You Shall Know Our Velocity

Dave Eggers bugs me.  I can't put my finger on the reason why exactly, but he does.  I didn't enjoy his Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I didn't enjoy this, his first novel.

Problems: for the hardcover edition of this book, the front cover (see left) is the the first page of text.  The inside front cover is the second page.  The first actual page of paper is the third page of the story, and so on.  Which is all well and good, except there's no reason for it.  It adds nothing to the story.  And the fact is, I enjoy the conventions of books, like when they have title pages, and copyright pages, and chapters (by the way, this book doesn't have chapters either.)  At one time,  I found the incessant quirkiness of McSweeney's charming.  Now, I find it wearying.  

Second, there's the plot of the novel, which concerns two friends,  Will and Hand (yes, the character name is Hand.  See what I meant about the incessant quirkiness?) who get a sudden windfall of money and decide to spent a week traveling around the giving it away to random people.  Right of the bat, the premise of two white middle class American men giving money to third-world citizens should raise a host of economic, racial, political, and ethical issues in most readers' minds.  And Dave Eggers strikes me as a pretty intelligent guy, so he's probably aware of these issues.  But during the course of story, he completely ignores them, never addressing the fact that there might be something flawed with his protagonists' good intentions.

Instead, Eggers uses endless pages of his narrator, Will, whining about his life.  Will has a host of problems:  His friend died.  He was beaten up by a group of strangers.  He has some sort of vague heart condition.  He broke up with his girlfriend.  His parents divorced.   One time when he was a kid, he sadistically killed a cow, and now he feels bad about it.  How all of these problems are supposed to be related, or why the reader is supposed to care about any of them, is beyond me.  By the time Will has his fourth or fifth crying breakdown in the book, I was ready to give up on it. For a book that's supposed to be about rapid travel, it has a ton of passages that drag.  

Will's eventual solution to his problems is to decide to keep travelling,  dealing with his problems by running away from them instead of facing them.  Doesn't seem like much of solution to me.  Top it of with the fact that this novel seems like it was edited by one of Dave Eggers's friends in exchange for thirty bucks and a six pack of beer:  continuity errors and logical inconsistencies abound.  I've heard that Eggers's What is the What is better, but I think it will be a long time before I try that one.