My Weekly Book

How We Are Hungry - Dave Eggers

This was an irritating book, not least because it wasn’t at all badly-written. What it reminded me of more than anything was early Douglas Coupland, before he went crazy and tore up the script and started deliberately writing rubbish or trying to re-write his own most popular published works. Possibly the same fate awaits Dave Eggers – but, once bitten, twice shy, I certainly don’t intend to award him 10 years of my life in which to prove himself, in the way that I did with Coupland. It does, to be fair, appear that he wouldn’t need it. His whole trajectory of going down the toilet really does seem to be occurring much more steeply, and in a much tighter timeframe, than that of his Canadian forebear.

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To dredge up a few positives. The writing in these stories was vivid and immediate, capable of great urgency, and the whole anthology had a broken, disrupted rhythm which serves to make it uncomfortable mental baggage – which I think is to its credit in shaking readers out of the complacency with which they might otherwise approach the book. But I felt about as engaged as if I’d switched on the television for a few minutes’ casual viewing before getting bored and doing something else more worthwhile instead. I suppose one of my biggest problems with it was ‘why on earth should I care about these people?’ Which is usually a pretty good indication that an author isn’t doing his or her job properly.

Here’s an excerpt from an excellent review on the website Pop Matters that really captured what I thought, and also seems to express the Coupland parallel mighty well:

How We Are Hungry suffers from the same unevenness that has plagued all of Eggers’s work to this point. When he’s good, he’s great: He can wrap you up in the swirl of ambition and pain and sincerity of young people wanting to make a difference in the world. As in the conversation between God in the ocean, he can echo the boldness and grandeur of Blake and Whitman, imaging humans as players in the grand drama of the universe. What’s lacking, however, is the why, the reason, the motivating factor for such strong desires and longings. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers railed against the universe like Job, feeling betrayed and jilted by a God that would let such horrible things happen to such good young people; in You Shall Know Our Velocity, his characters railed against the greed and selfishness and inertia of Western life, which comes off as smug and condescending and not all that compelling. In How We Are Hungry, Eggers continues along the same path, with earnest characters wanting to break out of whatever box they are in, to connect with others and with the universe, but who are suffering from not much more than, well, boredom. I’m very sad to say it, but to me Eggers seems like a one-trick pony. When the world first came across his style in his memoir, it flipped. Now that we’re seeing it yet again in his third book, perhaps we, like his characters, are beginning to get a bit bored. Read full article here

Been there, done that, sorry if I can’t be bothered a second time now I’m grown-up and therefore far more laid-back. And this guy doesn’t even make 33 references to The Smiths (or however many it is) to keep you amused during dull points in the story. An excellent point made to me on a Bookcrossing message board the other day was that perhaps you need to be a certain age to read Coupland; I suspect Eggers is the same and that I’ve simply got too old and insular and impatient for this kind of twenty- and thirty-something peculiarly American angst which has nothing whatsoever to say to me these days. If it ever did.

Some links:

• BBC Collective review
• McSweeneys
• Dave Eggers’ Wikipedia entry

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 12:25 am and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.