"Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?" (2014)

Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? was the third of a trio of novels that Dave Eggers published in quick succession from 2012 - 2014, and it's the most formally unusual of the three. As you can see from this excerpt, the novel's most immediately apparent characteristic that it is written in dialogue -- something that Eggers addresses in (appropriately!) a Q&A at the McSweeney's website:

Q: Why all dialogue? There’s a certain disorientation that happens at the beginning, because we’re searching for some context, or what in a play would be stage direction. But the book is entirely dialogue.

A: When I started the book, I hadn’t planned on it being only dialogue. I knew it would be primarily a series of interviews, or interrogations, but I figured there would be some interstitial text of some kind. But then as I went along, I found ways to give direction and background, and even indications of the time of day and weather, without ever leaving the dialogue itself. So it became a kind of challenge and operating constraint that shaped the way I wrote the book. Constraints are often really helpful in keeping a piece of writing taut.

Consider the two very modern forms that Eggers has worked with in recent years -- the Voice of Witness project in oral histories, and screenplays like The Wild Things. These are formats that necessarily require a dedication to achieving their effects through monologue and dialogue -- and which are, in their own way, forms of constraint writing. And it's not an easy constraint to work in, either; if you want to see an example of extraordinarily talented novelist who couldn't handle the constraints of the screenwriting form, look to F. Scott Fitzgerald's disastrous (and unproduced) career in Hollywood.

While the novel in dialogue is in itself an unusual form, it's by no means unknown -- it's been used by Nicholson Baker in his novels Vox and Checkpoint, Marguerite Duras in The Square, and Philip Roth in Deception -- and books in dialogue are about as ancient of a form imaginable.  Think of the classics: Socrates, Cicero, Seneca.  It was also used by a number of writers in the Renaissance and Enlightenment -- e.g. Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.  The form even has some deep roots in the novel format.  La Celestina (1499) is also written in dialogue -- and, by some lights, it might be considered the very earliest novel of all.

"The Circle" (2013)

If A Hologram for The King seemed like an unlikely candidate for Hollywood adaptation, The Circle is exactly what one would indeed expect to be a movie. (And so it is.)  It's a technological cautionary tale, part of a literary tradition that stretches back to Frankenstein, with a dash of creepy post-Watergate corporate dystopia thrown in for good measure. (I wouldn't call it a direct influence, but if you were a kid in the late 70s, books like Coma were pretty much what all the grown-ups were reading at the beach.)

The obvious real-life analogue to The Circle is Facebook, and the constant collision of its cheery Utopian rhetoric with its unsettling erosion of privacy. (In one of the moments when The Circle verges into outright satire, the characters begin to fret about not only their own leaked sex tapes and the like, but about getting trolled over the misdeeds of their ancestors -- all of which are now searchable.) The monetization of human interaction, and the constant upkeep of one's status, are the timely surface elements of the dark satire of The Circle. But I'm not sure that they're at its core, and that might be one reason that Eggers pointedly did not even research Silicon Valley for his book.

As Eggers noted in his May 25th interview at PSU, the origins of The Circle were much more low-tech, but rooted in a fundamental set of questions. An acquaintance had attached a confirmation receipt to an email he sent to Eggers; then, when Eggers politely claimed that maybe he hadn't seen the email yet, the acquaintance replied: why yes had, and at this particular date and time. To paraphrase Eggers pretty closely, at one time, you'd have had to go to your friend's house, hide in the bushes, and watch through the window to see if they'd opened your mail.  But now, this kind of knowledge -- and the behavior that these tracking tools enabled -- was somehow considered acceptable.

While the over-the-top Circle corporate campus and its cultish machinations are the obvious elements of the story, its moral center is in the hunting down of the protagonist's ex-boyfriend, Mercer, and his destruction for no real reason other than his lack of joining into The Circle. It is a death as oppressive and ominous as that of Winston Smith or, in Brave New World, of John the Savage.

In each case, there's a fundamental lack of empathy behind the death. But maybe there's a more succinct way to express this.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in The Atlantic a few years ago, defined "asshole" in a manner worthy of philosopher Harry Frankfurt. An asshole, Coates writes, is "a person who demands that all social interaction happen on their terms."

And that's why The Circle is maybe not really about technology at all.  It's about what happens when -- through technology, or any other sort of means -- we forget the humanity of others, and start acting like assholes.

"A Hologram for the King" (2012)

Although Dave Eggers has worked with movies before with And Away We Go (in collaboration with his wife Vendela Vida) and his adaptation of of Where the Wild Things Are,  A Hologram for the King occupies a unique position among his work: it is the first and (until The Circle gets released later this year) the only of Eggers's novels to be adapted for the screen.

A Hologram For the King is an unlikely choice for Hollywood: the book is replete with flashbacks and long scenes of displacement -- wandering through an incomplete city in the desert, confused and out of contact -- and it only partly resolves at the end.  That is, the book's conclusion retains a hint of a salesman's forced optimism, but a darkening sense that the book's home on the bookshelf will still remain very much between your beat-up copies of Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot.

It's also the first of a three novels (Hologram, The Circle, and Your Fathers) that center, in very different ways, on economic anxiety, globalization, and job loss. In Hologram, Alan Clay is part of a class of executives that have modernized and outsourced themselves out of existence, a man falling apart in a distant land, with his daughter's own advancement and education slipping away back home. The Circle, amid timely concerns about social media and technology, also has economic anxiety running throughout: Mae is fleeing miserable underemployment, and The Circle -- a company of what initially seems weird and unearthly benevolence -- appears as the saviour of her parents from ruin at the hands of insurers. Your Fathers has economic anxiety right at its fiery core of anger over a spendthrift government and its foreign policy.

These issues were not so far from Eggers's nonfiction and quasi-nonfiction from Teachers Have It Easy onwards; but at the time, Hologram was a clear change from previous volumes of outright fiction.  It takes time, perhaps, for readers and reviewers alike to move on from where an artist was to where they are. And with A Hologram for the King, Eggers's art and his advocacy alike work show a marked focus on issues of economic insecurity and education.

The hardcover edition's a fascinating example of the influence of 19th century bindings in Eggers design: the combination of washed-out brown cloth, heavy blind-stamping, and a foil stamped lettering is a distinctly mid-19th century look.  (As you get more towards the Gilded Age, you get a little less blind-stamping, and more... well, gilding.)  It is a design from an even earlier age of manufacturing -- what Eggers described in this 2012 interview as "actual objects by actual people" -- a solid contrast with the holograms being conjured in a mirage of a city.

"Zeitoun" (2009)

As an account of one family's experience of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Zeitoun is also a testament of the profound connection that Voice of Witness and related social justice projects had on Eggers' work in his writing's second decade. Zeitoun's imprisonment after Katrina was first told through his own brief oral history in a Voice of Witness volume, Voices from the Storm; and, perhaps fittingly given the focus of much of Eggers's related K-12 work, the collection was recently adapted into a theatrical production for schools.

Unlike What Is The What, here Eggers had both a source's adult experience, as well as adult peers and legal records, to draw upon in explaining just what had happened. The narrative itself is more chronologically structured, though with evocative flashbacks of a Syrian childhood. It also relies on irony in the classical sense of the word: we know, in ways that Zeitoun and his neighbors do not, the sheer magnitude of what is about to befall them and their city. This allows for a slow buildup, both of showing just what is about to be lost in New Orleans, and of the immigrant experience in a local business.

Yet Zeitoun has also become, quite without meaning to, an example of what happens when a work of nonfiction has the ground shift from underneath it after publication. The Zeitouns had a subsequent acrimonious divorce, amid charges of domestic violence (which he was then cleared of, though the court disputes and allegations have continued). As a work of nonfiction focused on a single individual, versus the ostensibly more fictive What Is The What, the book is more vulnerable than most to this kind of retrospective awkwardness.

And yet Zeitoun remains a powerful social document in its own right, and subsequent events have colored and complicated but perhaps not fundamentally altered that. That may be because, in spite of the title itself, Zeitoun is less about its protagonist than about Hurricane Katrina, its chaotic aftermath, and the growth of a security state fed by the country's continuing and dismaying paranoia.  The Italian economist questioned for doing math on an American Airlines flight from Philadelphia last week is only the most recent and ludicrous example of how little it can take, in the generation after 9/11, to find oneself snagged in the gears of this same societal machinery.

"What is the What" (2006)

What is the What represents, on its face, an opportunity for a remarkable number of potential literary pitfalls. Here we have the use of not just a Sudanese refugee's story by a popular white American writer, but the use of his voice as well.  The syntax and cadence of the story, as you'll hear in the above and below video, is modeled on Deng's. As early as You Shall Know Our Velocity!, Eggers was experimenting with this -- through Hand's humorously exasperating tic, once in Africa, of dropping all contractions -- but here it is rendered in absolute earnest.

And that -- its earnest intent -- is perhaps is what has kept the reception of WITW, even ten years later,  remarkably free of the angst that often surrounds the such use of stories and voice by writers: what, in the pejorative, would be termed appropriation.  The challenge in such conversations is that writers use materials -- appropriate them -- all the time. Such usage becomes more problematic when the intent is towards self-aggrandizement and self-actualization cliches -- How has this story made me, the newly enlightened writer, a better person? -- and, just as uncomfortably, when the question of financial motive is raised. WITW sidesteps both by removing Eggers's voice and presence from the narrative, and by directing the book's earnings to the VAD Foundation.

To the extent that Eggers has subsequently noted his learning process through Foundation work, it has been -- as he drolly puts it in this 2011 video -- "a journey to humility":



Amidst all this it's perhaps easy to forget that What is the What is itself a highly crafted work of art by Eggers.  The framing device of the Atlanta robbery -- the home invasion was indeed an actual event for Deng -- serves to shuttle back and forth between multiple timelines, which are themselves significantly filled out in a scene-by-scene, moment-by-moment fashion that the strict nonfiction of "It Was Just Boys Walking" was constrained from using. All of these are, ultimately, likely to be far afield in structure (though not voice or content) from the source material of his interviews and travels with Deng.

And while What is the What itself is at first glance is a formally unusual work -- a novel that began as nonfiction, with a prefatory statement by Valentino Deng that the major events of the book did indeed happen -- it is not an unusual work for Eggers, in retrospect.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was nonfiction rounded out as fiction, but still retaining enough fact that (in the first printing, anyway) it included the actual home numbers of some of the characters, and a prefatory comment on its factuality.  The subject matter of What is the What and the use of eyewitness testimony are also logical extensions of the work in "It Was Just Boys Walking" and the Voice of Witness volumes.

It is also, in both its subject and in its execution, part of his ongoing meditation on what one does after surviving to find a palpable sort of success (literary or otherwise).  What is one's moral and artistic obligation to do with that? What is the What, I think to Eggers's great credit, is indeed what he did.

"Surviving Justice" (2005)

Oral histories and "in their own words" narratives have a long history, but they came into their own with the postwar development of portable audio, and especially this century with better recording and transcription technologies.  It still remains an extraordinary amount of editing work; as Craig Taylor noted in a Rumpus interview of his 2012 collection Londoners, "I spoke to something like 200 people, and sometimes the person you’ll see in the book is the result of five or six interviews with other people who are similar but couldn’t quite say the things that needed to be said or just weren’t as eloquent. It takes a long time, but you just make those calls and talk to people and listen."

The starting point for many remains the immense body of recorded and published work by Studs Terkel, particularly his 1974 collection on jobs, Working. An immense archive of 5,400 radio shows by Terkel is now being created by his Chicago station WMFT.

As Eggers notes in this 2009 interview with Mother Jones magazine, Terkel was a towering part of the cultural landscape where he grew up:

In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often. We had some of his books in our house and that was sort of my first introduction to the form, which I thought was fascinating. He was just an intriguing figure when you would see him on TV—he had a talk show and a radio show, so he was kind of all over the place. You couldn't really avoid him. He was one of the biggest personalities out of Chicago. This was before Oprah. And he just looked like some guy out of a Cagney movie or something. The red-checked shirt and the red socks and his way of talking and that nose of his and everything. He had something very uniquely Chicago about him—real no-nonsense, no bullshit. 

It's amazing he lived as long as he did, and he was working pretty close to the end. I hope his legacy is done justice. It's important to hear primary sources, to hear people's voices as opposed to having it all filtered through some authoritative, professorial textbook voice. I've brought Surviving Justice into high schools and I've left them there, and they are the ones that everybody grabs.

Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, coedited by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen, was first in a series of volumes in the Voice of Witness series, which recently marked its 10th anniversary with an anthology.  One particularly notable entry is Audrey Petty's High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Housing (2013), which revisits Chicago and looks at public housing. Harper's has a Q&A with Petty that, along with noting some of her interview questions, also delves into the complexity of the responses that oral histories elicit -- that, along with their sorrows, these projects were nonetheless home and a community:

Ben Austen’s story “The Last Tower,” in the May 2012 issue of Harper’s, emphasizes the strong sense of community experienced by public-housing residents and their mixed feelings about Cabrini-Green’s demolition, even as the event was trumpeted as progress. In High Rise Stories residents express similar sentiments. In what ways were their experiences positive?

When I started interviewing people, the way in for me initially was to start with questions like, “Talk about your apartment: What do you remember about it? What was the layout? Did you know your neighbors?” I hoped the answers would lead to more questions, but I wasn’t prepared for the deep complexity of what people shared, or the powerful mix of conflicting emotions they felt when they talked about their homes and their communities. One woman said, without sarcasm or bitterness, “I saw shootings, I saw people killed — but other than that it was lovely.” All of these emotions were possible simultaneously, and one didn’t cancel out the other.

"It Was Just Boys Walking" (2004)

When "It Was Just Boys Walking" -- Dave Eggers' three-part nonfiction account of Valentino Deng (aka Dominic Arou), one of the "Lost Boys" of the Sudan -- first appeared in the successive March through May 2004 issues of The Believer, it may have felt to readers like a significant shift in direction for his work. And it was an overt shift -- but also one that had been gathering steam for some time.

Field reportage  had long been an element of the publications that Eggers edited or published, not least in The Believer itself. Although much of the popular conception of The Believer understandably focuses on its arts writing and long-form interviews, it's always had a strong element of reportage and political writing too.  The April issue that ran Eggers' second installment also included reports by Joshua Bearman and Stephen Elliot from the primaries in Iowa and Wisconsin. Even Issue 1 of the magazine, in March 2003, featured Marc Herman -- who also contributed some of the most cutting political field reporting to Might magazine -- turning in a sharp critique on how the antiwar protests that spring might have proved to be "more about voicing opposition for the record than actually affecting the chances for a war."

But "It Was Just Boys Walking" represented a new commitment to that form by Eggers himself in his work. It's written very much in the vein of modern longform journalism: a sharply described opening in a deafeningly loud cargo plane, followed by a section of back-story about the Sudan exodus, and then a journey back into Sudan with a nominally first-person reportorial presence. Like a John McPhee piece, you don't really learn anything about Eggers himself through that first-person -- he's really more of a stand-in for the inquiring reader.

The first and third installments are essentially straight-up "New New Journalism" -- something that would be perfectly at home in the New Yorker.  The second installment, curiously, is an oral history by Deng -- also a well-established form itself, and one that we'll soon see taking particular significance here in the McSweeney's subsequent Voice of Witness publications.

What's structurally interesting about this piece, though, is that Eggers inserted an oral history squarely into the middle of a modern longform journalistic narrative -- a unusual merging of two forms that are in themselves now fairly conventional.  It's a combination that takes advantage of the cycle of a monthly magazine, and of the now rarely-used installment structure. The two forms and POVs don't really clash, because you're reading each them a month apart from each other -- and they give a fascinating pair of perspectives on the story.