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.
