The fate of Dave Eggers is to be champion of lost boys. He was one himself, of
course, abruptly orphaned at 21, left to raise his eight-year-old brother,
Toph, extemporising parenthood, amid his own grief and growing up, then
recounting it in his bestselling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius. Lately he has spent four years researching the life
of Valentino Achak Deng, separated as a child from his family in the civil
war in Sudan and forced to march through the African wilderness, for his
novel What is the What.
While these sprawling, dense and sometimes self-consciously playful works
appear to have little in common with an 18-page picturebook bearing only
nine spare sentences, it is clear why, when a writer was sought to expand
the children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are into a
screenplay and novel, Eggers was chosen. Spike Jonze will direct the film.
In Maurice Sendak’s tale, Max the boy hero is merely sent to bed without
supper for “making mischief” and disappears into a realm of dangerous
creatures in which he is king.
But Eggers’ Max is fatherless after divorce, disturbed, judged as delinquent,
driven by vengeful wrath: a real lost boy.
Like many American children, Eggers grew up loving Wild Things,
“although it scared the crap out of me”, relishing its primal power. “It
comes from the subconscious,” he says. “Maurice doesn’t moralise, come in
with a child psychologist mindset and decide, ‘What do I need to teach the
kids?’. Everything he does bubbles up from deep within him.” Sendak’s story
is an allegory of emerging masculinity, so uncontrollable that it is evicted
from the family into a fantasy realm where it can thrive unrestrained.
Eggers’ novelisation weaves in his own fury and frustration at how the
adventure of boyhood is being stifled by our paranoid, safety-obsessed
culture: Max is perceived as out of control because he rides around his
neighbourhood alone on his bike.
“Maurice and Spike and I talked a lot about how we were all like Max,” Eggers
says. “I was completely hard to control as a kid. There’s nothing that Max
does in my book which I wouldn’t do worse. I still find that all the boys I
know that age are the same: they like to smash things, play with swords and
guns. Regular boys’ stuff. But throughout the process of writing the
screenplay and the book there were people in the movie studio who were
expressing shock about what Max would do or say. Because it isn’t depicted
any more.
“There is a whitewashed, idealised version of childhood that is popular in
movies. It has the kids sitting neatly in their chairs, talking in some
adult, sarcastic, overly sophisticated but polite way — a concoction that
bears no resemblance to an actual kid.”
It has taken five years, two studios, many rewrites and reshoots and an
alleged $100 million to bring Wild Things to the screen. Eggers was
bombarded with endless studio notes after moguls feared his and Jonzes’s
vision was uncomfortably dark. He bolstered his morale by rereading F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Pat Hobby Stories. But his respect for the
mercurial Jonze never wavered. “Spike is one of the most honorable guys I’ve
ever known,” Eggers says. “We were friends before we started and we’re close
friends now. Along the way, yes, there were tussles with the studios. But
that kind of thing is par for the course when there is this sort of money at
stake.”
There is probably no cooler figure in American letters than Eggers: his prose
is luminous, playful, original; he is the publisher of the ultimate in-crowd
literary quarterly McSweeney’s; and, with Vendela Vida, his
novelist wife, he produced the screenplay to Away We Go, the movie
directed by Sam Mendes. And yet the figure before me looks like any slacker
guy you would find huddled over his laptop in a corner of Starbucks: medium
height, generic fleece, camping shop shoes, curly mop and a manner that, far
from being knowing and cliquey, is warm, interested and inclusive.
Above all, Eggers is a passionate advocate for writing, not as something
grandstanding or masturbatory but as a force for change, a means of
self-realisation. With the proceeds of his work he set up a chain of writing
studios across America called 826 Valencia, which teaches children — many
from deprived backgrounds — the craft of writing. He wants to ensure that
their stories are heard — yet ask Eggers to tell his own and he shrinks away.
“I’m not super-interested in my own thoughts and life,” he says. “When you put
out a memoir, there it is. Now let’s move on to anything else.” Only 8,000
copies of A Heartbreaking Work were published initially and Eggers
expected his readings to draw only an arthouse minority. Instead they were
packed with mainstream America, attracted to the book’s universal themes of
loss and family. A Heartbreaking Work brought him critical success,
huge sales and a stack of cash, but also a lingering self-disgust.
He had exposed not only himself — his rage, rambunctious sex life, chaotic
childcare — but also those he loved. His elder sister, Beth, a lawyer,
publicly berated him for claiming whole credit for Toph’s upbringing, but
then retracted her words, saying that she was just having “a La Toya Jackson
moment”. Soon after, she killed herself. All Eggers will say is that her
death was “misperceived” and would require “many hours and weeks of talk” to
understand.
Eggers rejected what A Heartbreaking Work had brought him. His second
published book, You Shall Know Our Velocity, dedicated to Beth, was
about a group of youths who, having received a windfall, travel around the
world trying — with little success — to give it away.
But his second novel proper was abandoned unfinished after 500 pages. Eggers
wrote it while living abroad — with typical quirkiness in Costa Rica and
Iceland — having decided to disappear for a few years. “It was nice in a way
because you had no daily obligations, but that was exactly why it drove me
round the bend. I felt disconnected.” On his return to San Francisco he
signed the lease on the first 826 Valencia building and threw himself into
the practicalities of buying computers and painting walls. “I felt like I
was back where I knew what I was doing on the planet. I was liberated by a
sense of obligation. I knew how I could be useful.”
Altruism is not merely a moral imperative to Eggers but his salvation. His
family ethos was that hoarding money was wrong; it should be spent,
permitted to circulate. “Sometimes we had severe money worries, having to
move, having your braces taken off because we couldn’t afford dental bills.”
The family was comfortably middle class, living in an Illinois suburb — his
father was a lawyer — but when Eggers’ parents died, they left only their
house.
Eggers tried to give away the proceeds of A Heartbreaking Work but was
sued by his agent. With What is the What and his new work, Zeitoun
(published in Britain next year), about a victim of Hurricane Katrina who is
mistakenly arrested as a terrorist, he signed away royalties before
publication to charitable trusts. And so in Deng’s village of Marial Bai a
14-building educational complex has just opened, serving 100 students.
But that meant Eggers worked unpaid for four years. “We live pretty simply,”
he says. “We have a comfortable house. We can’t complain, we don’t have any
money worries. I’m just very simplistic about the fact that if you have
something extra and someone else doesn’t have enough, you try to equal it
out. And it’s a very clumsy process and you look silly doing it, which is
what Velocity was about.”
Eggers, it must be said, was paying his bills in other ways. Away We Go,
a road movie about an expectant couple travelling around America trying to
find the right place to raise a child, was a mere side project. While Vida
was pregnant with their daughter, now 4 (they also have an eight-month-old
son), the couple would sit around writing scenes based on the intrusive
comments that a pregnant woman receives. Suddenly Mendes was on the phone,
agreeing to make the film without subjecting them to death by 1,000 rewrites.
The couple in Away We Go take their parental obligations earnestly, so
different from Eggers’ account of raising Toph — all Frisbee games and
chucked-together dinners. “I look back on those years with Toph as
absolutely bliss,” Eggers recalls. “My mom had done all the hard work. He
was already 8. We had fun every single day. We were just partners in the
whole project. I only wish I’d learnt to cook better.”
Losing his parents, both died of cancer within months of each other, was like
“the removal of the floor and the ceiling simultaneously”. Suddenly his
family was an odd, misshapen unit, isolated and misunderstood. A
Heartbreaking Work brims with the disdain that Eggers and his sister
felt for other parents: “They are the old model and we are the new,” he
writes defiantly. A neighbour grew so suspicious that one day she burst into
their living room.
“She thought we were some sort of drug den with a kidnapped kid among us. We
didn’t fit into anyone’s idea of what a family should be.” Only when Toph
turned 21 did Eggers understand: “I thought, ‘Would I give an eight-year-old
to that guy?’ That is when I could finally see things through other people’s
eyes.”
Toph – Christopher Eggers – is now 26, working in Los Angeles as a
screenwriter on a series of children’s stories with his elder brother. A
Heartbreaking Work did not come as a shock to him. “We collaborated on
it at the time,” Eggers says. “He was reading those pages as I was writing
them starting when he was 16. He was always a writer,” Eggers says.
Collaboration is a foremost principle to Eggers. Not for him the writer
toiling in solitude. He and Vida read each other’s works in progress, and
those of many other writer friends. On the walls of 826 Valencia are the
proofs of celebrated novels, such as Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s
Daughter, headed “15th draft” to teach his students that writing is a
craft to be sweated over, not a lightning bolt of genius.
Eggers’ first and only job was as a journalist for the online site salon.com,
where he enjoyed the camaraderie of the trade. He replicated this in his
parallel career as a literary editor, running McSweeney’s and a
monthly publication, The Believer, edited by Vida. For a creature of
the dot-com age who shared office space with early internet luminaries, he
is an unashamed Luddite. He rarely goes online, and he reads proper
newspapers and revels in the feel of a physical object, such as the special
edition of Wild Things covered in fake fur.
His journalistic roots are evident, too, in What is the What and Zeitoun’s
reporterly tellings of another’s story. He seems determined to erase his own
voice completely: he asked friends to comb the manuscript of What is the
What, ruthlessly weeding out all Eggerisms so that it sounded like
Deng’s voice and not his own.
And yet it is that voice, with the seemingly effortless riffs, and sudden
ability to shock or amuse, that his readers seek.
But writing Wild Things has left Eggers eager to write another all-ages
book, perhaps a fantasy epic with the power to transport such as he felt as
a child reading Tolkien.
The shop window on his own life is shut. “I just wrote a short essay for a
friend’s anthology,” he says. “I so rarely write about my own thoughts these
days that it was really hard to turn in. And when I did I thought, ‘I will
regret this in some way’.”
The Wild Things by Dave Eggers is published by Hamish Hamilton on
October 29. To order it for £13.49 inc p&p call 0845 271234 or
visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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