LONDON - THANKS FOR THE CLARENDON, DAVE EGGERS

Here in London where the streets are paved with gold, we are roughly four years behind in terms of the nuances of metropolitan America’s literary gang wars. Are they still happening? Is n+1 still dropping flaming bags of shit on McSweeney’s doorstep? Are people in Williamsburg still playing kickball and thinking they’re adorable? I digress…

With that said, we are fully prepared for the consequences when we say that we still totally bum Dave Eggers.

He may not have produced an endearingly candid novel in something like five years. He did What Is The What (which we once saw in a bookshop in
Germany titled something like Was Ist Die Was and giggled all the way to Estonia) in 2006 and has been producing the
Voice of Witness series which documents human-rights atrocities,
including slavery rings currently operating in the US, victims of the Janjaweed and a whole bunch of Katrina survivors. We’ve maybe heard no better reason to retreat from the world of Michiko
Kakutani and doting Gen-X-ers than to produce oral histories of
witnesses of genocide. We also have an
intern who was at McSweeney’s this summer, and says he has a
charming swagger and smells like shampoo.

It appears that Dave has revisited his more light-hearted tone and produced a graphic interactive Thanksgiving play
for the New York Times which takes
place in four rooms, and it thoroughly did away with our fears that he’d succumbed to
crippling self-doubt and was just crashing at Michael Chabon’s place or
something.

K BROADMAN

November 28th, 2008 @ 12:48