HOW WE ARE HUNGRY: Stories
By Dave Eggers. McSweeney's. 224 pp. $22
Look carefully at the black, dust-jacketless cover of Dave Eggers's mixed bag of a short-story collection, How We Are Hungry, and you'll see the engraved image of a gryphon, the mythological animal with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle. It's the sort of thing that barely registers before you've begun reading. But after you've turned the last page and closed the book, there it is again -- and suddenly this hybrid beast, famed as much for its vigilant nest-tending as for its love of gold, seems a particularly apt symbol for the other unusual creatures about whom you've just read.
Animals, especially imperiled animals, make ominous cameos in nearly all of these stories. There's the wounded anteater who crashes the hotel room of two old friends, both of whom seem willing to sacrifice their friendship for a few nights of banal, artificial romance. There are the thousands of cows whose imprisonment in a beef-processing plant haunts a young man, himself imprisoned by a relative's blithe and repeated attempts at suicide. There's the sheep struck and killed on the road by a driver rendered temporarily insane with unfocused, diabolical jealousy. And in the last and most curious story, there's a chatty talking dog named Steven, who narrowly survives being thrown in a river and commits the remainder of his spared life to running, eating and playing with maximum gusto.
None of these endangered species, of course, can match the inglorious hominid biped when it comes to putting itself in harm's way. People are naturally included in Eggers's bestiary, represented as slow-moving animals whose hubris and thick-headedness combine to make them objects, most often, of pity and scorn. But every now and then, by virtue of almost accidentally manifesting a glimmer of the divine, they are redeemed. It's this tension between our base and noble impulses, our so-called animal and refined natures, that gives How We Are Hungry its momentum and imparts to the best of its stories a rare and welcome grace.
Unfortunately there's another kind of tension at work here: the tension between Dave Eggers the writer and Dave Eggers the spokesman for a particular type of self-conscious, stylized ennui. In the former role, he is gifted beyond doubt -- a fact to which anyone who was moved by A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir of raising his younger brother after the sudden death of their parents, will attest. And his debut novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, proved that he could extract genuine poignancy from the lives of wayward twentysomethings -- despite his memoir's famous disclaimer, in which he admitted that their lives "are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seem interesting to those living them at the time."
But in his other role, as the puckish avatar of post-collegiate irony, Eggers can be cloying. It was probably just a matter of time before the playful narrative subversiveness marking his earlier work (as well as McSweeney's, the smart literary journal he founded) culminated in something like "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself," a title followed by five blank pages. When John Cage introduced a silent composition or when Robert Rauschenberg painted his famous white canvases, they were curious about how audience interaction would necessarily affect the performance or the display. It doesn't work on the printed page, though, where the audience is unlikely to participate in quite the same way. It ends up feeling like a prank -- an honors student's prank, perhaps, but still a prank.
There are other moments of distracting self-consciousness in How We Are Hungry. "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water," a story that reprises a character from Eggers's novel, is riddled with the kind of authorial intrusions -- such as directly addressing readers to inform them what's salient and what's not -- that once made John Barth's short stories seem revolutionary but now seem precious. And every so often there appears a two-page story, a relic from the mercifully dormant "short-short fiction" fad that erupted some years ago; here they are little more than voice exercises, serving chiefly to illustrate how eminently reasonable Aristotle was to request that tales have a discernible beginning, middle and end.
Happily, there's plenty in this collection to remind us that, for all his noodling around, Eggers is phenomenally talented -- maybe uniquely so for such a young writer. His knack for humanizing the walking, talking demographics that are Generation X and Generation Y is on full display in a story like "Quiet," one of two in which wires clearly marked eros and agape become messily crossed -- in this instance, with violent results. In "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance," a young man who believes he's unable to give any more of himself to a needy friend discovers, to his chagrin, that his fundamental goodness obligates him to do so.
True to his book's title, Eggers has made his task here an exploration of the different ways our behavior is determined by hunger -- for intimacy and connection, to be sure, but more generally for any kind of transcendence, however momentary. In "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly," the longest and most conventionally rewarding of these stories, a young woman climbs Kilimanjaro but is able to revel in her superhuman triumph only briefly before tumbling back down to earth, where tangled vines of poverty and social standing are still very firmly rooted.
But Eggers doesn't fault her for trying. Like the gryphon, she's a beautiful mutant: half of her fearful and heavy, the other half aching to fly heavenward. In the end, the author has an extraordinary animal give the final word on the meaning of life, the nature of God and the value of staying hungry. Not many young writers can pull off a benediction from a talking dog. Dave Eggers, it seems, is one of them. •
Jeff Turrentine is a Washington Post staff writer and a regular reviewer for Book World.
