Flamboyantly humble.(Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity)(Book Review)

Dave Eggers You Shall Know Our Velocity. McSweeney's Books, 376 pages, $21

Dave Eggers, flamboyantly humble, ashamed of his success, wallowing in that same success, the biggest dork of all, has second-order vanity, bad. He has had it since he edited the irreverent, sometimes hilarious, and ultimately shallow Might magazine. He thinks quite a lot of himself, but he knows that is not good. Consider the author photo for his first book, the megablock-buster Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The photo is blurry; author photos do not matter to him. In the blurry picture, there are two dogs and a bird, as if he were saying: "Don't look at me, look at these two dogs, and this odd bird on my shoulder." The bio states that Eggers has no pets. "Think about it: there are three animals in the photo, none of them mine." One tends to look at the author photo for a very long time to figure out what is going on. Now everyone knows what he looks like. He is shrewd, this Eggers.

His first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is out from his own house, McSweeney's. There is no author photo. There is no dust jacket. There is a natural gray cardboard cover, with the first paragraph of the book printed on it in capital letters. The front-cover endpaper picks up the text. One is tempted to make comparisons to early Surrealist experiments with type, but remembers that actual type was a little trickier. When Sylvia Beach and James Joyce labored over the huge "S" ("Stately, plump"), they were laboring with blocks and lead, not simply increasing the font size in a floating palette in their desktop publishing software. Eggers's trick was easy to do, and it does not warrant comparison to anything.

Print at your own press and you print on very thick paper (it took me fifty pages to stop checking that I hadn't turned two pages instead of one), and no one will stop you from inserting color photographs and many diagrams into the book. It seems copy editing, however, will not go well. There are rumors that Eggers is mean to those who criticize him, and I wonder if he fires editors who point out typos, dropped text, and left-in editorial notations. Someone clearly forgot, for instance, to wrap the text around a picture of a building on page 102, and as a result there is about a third of a page of copy lost. There is a scene early in the book in which the characters see three white Broncos, and they riff on white Broncos post-OJ ("how could they even make them in that color?"). Inserted into the text are three pictures of what appear to be Mercedes M-Class vehicles--decidedly not Broncos.

Perhaps he thinks that clean copy is a vanity, or a tool of the New York literati, at whom he is thumbing his nose by moving back to the West Coast and supporting independent bookstores. His repudiation strikes less charming notes, as well. The literary agent Elyse Cheney had to sue to receive her six-figure commission for the sale of his first book to the movies. Eggers is not against agents. He has a new agent: Andrew Wylie. One hand is thumb to nose; the other is signing a note thanking The New Yorker for publishing an excerpt of his novel.

This is the kind of contradiction of which Eggers is made. It is what makes him frustrating and endearing simultaneously. On top of all ...