Speed Freaks

Dave Eggers’ first fiction, You Shall Know Our Velocity (Y.S.K.O.V.), is aptly titled. There is an excitement to the novel -- a speed -- that you will not find outside of a Tom Clancy thriller. Eggers seems so eager to get (us) into this book, its first 100 or so words appear on the cover and continue onto the front endpapers. It begins with an ending: “Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in East-Central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn‘t yet met.”

Thematically the book recalls Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five or Heller‘s Catch-22, and those writers’ satiric, beside-themselves take on international relations. In terms of plot and tone, Y.S.K.O.V. is one part On the Road, one part Cannonball Run -- it‘s both a race and an alt-cult coming-of-age story. And like Kerouac’s book, Eggers‘ could inspire a generation as much as it documents it. Indeed, the thing that people hate about Eggers’ writing -- his cleverness, his obnoxiousness, his self-obsession -- is precisely what makes him so good. His characters reflect much of young America‘s attitude about themselves and the world around them, just as the dark, ecstatic, fucked-up characters of Sal and Dean reflected the underbelly of ’50s America in On the Road.

Will -- the narrator of Y.S.K.O.V. -- and his cohort Hand are two 20-somethings from Wisconsin, muddling through their lives and stupid jobs when their close friend Jack is killed in a horrific car accident. While sorting through a storage locker containing Jack‘s belongings, Will is savagely beaten by an unidentified mob. Later, he comes into a considerable sum of easy money -- $80,000 for allowing a silhouetted image of himself screwing in a light bulb to appear on the packaging of a new brand of incandescent. Inspired by flat-fare airline tickets that allow you to fly around the world unrestricted, as long as you continue on in one direction, Will and Hand improvise a trip around the globe in seven days. They plan to give away $32,000, overpaying trinket merchants one-thousand-fold and taping it to donkeys. There is poetry to their itinerary:

Chicago to New York to Greenland

Greenland to Rwanda

Rwanda to Madagascar

Madagascar to Mongolia

Mongolia to Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan to New York to Chicago

But the results are more prosaic. As with many young Americans on an overseas vacation, they know next to nothing about their destinations, and so they fall victim to cabbies, unknowingly chat up prostitutes, visit seedy discotheques. Most importantly, they find that giving away money is easier said than done -- and rarely guilt-free.

Almost as interesting as the plot of Y.S.K.O.V. is the story behind the novel, most notably the fact that Eggers has self-published it through his own McSweeney’s imprint. The first edition of 50,000 copies is available only from the McSweeneys.net Web site and in 100 independent bookstores nationwide. You could say that it‘s a brave and perverse choice, given that his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (A.H.W.O.S.G.), achieved a rare publishing trifecta. (Excerpted in The New Yorker, it was credible in literary circles; its breezy, funny, footnoted text impressed those among the hip, pop-culture cognoscenti; and it was a genuine hit on best-seller lists, moving upward of 300,000 copies in hardcover.) Depending on the success of this latest venture, you could say that Eggers is rejecting the big money of a second book advance, or astutely marketing himself and hoarding all the revenues. (Undoubtedly for a good cause: Earlier this year he founded 826 Valencia in San Francisco’s Mission District; mainly a drop-in center for tutoring kids in writing, it‘s also a fully functional pirate shop that sells items like lard, mops and peg legs, the proceeds from which benefit the center.)

A.H.W.O.S.G., a memoir of the time after the early, simultaneous cancer deaths of Eggers’ parents, followed his efforts to deal with his anger and raise his 8-year-old brother, Toph, while running Might magazine, the satirical publication he founded in S.F. In large part, Eggers cut a sympathetic figure, but reactions to the book and the author were mixed. While many readers responded with cultlike fervor, making his publishing imprint an indie-lit success story and his Web site a daily must-see, there‘s also been a small backlash among journalists and critics. The thinking goes that Eggers is perhaps too self-reliant, too clever and too self-conscious.

Yet he’s clearly the brightest light in what can be viewed as a kind of Tender Asshole School of fiction writers, in which I‘d place some of our most conspicuously talented contemporary authors -- David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Rick Moody. Their neuroses are tactile, as are their pulsing brains and their sizable hearts. They are too tender for this world. One part of you wants to stroke their heads and tell them everything is going to be all right; the other wants to slap them and tell them to get their shit together.