I received my copy of Dave Eggers' new novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity on Friday, and like all the McSweeney's products, was immediately struck by the beautiful custom publishing, which seems to confront the legacy of Eggers' first novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, head on. A.H.W.O.S.G. was widely noted for the way in which Eggers obsessively catalogues and preempts every potential criticism of the work, enfolding explanations and defenses into the body of the narrative itself.
That work has 100-some pages of auxiliary (or perhaps central) content. The extensive prefatory material includes typical material such as reviewer's quotations and the author's bio, as well as less-typical additions such as a plot of the author's position on a sexual orientation scale (7/10 heterosexual), "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book", "Preface to this Edition", a thorough table of contents, acknowledgements, a listing of the major themes of the book, in both prose and graphical form, a complete disclosure of the money the author received for writing the book, and what it was spent on, an offer to receive $5 back from the author by sending him a letter with a personal photo, an "Incomplete Guide to Symbols and Metaphors", and a drawing of a stapler. In addition, my paperback version was S-bound so that it can be read from either direction (fig. 1). Read from the back is another 50 pages of "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making: Notes, Corrections, Clarifications, Apologies, Addenda". This section includes in particular a many-page rant set in 6-point type about why A.H.W.O.S.G. is not ironic. I met Dave at a benefit for breast cancer research at a beautiful church in Coral Gables across from the also-beautiful Biltmore Hotel, and he's sensitive about this "irony" matter in person, too, reciting lines from Alanis Morissette's "(Isn't It) Ironic", and describing how each one, in turn, was not at all ironic.[1]
What differentiates this novel from its predecessor is the manner in which the reader is thrown abruptly into the story on the very cover of the book itself (fig. 2), with absolutely no contextualizing information at all. Perhaps this is a response to some readers' frustration with the overwrought antics of A.H.W.O.S.G. and Eggers has swung to the opposite pole. Elsewhere the possibilities afforded by custom publishing are more obvious, as with the inclusion (multiple times) of an image of the famous Scorpion lyrics... (fig. 3)
fig. 1:
fig. 2:
fig. 3:
[1] I don't mean to give the impresion that Mr. Eggers is always ranting. To the contrary, he's a really nice guy and drew this picture of a dog for me:
...which may be a portrait of the narrator of his short story "After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"[2], which appeared in the collection Speaking With The Angel, edited by Nick Hornby, and is the best (though only) story I've read written from the point of view of a dog.
[2] ...speaking of which, does Dave have an unhealthy obsession with drowing in a river? Read the opening of Y.S.K.O.V. in fig. 2 above.
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