"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.