Tell Me Why

I’M IN THAT cohort of earnest, educated, now-middle-aged North Americans who fell in love with Dave Eggers’ sprawling, sometimes unapologetically self-indulgent memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. All my life I had lived with an ongoing inner monologue of exaggerated self-consciousness, but I’d never read anyone who could articulate the experience as precisely, never mind playfully, as Eggers.

Eggers could have made a fortune repeating the same entertaining self-indulgence, but he’s shaped his career into anything but navel-gazing. He’s formed writing workshops for kids; started two long-running magazines; cofounded an oral history book series on human rights crises; and written a string of beautiful, compassionate books of fiction and nonfiction with an unmistakably critical eye.

In his latest novel—Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live Forever?—Eggers uses a dialogue-only form to tell a compact story that thunders with probity and timeless, existential urgency. The main character, Thomas, a middle-aged man with psychological issues, has conversations with six different kidnap victims—an astronaut, a former member of Congress and Vietnam vet, his high-school teacher, his mother, a policeman, and a woman he meets during walks on the beach—holding them on an abandoned military base on the California coast. He doesn’t physically harm any of them; he just wants to know where everything went wrong. Why do our friends die? Why do our career dreams come to naught? Why do the mythical promises of science, democracy, education, nationalism, law, progress, and even love fail to deliver?

It’s not obvious that Thomas is insane, but he certainly is troubled, and not just as a gentle euphemism for “dangerous sociopath.” “We all think there must be someone very smart at the controls, spending the money, making plans for our schools, parks everything. But then its guys like you,” he tells the retired member of Congress, “who are just guys like me. No one has a ... clue.” Thomas is troubled by all of society’s broken promises.

The tale is sparse, but it’s not just an existential screed dressed up in a gimmicky novel. Your Fathersis like a follow-up to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, with Thomas just as troubled by the same disappointments and failures as the prophetic/deranged Tyler Durden. But Thomas is only a shadow of the strutting, macho pugilist Durden. He would have never made it through the front doors of Durden’s Fight Club.

Your Fathers reminds me even more of the book of Job. The hapless, poetic Job loses everything but his life for no good reason, and God responds to the problem of suffering with the miracle of being. But God’s long list of wonders doesn’t make the raw suffering of existence go away. “Human beings are born to trouble  just as sparks fly upward.” Every generation asks afresh: Why must we suffer?

[Spoiler alert!] In Eggers’ tale, there is no voice of God in the end, only police bursting into the buildings to free the captives. “We’re in here! Everyone’s safe,” shouts the retired member of Congress. “God, that sounds really horrible, doesn’t it?” says Thomas. “Nothing in the world sounds worse than that, to be here and safe. Say it again. I don’t think they heard you.” The member of Congress repeats his call. “Jesus Christ,” says Thomas. “That is the saddest thing I ever heard.” The end.

Eggers has evolved into a genuinely prophetic voice, reading the signs of the times, exposing modern idolatry and unquestioned hypocrisy, refusing, like Thomas, to feign consolation in the words “everybody’s safe.” His is the voice of an era that imagines itself to have outgrown the need for God but doesn’t know how to get by without God. The closing, mournful cry of Thomas is a lament for the times, a bracing word to counter the false optimism of our politicians, the dehumanizing “reasonable margins” of economists, and the blind servitude of cultural leaders that worship the stillborn idol of moral progress.