Round-the-world spending spree
John de Falbe
YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY by Dave Eggers McSweeney's Books, $22, pp. 371, ISBN 0907335555 This book, published on 20 September, has a cover price of $22. My credit card was charged $75,41 on 28 August for a copy to be sent by courier, which has still not arrived. The copy that I read came from a consignment that arrived by accident. After 18 months of dealing with McSweeney's, I know that this is characteristic. When it comes to sending books outside the USA, the idea appears to be that losers who don't inhabit the land of the brave and the free should shut up and be grateful for whatever crumbs they are thrown. 'I'd always assumed ... that all other nations [besides America} were huddled together, trading and commiserating, like smokers outside a building,' the narrator writes in this book; and later, This earth is not yours; it's ours. Don't you fucking know this?' Charming sentiments, which reminded me of something.
The fact that I was shaking with fury about the distribution of this book ought perhaps to be irrelevant to its review, were it not that it is the enterprise as a whole which invites comment, not just the book itself. In the UK Dave Eggers is best known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his moving account of how he and his little brother managed after the near-simultaneous death of their parents. But Eggers is also the general editor of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. Innovative in both design and content, always beautifully produced and often very funny. McSweeney's is now on its ninth issue. It flaunts its own excellence with irresistible exuberance, it is a champion of independence; something is happening here, and you cannot help but admire it. It is so hip, in fact, that it has already achieved cult status; issues 1, 2 and 3 change hands for hundreds of dollars.
McSweeney's have also published a few books and now they have just produced 10,000 copies of You Shall Know Our Velocity, Dave Eggers' first novel, to be sold over their website and through selected independent bookstores — emphatically not Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders etc. This is naively interpreted by many as a triumphant knee-jerk towards corporate bookselling, but it isn't quite so simple. Although it will boost Eggers' deserved reputation as a literary entrepreneur and earn some money for the remarkable McSweeney's scholarship project, it will also generate useful publicity for the US and UK trade editions of the book when they come out next year assuming, that is, that it is any good.
As you would expect, the production is striking and unusual. The book is cased in thick, rough cardboard, and it has a black cloth spine bearing the author's name, the title, and the lovely McSweeney's colophon. There is no dustjacket, but the front is beautifully printed with the novel's opening sentences. The text continues on the front endpaper, which looks odd and makes you think that a page is missing. The paper is good and the book is properly sewn, The publisher's details, some acknowledgments and a dedication appear in small type at the bottom of the right-hand rear endpaper. Apart from the business with the front endpaper, the design is a success. The same care, unfortunately, has not been extended to the text, which has not been properly proof-read. It would be easier to believe that Caillebotte is spelt Callibotte on purpose, and the date of the Casablanca Conference given as 1938 deliberately, to demonstrate the narrator's ignorance, if it were not for words like 'dulpiOcated'. And 'Out my portal the plane wing was silver and shining like it would have 50 years earlier ...' — how did this get through? Or The terrain would be get warmer ...'? A photograph is followed by lerence between stasis and swooping?' which suggests that a whole chunk has been left out. There is more, and it is distracting and sloppy.
Will and Hand are 27-year-old mixed-up American kids who decide to go on a round-the-world trip in a week, stopping off in four or five places where they will give away thousands of dollars at random. The money was a windfall earned by Will when an image of him screwing in a lightbulb was used on a brochure. So off they go to Senegal ('Greenland was too windy'), Morocco and so forth, where they thrust hundreds of dollars at peasants, prostitutes and children. Their reasons for wishing to get rid of the money in this surprising way are obscure, but seem to have something to do with an awareness that other people in the world are poor, sheer delight in their own perversity, and — it emerges — rage at their friend Jack having been crushed by a truck. Will has additional reasons for feeling ill-used by life because he was beaten up by two men with bats, his father deserted when he was little, and he feels guilty for setting fire to a cow as a child. As they travel, their attitude progresses from a silly pity that amounts to contempt for the rest of the world to an awareness that choosing who to give to is difficult and fraught with moral complications. At last we read, 'There were rules down there, and there was a task at hand, and there were few options and with few options comes such great solace,' and All I ever wanted was to know what to do.' With these admissions, it seems, there is hope for something more positive than egocentric rage as a response to the world.
They Shall Know Our Velocity is a traditional novel about a young man trying to understand his identity and the duties it entails in a confusing world. This is no criticism — think of Catcher in the Rye. Eggers writes with bravura. He is serious, and he has lots of amusing ideas, some fine phrases and a readiness with contemporary references that some will mistake for originality. But the characters have neither the charm nor the subtlety of Holden Caulfield, and the road is not as interesting as Kerouac's. And some passages are very tedious indeed. Dave Eggers is assuredly at the cutting edge of something, but not yet of fiction.
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