Title: I Think He Meant Stuttering Genius
Product review: The brilliant title notwithstanding, novelized autobiographies require something more interesting than the death of parents (barely etched at that) to make it interesting. At 22, the author pretends to know more and feel more than other less sexy mortals. The narcissism of this exercise becomes tiresome rather quickly. If Eggers were truly funny, he could have salvaged something. But Eggers is earnest, unflaggingly earnest, ironically earnest. While irony is a useful self-deflation device, Egger's overuse of it is instructive. If you need to mock your own work to defang critics, your issue is approval, not world-weary hipness. Readers might be better steered in the direction of Frederick Exley, whose similar novel/memoir A Fan's Notes is immensely and mordantly entertaining. But then Exley was writing outside the shadow of youth, and the tragedy of his failed expectations rings heroically true. Eggers needs to live a life before he starts writing about one.
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