So. "How We Are Hungry" by David Eggers. That's a good question. How ARE we hungry? I, for one, am hungry for a novel that is funny, poignant, clever, genre-stretching, and at least a few times makes me laugh so hard I snort something (milk, preferably, but it could be anything) through my nose. I'm talking about a book like "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", of course, which "How We Are Hungry" is definitely not. I suppose an author isn't required to follow one book up with another of the same vein. However, an author is expected to stick to a certain level of quality, and if you burst out of the gates with a brilliant first novel subsequent novels are always highly scrutinized.
Perhaps my problem is that I know TOO much about Eggers himself. Since his first novel was a memoir and since I pay attention to his McSweeney's Press and related ventures (which lately has been as much a pulpit for pushing liberal agendas as a literary outlet) it is hard for me to separate Dave Eggers from his fiction. 1) I cannot help seeing Eggers in every one of his fictional characters and thinking each story sounds like something Eggers experienced and then translated directly to the page with a different name. 2) I cannot help noticing that half of his short stories are thinly veiled attempts to push liberal anti-Bush agendas.
I realize that EVERY story is actually something the author experiences and then translates to the page with a different name. That's fiction. However, there's a problem when you can't stop thinking about it. Also, I have no problem with a liberal anti-Bush agenda, but there's a place a liberal anti-Bush agenda DOESN'T belong. An example of a place it doesn't belong is an Academy Award acceptance speech. Another place it doesn't belong is literary fiction. Especially thinly veiled anti-Bush liberal agendas. If you're going to do it, it shouldn't be thinly veiled. It should either be thickly veiled or not veiled at all.
Okay, but all this is sort of secondary to the fact that the book just wasn't that great. There are some clever moments, but unlike his previous works the clever moments aren't funny, and clever without funny is just annoying and pretentious. There are short-short stories that are two pages long and serve to be nothing other than voice experiments. There are five blank pages entitled "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself" that don't serve to evoke a second thought or even a grin as the reader flips immediately past. None of the characters seem to have much at stake. None of them even seem that compelling or emotionally complex. There is one story about a man who is desperate not to die alone and it's one of the few stories that could have possibly been emotionally deep, but instead Eggers tells the story as NOTES ABOUT A STORY, which is clever, but it ends up distancing the reader from the whole thing and making it more of an workshop exercise. Had the story been a real story, it might have been overly sentimental and sappy, but sometimes a good author needs to tackle such subject matter and prove himself to be a good author by dealing with such material well.
I realize I'm being very hard on this book, much harder than I would be on a first book or on any other book whose author hadn't previously written something I loved so much. Sorry, Dave Eggers. I'll still read your next novel.
Wait, you are down on Eggers because his second novel is not the same caliber of his first novel, but really, the first one was a biography, and the second one was short stories, so really neither of them is his first novel after all. Have you ever read "You Shall Know Our Velocity" - that is technically his actual first novel?
P.S. I have not actually read "You Shall Know Our Velocity," I just looked it up on http://www.kcls.org
Of course I've read it. What sort of obsessive Eggers fan do you take me for? I find it difficult to make a distinction between noval and autobiography in the case of AHWOSG. It is, I think, more appropriately referred to as a "literary memoir". In any case, I didn't think YSKOV was that great, but it was better than HWAH.
Interestingly, Eggers did a quick release of a second version of YSKOV which contained an added "interlude" which served to negate half the novel. I read the first version before the interlude was release, so only read that strange novel negation much later after the full novel had a chance to sit in my head. My (completely unreasonable) impression is that Eggers based YSKOV on mostly personal experiences and then added a thin layer of fiction to the story to make the whole thing more compelling than a bland novel about some wealthy friends galavanting around the world on a week-long trip. Then I think his desire for truth and anti-fiction got a hold of him, he felt guilty for dressing a true story up with fictional elements, and he created the after-thought interlude as a sort of apology and negated all the emotionally compelling parts of the novel. The character narrating the interlude actually says that he doesn't understand why all these made up elements were put in the novel since a true story should stand on its own. However, the interlude is still "fiction" so it comes across as a weak attempt to apologize for itself. I think Eggers is very conflicted about the worth and role of the novel and he needs to deal with that before he writes a good one.