What Is the What (2006)

I knew virtually nothing about the Lost Boys of Sudan when I started Dave Eggers's "novel," but after finishing it I not only have a better understanding of that chapter of history, but the details are also impossibly vivid. I use the term novel in scare quotes because that is the book's marketing label and the category in which it won awards and acclaim. What Is the What is closer in form to a memoir—closer even than to biography, because it tells the story of Valentine Achak Deng in the first person. Achak (as he is most often called here) lost his parents and siblings and was forced to flee his Sudanese village on foot after it was overrun by violence and destruction in the long Sudanese civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2005. He was not even 10. Joining with others, he walked nearly 2,000 miles to a refuge in Ethiopia, from which he was ejected by wartime circumstances and forced to make another long trek on foot to Kenya. Eventually, as an adult, he finds his way to the US as an immigrant. What Eggers has done with this story is nothing less than remarkable. It does work like a novel because in many ways it's structured like one—with a 24-hour frame story set in Atlanta, where Achak finally lands, that proceeds with unreeling memories of his life. It works like a memoir because Eggers so completely occupies the point of view of Achak. Eggers already showed his skill for memoir and lost boys in his own tale published six years earlier, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his first book. It's interesting to see someone so immersed in memoir who also appears to be so egoless, at least in his writing. What Is the What (subtitled The Autobiography of Valentine Achak Deng) works so well because there is so little Eggers and so much Achak. But the telling here counts nearly as much as the tale. By making it a novel, taking the liberties of flashbacks, information artfully withheld, suspense, and other techniques of fiction, it bypasses dry historical accounts and is that much more effective. Once here, Achak has nearly as many problems in the US, and ultimately this story encompasses American experience as much as Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Kenyan. And if Eggers has the human spirit of Achak right, as he seems to, he's even more shrewd about getting out of the way of it. In spite of a life of unimaginable privations and hardships, Achak is a warm light burning bright. You can't help but love him, and this book is the most direct way into that for most of us. I'm really tempted to call it a masterpiece.

In case it's not at the library.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)

Dave Eggers's specialty might be setting up shop in the gray areas of literature and then living there as if he were a natural. Maybe he is. His first book is a reasonably straightforward memoir, written and published in his late 20s. That's pretty young for a memoir, but Eggers already had a daunting life story to tell—both his parents died of cancer in the same year, when he was 21 and his youngest brother Toph was 8. Dave, Toph, and their sister Beth (with help from the eldest of the four siblings, Bill) moved to California and raised Toph while attempting to carry on their own young adult lives. But it probably wasn't the harrowing story that made Eggers and his book so popular in 2000. That likely had more to do with a natural talent for telling a story, filtered through a Gen X sensibility. In fact, it might be fair to call this a classic of Gen X literature, along with anything you'd care to name by Douglas Coupland, author of the term. Ironical self-consciousness is a primary feature confronting the reader. It starts with the title. Then there are elaborate instructions for how to read the book, along with sections of the book that were taken out presented with no context. Then it's on to the Acknowledgments, another lengthy section riffing on its own self-awareness and abusing book structure tics, e.g., "The author would like to acknowledge that he does not look good in red." After nearly a hundred pages, the text proper of the memoir finally begins. Two things enable Eggers to get away with all this, at least as much as he does. He doesn't always. But he is a good writer and his story has a sobering gravity that keeps it compelling. Both elements are necessary but in the end I'm more impressed with his writing. He is somehow warm and generous even as he is cold and calculating, willing to test his sincerity in the crucible of your skepticism as much as it takes. Perhaps because he is literally the first to doubt his own sincerity. He is a weird combination of genuinely modest and raging egotist. I was sad to hear his troubles did not end with those recounted in the book. A year or two after it was published his sister killed herself. He hasn't written much about his family since. The book does not live up to the title, of course, but it's good enough to pal around with the idea.

In case it's not at the library.

The Witch (2015)

As the lights went down for yet another weekday matinee movie screened exclusively for me, myself, and I, and as the images of pilgrims came out of the shadows to start the picture, I found myself wondering about the subcategory of witch movies within the broader horror ghetto. Whenever the deep forest environs of The Witch came to the fore—as important an element here as any—I was reminded immediately and repeatedly of The Blair Witch Project, and never of The Wizard of Oz, both of which appeared frequently in the lists I googled up later. Director and writer Robert Eggers is a relatively untried production designer with an abiding interest in fairy tales and the fantastic. The Witch comes with a gaudy subtitle—"A New-England Folktale"—that gives away the preoccupations with both the fantastic and the factually accurate. Set in 1630s Massachusetts wilderness, it pieces its story and even dialogue from period documents. It's soon established, for purposes of the movie, that at least one witch is real. A goat and other satanic appurtenances are also involved. In the story, a family of pilgrims—husband, wife, and their five children—chooses exile over murky disputed points of religion with a larger group. In this context, choosing exile can also be understood as a sin of pride. The family finds a patch of open land near a forest and begins to farm it. They caution one another never to enter the woods, it's a family rule, but of course at different times many of them saunter right in. The scenes inside the forest are gloomy, foreboding, and beautiful, and again, they hark to similar scenes in Blair Witch (albeit with steadicam this time). The father may or may not be a religious intellectual powerhouse, but he's otherwise inept. He can't farm and he can't hunt. The mother is exhausted and close to breaking down emotionally. All they have is work ethic. Of their children, the oldest girl and oldest boy are beginning to feel their sexuality. A boy and girl set of twins are somehow off. And last there's a newborn, Sam.

After some weeks or months there, calamity begins to descend on them. That's the arc here. No point going into specifics, you can see yourself, except to note that it's a very steady drumbeat of disaster. The period detail, the costuming and so forth, feels totally authentic, which is probably no surprise in a movie directed by a production designer. The language is formal English, with the odd locutions of the 17th century, many a "thee" and "thou" for example. I think what works best are the scenes obviously informed by the documentary "evidence": recorded legends, eyewitness accounts, and so forth. To be clear, certainly it's doubtful they ever happened. Those making testimony against witches all too often had ulterior motives or didn't like women or both. Still, it's a certain window into a contemporaneous view of what we now regard as superstition. The family members simply take it as given that they are locked in battle with dark forces, a remarkable view itself now. They instantly respond in kind, with prayers and supplications and such, on their knees, huddled in a circle. In one scene, the twins suddenly forget the words to the Lord's Prayer mid-session, and then go mute. Very close attention turns to one of the family's goats (as well it should). The Witch is reasonably spooky and shivery, and almost always restrained and quiet, though it gets to some pretty nasty places. At still another point, the oldest boy is in the woods by himself, breaking the family rule, and the witch appears to him as a beautiful, beautiful woman. She beckons him to come closer, come closer, and he does, he does. His whole trip only goes stranger from there. As with "standing in the corner" in Blair Witch, this is what's so scary about witches in the woods. You're liable to run into something that gets you in its power and tells you to do things, and you do them. Even when it's not in your best interest. The Witch is really pretty good.