The central story of the book is the death of Eggers's parents within a month of each other, first his father, quite suddenly, of lung cancer, and then his mother, after a lot of suffering, of stomach cancer. The adult Eggers children, Bill, Beth, and 21-year-old Dave, are faced with the task of executing their parents' estate, processing the loss and, most importantly, assuming parenting responsibilities for their 7-year-old brother, Toph. Bill already lives in Southern California, so Beth, Dave, and Toph move out to Berkeley from Chicago, and Dave takes on primary guardianship of Toph. A great deal of the book is about the unique challenges and hiliarities that this scenario creates.
Almost as extensively treated are Dave's adventures starting a magazine called Might with a group of his vocationally drifting friends. These sections magnificently depict the misguided idealism of early twentysomethings, and how they navigate the world. I saw so much of myself in this book, in a way that I didn't the last time I read it because I still WAS an early twentysomething. A lot changes between ages 23 and 27, and I understand a lot more of what Eggers is parodying now. He so perfectly encapsulates the mindset of that age group, the way they truly believe they can change the world, and the fatigue that sets in once they confront one too many obstacles. Of the Might staff's efforts to gain sponsors, Eggers says, "We would meet them for drinks or lunch, in the back of Infusion 555, or at a picnic table in South Park, and we would talk, explaining our plans, vaguely conveying our hopes, doing the best we could to articulate the fact that we wanted to be successful without being seen as successful-successful, wanted to keep doing what we were doing, with the option of opting out if we ever got bored, wanted to conquer the world in a way that no one would be able to tell that that's what we wanted, trying not to let on how tired we all were, how unsure we were that we really wanted to do any of this anymore, actually -- " It's like looking in a mirror.
Eggers also can't help but mock the sad aura that seems to surround orphans and those whose families have been touched by great suffering. He exploits it even as he cowers in shame because of it. He is equally ambivalent about his affluent childhood, and he reacts to it while also defending himself to those who would judge him for it: "I won't apologize for having been brought up in what was, at least in my part of town, a pretty simple suburb - trees and a creek, nice parks. It's not like we had a choice, that at eight or nine, whenever, we could have left home, moved somewhere less horribly fraught with this hideous prosperity. I should say, though, that like any seemingly stable and contented context, one with a certain stability and attention to detail and respect for family - comfortable but deeply midwestern, this was - at the same time, it was very quiet sometimes, oddly quiet, and underneath there was the tiniest, faintest sound, like air being let out of a narrow hole, a sound like someone screaming from worlds away, and people were dying in dark and bewildering ways."
Some extra pathos came out of the fact that I happened to visit Chicago in the last few days of reading this book. I was there to see my old roommate and borrow her car to drive to Peoria for a wedding, but just happened to read the last section of the book, in which Eggers returns to Chicago to visit old friends, just before I arrived there. It was a bit eerie to drive through Lake Forest and its surrounding towns, knowing that any of these houses could have been the one in which the Eggers family lived just before their untimely visits from the Grim Reaper. Eggers also writes a moving account of how he goes to the funeral home to retrieve his mother's ashes and then to the shore of Lake Michigan to deposit them. I hung out on a Lake Forest beach with my roommate the night I stayed with her, and couldn't help but shiver as I looked out at the jetties and wondered which one Eggers stood on as he sprinkled those ashes. Independent of this experience, I also managed to discover that Beth Eggers committed suicide in 2001, just a year after this book was published. I hadn't known that before, and it made the Eggers family's story that much sadder for me.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius does what I don't think any book before it has done so well: both lived up to its title and managed to successfully mock the title's claims at the same time. That is really why it's such an astounding book. The New York Times Book Review says it better than I could: "[A Heartbreaking Work] is finally, a finite book of jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly." Yes.
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