Books: Dave Eggers Gets Real

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Will and Hand ricochet from country tocountry in picaresque fashion, Senegal to Morocco to Estonia, drinking, bickering, rarely sleeping, thrusting wads of cash at startled strangers, staying just ahead of the boredom and the crying jags that threaten to crest over them like a wave--but just behind the sense of happiness and belonging they're sure awaits them in the next strip bar or hotel lobby. Eggers' strengths as a writer are real: his funny, pitch-perfect dialogue; the way his prose delicately captures the bumblebee blundering of Will's thoughts (he compares the workings of his brain to "a toddler in a room full of new guests"); and the stream-water clarity of his descriptions (with the sentence "His socks were white and Van Horned up around his calves," a reference to chronically uncool NBA player Keith Van Horn, Eggers may have enriched the English language by a verb). At their best, Will and Hand, like Vladimir and Estragon, have genuine existential pathos; at their worst they're a little jejune, a pair of Holden Caulfields railing at the phonies. Critics have tarred Eggers with the brush of irony, and You Shall Know Our Velocity seems to be his attempt to cleanse himself in the turpentine of earnestness. "When we pass by another person without telling them we love them," Will thinks, "it's cruel and wrong and we all know this." Do we?

But there's genius here, and if it occasionally staggers, the book deserves our forgiveness and our respect, as does Eggers himself. After all, who is doing more, single-handedly and single-mindedly, for American writing? If his reclusive habits only fan the flames of media interest, so what? He should be left alone to go about his business and to do good works, of which You Shall Know Our Velocity is unquestionably one. And we will leave him alone. Very soon. Any minute now.