Volume 47, Number 14 · September 21, 2000
Notes of a Son and Brother
By Benjamin DeMott
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers
Simon and Schuster, 375 pp., $23.00
In little over a month, in the early Nineties, a twenty-one-year-old college senior named Dave Eggers lost both his parents to cancer. Eggers's older brother and sister were launched on business lives and postgraduate education, so he took over as de facto guardian of the family's youngest child, eight-year-old Christopher (nicknamed Toph). [*] At the same time he became the family memoirist, describing—in a journal that serves as the basis of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—his parents' terminal illnesses, his own performance as quasi parent of a younger sibling, and concurrent episodes in his sputtering career in San Francisco, as founding editor of a satirical journal called Might and would-be cast member of the MTV series The Real World.
Review, 3451 words
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