Dave Eggers Is Not A Novelist

The dominant organising principle of the literary-industrial complex is the novel. Of course, in very broad terms authors can also write journalism, history, biography and short stories, and explore ideas through short-form essays and book-length polemics. But it’s having written a novel that makes people really consider someone an author rather than a nebulous ‘writer’.

Dave Eggers is an author. He’s also an editor, publisher and literacy advocate. But, importantly, he’s not a novelist.

Eggers burst onto the literary scene in 2000 with the ironically aggrandising memoir A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. He’s since toed the line between journalism and polemic with Teachers Have It Easy (2005) and Surviving Justice (2005), and waded into the murky waters of novelistic autobiography on What Is The What (2006) and novelistic journalism on Zeitoun (2009).

With his wife Vendela Vida, Eggers wrote the screenplay for Away We Go, which releases in Australia on 10 December; and he turned Maurice Sendak’s iconic children’s book Where The Wild Things Are into a screenplay for the forthcoming Spike Jonze film, which in turn he has novelised as The Wild Things.

Eggers has also penned a volume of short stories, How We Are Hungry (2004). But to date, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) remains the only conventional novel Eggers has written.

In her discussion of “romantic historicism”, literary critic Ann Rigney writes that history’s claim to objectively represent social realities has always been dubious because of its entanglement with “the novelistic genre, whose role has traditionally involved the portrayal of manners and daily experience in such a way as to engage the sympathies of readers.”

For Rigney, ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ are such slippery categories because of the nuances contained within the very idea of fiction. It can be something that is constructed rather than discovered (“fictive”); invented rather than real (“fictitious” and “imaginary”); legitimate in its make-believe nature (“fictional”); or literary in genre (“novelistic”).

Teasing out the idea of ‘fiction’ does shed a light on what we expect of a novel, because very little is illuminated by tedious debates over form. Perhaps we can say that, to qualify as novels, book-length works must be self-consciously literary – that is, using language to illustrate and evoke rather than merely to inform. They must also immerse readers in a fully imagined world peopled with characters who have their own interior lives, and who participate in intriguing events.

That's some mic: Dave Eggers at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival. Image: David Shankbone

Even in the early days of the novel there was considerable uncertainty surrounding the ways in which it differed from heroic romances, satirical romances and ‘true histories’. The roman à clef was explicitly marketed as fiction but was a coded narrative of actual people and events. As Frank Hardy can attest, such books have been threatened with libel actions – Delarivier Manley, author of Atalantis (1709), dared England’s ruling Whig party to prove in court that her book ridiculed them rather than narrating the fantastical events on a mythical island. The politicians’ suit failed, and Manley went on to publish three more similar volumes.

Conversely, books whose prefaces vehemently claimed them to be faithfully recounted matters of record – such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) – were almost complete inventions. In the same tradition, first-person travel narratives of spurious veracity remained bestsellers well into the 19th century. Helen Darville and Norma Khouri are among the best-known contemporary beneficiaries of the book-buying public’s credulity; Simon Caterson’s new book Hoax Nation promises to uncover a uniquely Australian terrain of truthiness.

Some authors colonise a moral high ground by recounting traumatic events as if from personal experience. Indeed, the contemporary controversies over literary truthiness – especially the subgenre of Holocaust truthiness – reveal that readers often locate authenticity by deferring to the authors’ positions of narrative authority. As Stephen Colbert, who originally coined the word ‘truthiness’, explained in 2006, “It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.”

As Dave Eggers’s career reveals, it’s quite possible to blend fact and invention, the author’s own experiences and those of other authors and real people, and evade the shitstorms that have plagued JT LeRoy or James Frey. Perhaps this is because he always defers to his source material: acknowledging his own role as observer, shaper and interpreter: as a literary portraitist, if you will.

“As Valentino [Achak Deng, whose 'autobiography' Eggers wrote in What Is The What] explains it, he’s not a writer, but I was. It’s just like how, if he wanted a film made of the book, he’d hire a filmmaker,” Eggers told Entertainment Weekly.

“We both decided the important thing was to tell the story well and bring an audience that might not otherwise come to it if we had written only what he could remember, and only what we could prove. Only maybe 433 people would’ve read that book. So we made it a novel,” Eggers says. “All these things in the book – the facts of the war, the movement of people and troops – are historically accurate, but what’s necessary to make a book compelling is shaping it in an artful way, with dialogue, and descriptions of a bird in a tree on a given day.”

What, then, to make of The Wild Things, a novel that fleshes out Maurice Sendak’s deliberately spare and evocative 338 words to a point that risks losing the magic of the original?

“From the beginning, Maurice wanted the movie to be different from the picture book and I didn’t want the novel to be a replication of the movie. They’re three wildly diverging stories although they all start with the same three building blocks of Home, Island, Boy,” Eggers said to Rolling Stone.

“I was able to fill in a whole lot of back-story and get into Max’s head. I had maybe 30-40 pages on Max’s home life before he left for the island and that was the place where I explored a lot of thoughts I had about boyhood or childhood generally.”

But some reviewers did not care for Eggers’s thoughts. “In a trick of reverse alchemy, Dave Eggers’s latest novel transmutes pure gold into base metal,” wrote Tom Deveson in The Times. “Eggers ties the story into a ­contemporary brattish America, reducing its significance to the explicit and banal.”

“Here’s yet another example of a contemporary writer paying homage to, and screwing around with, an earlier masterpiece,” agreed Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. “Where Sendak created a poetic blend of words and pictures to depict typical childhood impulses, fears and desires, Eggers has crimped these universals, reducing them to the upswellings of confusion and rage felt by an 8- or 9-year-old after his parents’ divorce.”

“Ultimately, this is one man’s experience of Where The Wild Things Are, and interesting as it is in that respect, it only really made me want to revisit my own,” agreed Patrick Ness in his review of The Wild Things.

J Malcolm Garcia's eyewitness account of the recent Afghanistan election, in McSweeney's San Francisco Panorama.

Arguably, the novel form is defined by being one man’s (or one woman’s) coherent account – the author’s. Eggers has annoyed the critics this time because his creative vision comes from a previously existing work around which people have already woven their own imaginative stories. They don’t need Eggers to make the story compelling.

But that’s not to say people shouldn’t be allowed to riff off the classics. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), hailed as a successful novel in its own right, is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Other well regarded ‘parallel novels’ include Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (Mrs Dalloway), Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (The Wizard Of Oz), Geraldine Brooks’s March (Little Women), Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (Great Expectations), and many more.

And Eggers’s magpie working methods do pay off in what we could call his novelistic journalism. Bucking all the recent trends about the death of print media, the latest issue of his Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is a newspaper called the San Francisco Panorama.

Calling itself “a 21st century newspaper prototype”, the Panorama brings the playful McSweeney’s treatment of genre to newspaper reporting, with contributors including people better known as novelists: Nicholson Baker, Stephen King, Michael Chabon, Daniel Alarcón, Miranda July, Chimamanda Adichie and Roddy Doyle. Graphic novelists Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Adrian Tomine and Daniel Clowes are also contributors.

What’s interesting about the project is that, while Eggers recognises being local is one of the newspaper’s most valuable qualities, the emotional response inspired by its look and feel is also what set it apart from its supposed conquerer, the internet.

“Paper is a uniquely beautiful format, more so than the web, I think: you need to invest in the aesthetics,” Eggers recently told The Guardian. “We’re resurrecting practices from 100 years ago – like printing full-page comics. We want to give young people ways to engage with it, feel ownership of it.”

As with all Eggers’s ventures, the San Francisco Panorama shouldn’t be taken absolutely literally. But Eggers has always aimed to reach out to readers; and the novel, he has also said, offers an engagement with the reader that straight reportage can struggle to create. Perhaps both a strength and weakness of the San Francisco Panorama is the way it harnesses the peculiar, refracted truth-telling found in fiction.

“When you read [Khaled Hosseini's] The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, it makes it a lot more difficult to accept the casualties that we read about randomly on page 13 of the newspaper, because suddenly we know who these people are. I think that’s the unique ability of the novel in particular.”

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