What is the What - Dave Eggers

I am almost at a loss to know how to describe Dave Eggers' novel, What is the What. My recent habit in reading books has been to approach them with as little context as possible, in order that I might have the purest initial reaction (later, of course, I read countless reviews to find out how my reaction meshes with the general dialogue about a book). With What is the What, I did just that - my initial thoughts upon beginning the novel centered upon the author (thoughts described in some detail here) and not at all upon the story.


Specifically, I had some skepticism that Dave Eggers, whose only novel I had read (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) left me sort of ambivalent about him as a writer, would be able to pull off the many demands of What is the What. I was concerned that his attempt to write a story about a Sudanese refugee in first person would fail miserably, or - worse - that it would succeed in some measure but be a hackneyed, American-white-person tale of broad platitudes and easy moralizing (see the movie Crash for more on this genre).


Thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, I was wrong. Eggers manages What is the What beautifully. It was, at times, like reading a textbook on how to convincingly and authentically write a first person narrator who is so very, very different from yourself. Eggers' answer to this sticky authorial problem is simple: compassion. Within pages, I had forgotten that Eggers was writing... or at least stopped caring. He treats Valentino Achek Deng with complete compassion and with a total lack of irony or pretension... where other authors might play with the space between their experiences and those of their central narrator, Eggers ignores that space - in fact, ignores himself completely. Though the author appears occasionally, it's only in the structural frame on which he hangs Deng's story. The novel is both remarkable and engrossing.

Eggers structures the novel around two timelines, both moving forward simultaneously. The first involves Deng's life in Sudan, from his early childhood in a Southern Sudanese village to the civil war that drives him from his village to his travels through various refugee camps and his struggle to emigrate to the United States. This backstory is told in large chunks by present-day Deng, in his mid-twenties and living in Atlanta. This present-day storyline follows the robbery of Deng's apartment and his time bound and gagged in his living room (which gives him plenty of time to tell his backstory to the reader), along with the days following the robbery and Deng's subsequent (and sudden) enlightenment. Although Eggers occasionally shifts back and forth in his timeline (largely in the present-day storyline), he keeps his two storylines relatively linear, each moving towards a prospective climax and subsequent resolution.

Deng is a beautiful character: full of verve and intelligence, but also sufficiently sobered by the tragic events he's witnessed throughout his life. Deng isn't the long-suffering but perpetually joyful character so often caricatured in refugee stories; he is hopeful but often discouraged, faithful to his god but also despairing that god might not care about him after all. I rooted for Deng and desperately wanted him to succeed, but the story is such that you never know if the good life will ever come to him.

In fact, as I approached the final chapters of the novel, I began to wonder how Eggers would resolve this novel. The novel is 500 pages of very, very terrible things happening to this character (and many of his friends), and I began inwardly to beg Eggers to give Achek Deng a break. At this point, I didn't care if Eggers finished the book with a crushing deus ex machina - I only wanted Deng to be happy.

It's a testament to Eggers' confidence and talent that he didn't stoop to such a level. The ending is incredibly satisfying, but it's not an easy ending. Rather, Eggers allows his character to realize his own internal strength, to re-energize the hope he's always held inside, and to walk forward, literally, into the sunset. What is the What ends the way I wanted The Kite Runner to end - its open endedness refuses to provide a tidy closure, but it does provide a sense of hope.

When I finally finished the novel, I discovered the obvious: that it's based on the life of the real Valentino Acheck Deng, which accounts for Eggers' uncannily realistic representation as well as the bittersweet but authentic ending. Although it could be called a memoir, Eggers is too savvy to do that... he knows that Deng's story carries more power with the structural artistic license a novel is able to provide, and he's right. Even so, the weaknesses in the novel show in the structural kinks... a bit of clumsiness in the way Deng addresses passersby, as if he's telling his story to them, a little too-easy convenience in the way he finds every opportunity to slip from present-day into his backstory. Yet even those contrivances are explained (or at least rationalized) by the character Deng's final assertions that he must tell his story to anyone he sees.

This is a type of novel most appreciated when one is able to forget the fact that it's told by anyone other than Valentino Acheck Deng, and, happily, that's the way it reads, for the most part. It's Eggers' greatest achievement, this ability to sink us so deeply in the character that we forget Deng isn't real... only to discover, finally, that he is real, in a way. It's that discovery, and the discovery that Deng battles onward, upward, and more courageously than ever before, that makes What is the What a truly uplifting novel.