Inside every book reviewer there prowls a mean and wary beast, like a hyena prowling around a fresh-made corpse. This creature will not be taken in by publisher's hype or glowing jacket blurbs, by bestseller statistics, or even by word-of-mouth; above all, it will resist with claw and fang when an author tries to smooth its fur with a big, warm hand. This brute is the Old Hack - first cousin to Gore Vidal's Wise Hack - whose age is fixed no matter how young or elderly is the host inside whom he is trapped.
Dave Eggers seems to be familiar with the Old Hack, for in the opening pages of this, his first novel - let us call it a novel, for want of better - he fires off a quiverful of sedation darts, most of which, however, fly well wide of the mark. Inside the front cover, for instance, we are presented with the blank, capitalised assurance that "THIS WAS UNCALLED FOR". Then, on that page where usually you get only the publisher's address, and the book's publishing history and ISBN number, Eggers offers us a detailed description of himself, including a "sexual-orientation scale" from one to 10, "with 1 being perfectly straight, and 10 being perfectly gay" - he places himself at three - as well as a long, poker-faced note on the non-fictional status of the book, which concludes: "All events described herein actually happened, though on occasion the author has taken certain, very small, liberties with the chronology, because that is his right as an American."
The Old Hack, his teeth still bared at the affront of the book's title, is next presented with six numbered "RULES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR ENJOYMENT OF THIS BOOK", which include permission not to read the author's preface, to skip pages 209-301, or just to read the first hundred or so pages and forget the rest. Then comes that Preface - close on seven large pages of small type - a jokey Table of Contents, and 21 pages of Acknowledgments, which include a breakdown of how the author spent his advance, an offer to pay five dollars to the first 200 readers who . . . Oh, why go on? Suffice to say that the Acknowledgments end with a drawing of a stapler. Cute is not the word. When all this paraphernalia has been surmounted, however, it is heartening to arrive at what seems to be an ordinary, old-fashioned novel, with a narrator, and the narrator's Mom, and his young brother Toph (Christopher), and the usual descriptive bits - "the December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic" - and lots of staccato dialogue:
"Where were you?" my mother says.
"In the bathroom," I say.
"Hmph," she says.
"What?"
"For fifteen minutes?"
"It wasn't that long."
"It was longer. Was something broken?"
"No."
"Did you fall in?"
"No."
"Were you playing with yourself?"
And so on. We are in J. D. Salinger country, and what you hear is the sound of another Glass family breaking. For Dad, we quickly learn, has died a month ago, from cancer, and Mom in her turn is about to die from the same disease: "While reclining on the couch most of the day and night, on her back, my mom turns her head to watch television and turns it back to spit up green fluid into a plastic receptacle". It rapidly becomes apparent why the word "heartbreaking" appears in the title.
One of the many peculiarities of the book is that the narrator is as ageless as Proust's Marcel. In the opening pages he speaks and behaves like a 10-year-old, and it is surprising, and unsettling, to discover that in fact he is 21. This uncanny air of youthfulness, not to say childishness, is maintained to the end, whether by design or otherwise it is hard to decide. The prose, like Holden Caulfield's, is by turns strident and breathless, the voice candid and sly, the tone appealing and smugly self-sufficient. Is this how all orphans would speak - "I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know" - if they had Dave Eggers's prodigious linguistic gifts?
For he does write wonderfully, and this is an extremely impressive debut. In telling the story of his parents' deaths, and his subsequent move to Berkeley, in California, where he becomes the devoted - at times obsessive - surrogate father of his little brother Toph, and their eventual removal to New York, Eggers takes enormous risks, a surprising number of which come off. The frantic, speeding, often hilarious narrative is a sort of dancing in place, aimed at holding off the pain and sorrow of this terrible thing that has happened to the family, this grotesque joke that a merciless fate has played on these poor people. Eggers is aware of the ruses he resorts to, seizing on the misfortunes, illnesses, nervous collapses and deaths of those around him in order to fill the hollow of an embrace that his lost parents should be filling. His suicidal friend John sees to the dark heart of the matter:
"You know what it is? It's entertainment. If you back up far enough, it all becomes a sort of show. You grew up with comforts, without danger, and now you have to seek it out, manufacture it, or, worse, use the misfortunes of friends and acquaintances to add drama to your own life."
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has been a huge bestseller in America since it was published at the beginning of the year. It may well become a classic, like The Catcher in the Rye, or even Huckleberry Finn, though its extreme self-consciousness, and a tone that for all the speaker's jokes and squibs is often merely winsome, may prevent readers from being able to love it as a work of art must be loved if it is to live. For all that, it is a great feast of a book. Now the Old Hack will find a shady tree to lie under and sleep off his indigestion.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times