Dave Eggers’ latest work Your Fathers, Where are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? is both a social polemic and tightly paced hostage drama – a page-turner, even – taking in the length and breadth of the modern American condition. It’s also, in classic Eggers style, a formally radical work, building complexly drawn characters from dialogue alone.
Thomas, our kidnapping protagonist, is a man on the brink. Somewhere along the line, things have gone horribly wrong: NASA has abandoned the Space Shuttle, trillions of dollars are spent on foreign wars, and all the while there is not a single unifying purpose for his generation. In addition, his best friend, Don, is dead – the system let him down too. Thomas been ignored his whole life. And now, finally, he’s going to get some answers.
Since his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, an entertainingly digressive, self-conscious memoir that essentially called foul on the entire genre, Eggers has used the novel as a political vehicle. His previous novel, The Circle, describes a dystopic near future in which personal and online privacy gives way to corporate-controlled social networking. Before that, A Hologram for the King took on the financial crisis and the shifting fortunes of a white American businessman in Saudi Arabia.
In Your Fathers, Eggers addresses an ostensibly more banal, slow-burning crisis, which is ultimately no less incendiary in its implications. With his peculiar blend of angry nihilism and earnest curiosity, Thomas speaks for a nation of disaffected people – everyone from the high school misfits, to the mentally unwell – about the dire poverty of meaning in modern life.
What ensues is a j’accuse on the American dream, reminiscent of the night-long reckoning of Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge. In introducing us to this frustrated everyman, Eggers seems to be searching for a pathology beneath the ire of modern American life. And one cannot help but feel the ominous presence of an elephant in the room: though no hostage is threatened with a firearm, there is a palpable allusion to this evermore familiar type violence. ‘If you don’t have something grand for men like us to be a part of,’ Thomas says, as if referencing this directly, ‘we will take apart all of the little things. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Building by building. Family by family.’ Perhaps most eerie of all, is that while Thomas has a lifetime’s worth of evidence for being a little unhinged, he’s also spookily identifiable.
The dialogue conceit lends itself to an almost Socratic approach to an interrogation of modern America, and Eggers uses it to full advantage in discussing hot button topics like police brutality, foreign policy, and again in a particularly irksome encounter in which Thomas recalls (and doesn’t quite recall) an incident with his high school teacher.
That the book’s conceit and craftsmanship is all so diabolically clever – so Eggers! – will inevitably work against it for some readers. The climax, for example, is delivered by a coincidence almost too contrived to stick and some very heavy lifting is required on the part of the reader when the device, otherwise camouflaged, is exposed.
But that this slow denouement by punchy to-and-fro dialogue manages to (mostly) avoid gimmicks is due to the carefully timed revelations that build a clear and steady picture in excruciatingly tense slow motion. Eggers is pitch perfect in drawing character through their speech alone; Thomas, introduced to us, as to his hostages, in vague outlines, is fully fleshed out to a searing three dimensions by the book’s end. It also means that, in the fashion of any great thriller, what doesn’t play out on the page, does so doubly in the imagination of the reader.
The book’s overall effect, not accidently, is much like waking up to the claustrophobic confusion of a dark room. And while Thomas may be interrogating his subjects in a dogged quest for truth, Eggers is doing much the same.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Your Fathers, Where are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?
By Dave Eggers
Paperback
RRP $29.99
ISBN: 978024116927
Penguin Books
June 2014
