Genius: The Ability to Make Fun of Anything
BY SHELLY BRYANT I JULY 22, 2008

	IMAGE PROVIDED COURTESY OF VINTAGE BOOKS

Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Vintage Books, 2000. 437 pages.
ISBN 978-0375725784

He really did it. Dave Eggers really put that title on his book, and put it out there to sell to the masses. Brave, brave man.

So, is it heartbreaking? Is it really a work of genius?

Part of what makes the book work before one even begins reading is that the title is obviously meant to poke fun, isn't it? It is meant to show us all that we are a little too sophisticated for outdated ideas like genius, and a little too cool to be truly heartbroken. We're beyond such things now, surely, in this day and age.

Eggers, in this memoir, effectively pokes fun of pity, and foregrounds his own ineptitude, evoking throughout the reading experience the irony in the book's title. His occasional open boast of being better and smarter than everyone else who has ever lived is clearly meant to be facetious. It is a way of showing that he is just as uncertain as all the rest of us, that he knows just how much he lacks being a truly staggering genius. And the work clearly highlights his eagerness to change the world in his own little way, despite this jaded outlook on that very world.

That is what makes the work both genius and heartbreaking. It isn't really all the clever uses of language, though they pop up over and over. It isn't the uncanny ability to pull the most appropriately inappropriate pop culture reference out of a hat, even though in doing so it is as if he is whispering seductively into the ear of the generation in which I grew up. Nor is it the fact that at 22 years of age, he became—all in one moment—an orphan and a single parent of an orphan, a fact sure to arouse sympathy from nearly any sentient being. It isn't even, really, his gift for making fun of any- and everything imaginable, even though he possesses that rare gift in ample portions. No, what really sets this work apart, making it a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, is the way Eggers puts his own inadequacies and insecurities in the face of life's trials on display, and then forbids the reader to feel any pity for him.

In relaying his misgivings about parenting his only-slightly-younger brother, Eggers dredges up all the fears and self-consciousness that goes along with being a parent. When his friends comment on his brother's mousy way of answering the phone, here is the young parent's response:

So I've been imploring him to sound normal. Please sound normal, Toph, you are normal, we are normal so just sound normal please can't you? Don't sound like I have been beating you, like you're in the bathroom hiding from me, because I have been there, have hidden from parents before, have been on the other side of a door being struck with all conceivable parental force, have searched the bathroom for places to hide, have found a place in the closet where the bath toys are kept, under the lowest shelf, and I have hidden there, and have seen, darkening the white slit of light under the door to this closet, his shoes, and then the white light everywhere as the door is opened, and have had my shoulder grabbed and....and he's been working on it, especially when I make him do it i front of me, my arms crossed in front of me, watching, coaching, making a chipper smiley face for him, eyebrows shooting skyward...happy!

This is the sort of writing that fill the pages that Eggers offers us. It is much too self-conscious to be taken too seriously as a work of staggering genius, much too over-the-top to quite break our hearts. It is, like us, much too aware of the jaded front needed to face this world in which we live.

And perhaps that is why the book works so brilliantly. It is, ultimately, like us. It has seen hints of heartbreak and glimmers of genius, and perhaps, in its own small way, it too might move past the mundane—even if it doesn't want to take itself too seriously in the process.

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