Books: Dave Eggers' Mystery Box

There is a box in Heartbreaking Work too, one that is neither amusing nor artsy. This box contains the ashes of Eggers' mother, who died of stomach cancer when he was 21--five weeks after his father died of lung cancer. Eggers thus became the guardian of his eight-year-old brother Toph (short for Christopher) and moved from suburban Chicago to California. It's a hilarious book, despite the subject, that applies McSweeney's textual slyness full-force. The acknowledgments contain a guide to themes and symbols (and a chart of his advance and expenses), and his subjects frequently break out of character to note how Eggers has altered events.

This can, and sometimes does, look like an artful dodge of emotions or potential critics. But Eggers says he's just recognizing the artifice of writing and the anxiety of profiting from tragedy. "If I don't include misgivings," he says, "then I'm holding something back, and that would be a lie." Yet beneath the wordplay is genuine emotion, as at the wrenching yet warmly comic climax, when Eggers discovers the box of his mother's remains on a visit home and drives out to scatter them on Lake Michigan. "My eyes blur. I shake. I want to put the box somewhere else--in the trunk maybe--but know that I can't...She would f____ing kill me."

Another young author, Jedediah Purdy, last year published For Common Things, about the threat of the "ironic individual," possessed of acute self-awareness and mistrust, which, Purdy argued, led to cynicism. Heartbreaking Work is a resounding rebuttal. In it, literary gamesmanship and self-consciousness are trained on life's most unendurable experience, used to examine a memory too scorching to stare at, as one views an eclipse by projecting sunlight onto paper through a pinhole. This is not irony obscuring sincerity. It is, finally, irony in the service of sincerity.

Not that Eggers has no self-conscious ambivalence left. During the interview he gets a phone call from a bookstore in his hometown asking him to do a reading. He seems rattled. He's doing a book tour but doesn't relish reading the work; in fact, he says he hasn't seen a copy. I tell him I have one. Would he like to see it? "No! I asked them not to send it to me." But then: "Does it look good?" The question will have to wait for the tour, for when his eulogy to his parents rolls off the presses, in boxes and boxes and boxes.