By Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers is quite prolific.
I wouldn’t say I’m a fan, but somehow I’ve
read three Eggers books, the first being
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius (before this blog) and
The Circle.
Earlier this year, I found a jacketless hardback of
Heroes of the Frontier at the neighbourhood giveaway nook in the alley
bordering Outremont. It’s somewhat thick so I chose it mainly to make space in my on-deck shelf! Knowing Eggers, I knew it’d be a straighttforward
read, but not sure how I’d like it (The Circle was all right, and I can’t
really remember much from A Heartbreaking Work, except that it was well-written). So I
brought it along for summer reading at a charming cottage I discovered near
Riviere Rouge and it turned out to be a good choice. Eggers is a talented writer but I never
really connected with his writing - until now.
Heroes of the Frontier begins with a 40 yo woman named
Josie, who is somewhere in southern Alaska RV camping with her
two children, Paul, 8, and Ana, 5. We
gradually learn about this female ‘hero’:
how she came to be adopted as a teen (by her dentist) along with her stepsister,
how her dental practice was felled by a litiginous patient, her failed marriage
to the somewhat deadbeat “loose-boweled” father of their
children. Carl’s about to remarry and had even
invited Josie and kids to his wedding. Josie’s
way of dealing with that was to take the children and flee as far away from Ohio
as possible without having to leave the United States. Enter Alaska, the last frontier.
Josie and children stay at her stepsister’s
place, meet various people and get into a few misadventures. They also visit some roadside attractions.
… but everyone was gone or vacationing, so Josie and the
kids were alone in what seemed to be a zoo after an apolcalypse…
This was not
so bad. But it was sad like any zoo is sad, a place where no one really wants
to be. The humans feel guilty about
being there at all, crushed by thoughts of capture and captivity and bad food
and drugs and fences. And the animals
barely move. They saw a pair of moose, and their new calf, none of them
stirring… They saw an antelope, spindly and stupid; it walked a few feet
before stopping to look forlornly into the grey mountains beyond. Its eyes
said, Take me, Lord. I am now broken.
One time, they discovered unoccupied lodging where the
management was simply absent. Josie
enjoyed a blissful couple of nights sleeping on a real bed and taking hot baths.. before they got ran out by the returning owner. Another time, she even got some action with a
friendly manager of an RV park, though it got cut short when she realized Paul was
listening. Eesh, RV living! Later on in their journey, Josie and kids broke
into a furnished cabin located near an abandoned mine. Then the kids found a lost dog.
Towards the end, they arrived at a town
festival where Josie met a musician. She
asked if he and his musician friends can help her compose some music, in
exchange for dental care, even though she had no training in music, let alone
any aptitude for it. You get the sense that Josie could have been a gifted composer had her life worked out differently. She and the musicians were getting into a
groove with the improv composing before it got cut short by an evacuation order
due to spreading wildfire.
There's an obvious allegory Eggers is making: the state of America seen through the experience of an ordinary,
single mother. Thankfully, Eggers didn’t over-romanticize anything and was able to achieve something
that was quietly profound. There was
nothing terribly epic in their journey, except maybe the semi-apocalyptic wildfires
they encountered. I wonder
if readers at the time thought it was an artistic license, like how PT Anderson put raining
frogs at the end of Magnolia. Heroes of the
Frontier was published in 2016, the same year the wildfires ripped through Fort McMurray, AB, and well before the
huge wildfires that devastated Northern California (where Eggers is based). And now the heatwave and catastrophic BC
wildfires this summer. If anything, Heroes
was all too prescient. Nowadays anywhere you want to go, you have to consider Covid or climate change.
A couple of trifling issues for me. On Goodreads, I saw criticisms from Alaskans
who said Eggers got many things wrong and questioned whether he had ever visited
Alaska. So knowing this was a little
disappointing because as a reader you expect some research and verisimilitude
from a critically-lauded author!
Then there was Paul, "eight years old, with the cold caring eyes of an ice priest, a
gentle, slow-moving boy who was far more reasonable and kind and wise than his
mother.”
In fiction, one should always be wary of precocious child
characters because it’s become such a trope.
In this case, Paul was often the adult in the family, and understood
his little sister better than their own mom.
For the most part, Eggers was able make the character of Paul believable
enough as he understands children. But the repeated use of his ice priest eyes got
a bit tiresome.
Perhaps because Heroes of the Frontier was written as an
allegory, there's an earnestness of The Great American Novel that's hard to ignore. But it’s grounded enough in mundane reality that you can forgive Eggers
for it. One example, was the obvious commentary
on parenting in 21st century America. This review summed it up best and will quote part of it, as it may not stay online forever:
Eggers is not giving us yet another treacle-filled account
of how we should live for our kids, be defined by our kids, or describe our
life's purpose through our kids.
Eggers dares to offer still more: two extraordinarily
textured and credible portraits of young children — rare, in American
literature — coupled with a trenchant, spot-on account of how hard parenting
can be. Why parents need to take time for themselves, away from their kids. And
why, for all that, those same kids can help us to a better view of who we and
America might be.
Declaring war on our often narrow, success-oriented,
ultimately parent-centered view of raising children, Eggers suggests a model of
parent-child relations in which a parent need not be a "heaven-sent and
infallible being" — and in which children can be the devils they often are
and nevertheless still be passionately loved:
"One second she believed fervently that it was enough
to be with her children, the next moment they bored her to tears and were an
impediment to all her dreams. Goddamn them, her terrible robber children,
robbing her of so much, giving her everything and robbing her of everything
else, her gorgeous perfect thieving children damn them, bless them, she couldn't
wait to lie down with them, holding her cold hands against their hot smooth
faces."
Passages like this reflect Eggers at his best: emotionally
honest, conflicted, aware of our failings and yet willing to believe that
people like Josie really are heroes, searching in that quintessentially
American way for the undiscovered country in which each of us might yet realize
the promise of the American dream and become our best selves.
Here's a passage I personally liked. Yes, it’s earnest, but then again, what
parent hasn't had such thoughts when watching over their sleeping kid(s)?
…Paul and Ana
slept deeply and Josie hovered over them, like a cold night cloud over rows of
hills warmed all day in the sun.
They were
growing in beautiful ways, becoming independent, and forgetting all material
concerns, were awake to the light and the land, caring more about the movement
of the river than any buyable object or piece of school gossip. She was proud
of them, of their purifying souls, the way they asked nothing of her now, they
slept through the night, and relished the performing of chores, liked to wash
their clothes—and they were immeasurable better now than they were in Ohio.
They were stronger, smarter, more moral, ethical, logical, considerate, and
brave. And this was, Josei realized, what she wanted most of all from her
children: she wanted them to be brave. She knew they would be kind…
All along she
had been looking for courage and purity in the people of Alaska. She had not
thought that she could simply—not simply, no, but still—create such people.
Near the end, when I thought that Josie was starting
to find herself as a woman and mother, she goes on a hike up a
mountain with her kids, so unprepared she brought no provisions nor checked the weather forecast. What
parent in their right mind would allow herself and kids to continue on a hike when
a storm was fast approaching? I know I
wouldn’t have put my own child in this situation in the first place. But I guess what Eggers was trying to say
was this was a newer, freer Josie. Earlier
in the novel, Josie was always a slave to “the voice”.
Josie,
despairing of the waitress who had not returned, downed half a glass of water,
and that act, the dilution of the holy water within her, took her away from the
golden light of grace she’d felt moments before, and now she was sober of
something like it. Tugboat captain? Some
voice was now speaking to hear. What kind of imbecile are you? She didn’t like
this new voice. This was the voice that had told her to become a dentist, who
told her to have children with that man, the loose-boweled man, the voice who
every month told her to pay her water bill. She was being pulled back from the
light, like an almost-angel now being led back to the mandanity of earthly
existence.
Of all times, Josie chose then to ignore the voice. But whatever, all three survived and they came out of their journey renewed. The End.
I saw that quite a few Goodreads readers felt this was the worse Eggers novel because they
couldn’t relate to Josie, thought she was a bad parent, or an
idiot with her poor life choices. For me, Heroes is now my favourite of the three Eggers I read because for the first time, I
identified a lot with Josie. We shared similar
thought processes, insecurities growing up as a teen and the burden of that level-headed voice in my
head. In some ways, it
could’ve been me in some of Josie's situations. Even knowing that Josie is also a cipher, I still felt Eggers had a good handle on Josie as a flawed yet three-dimensional female character, like this Guardian review:
Josie is a memorably articulate
critic of America, but the most reliable target of her carping is Josie
herself. Shifting between euphoria and melancholy, evasions and grandiosity,
she is drunken, loving, distracted, hopeful and scathing about her own
shortcomings as a human and as a parent. And you can’t help wondering how much
of Eggers himself is woven into his protagonist’s life and preoccupations.
What Eggers and Josie clearly
share is a moralist’s indignation at the way the world is. This is a road trip
that seems to owe as much to John Bunyan as Jack Kerouac. With his last novel, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the
Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, Eggers earned some criticism
for too obviously allowing the corners of his soapbox to protrude through the
shape of the story. Here, the anger and moralising are plausibly embodied in a
character. And while you enjoy the vim of Josie’s scathing diatribes, you are
also gauging how disconnected she has become from reality.
I also observed this, and if this was Eggers’ intent, and
it’s obvious it was, he wove these aspects into Josie quite competently. I liked this book.
And I can now say I like Eggers as a writer.
Passages I liked:
(p. 221)
Josie thought
of her own basement, the things she kept there even while knowing she would
feel freer without them. She knew she
felt liberated outside that house, and felt freer without her job, freer away
from those hot dirty mouths. She felt freer here than at home, freer here alone
than surrounded by her purported friends, and she felt sure she would be far
freer without her bones weithing her down andher flesh draping over her bones,
all this ugly aging skin needing food and water and moisturizer. To be a ghost!
To see all, to see anything, but never to be seen—this might be bliss.
(p. 242) It was not
novel for Josie to be apart and stare. As a teen, during the worst years of
Candyland, she’d been through a very long few years of aloneness, a brutal and
wonderful and terrible time of luxuriating in her tortured mind, her suddenly
heavy thighs, her growing nose, the rumors about her parents, the word Rosemont
on everyone’s tongues, always implicating her parents, her feeling of being
horrified at eing alone on weekend nights but
not wanting to be among people, either. She railed against the injustice
of her always being alone, but she loved being alone. As some sort of
compromise, she’d taken to long walkds at night, and that led her into the
woods behind homes all over town, and when she walked behind these homes, keeping
herself deep in the trees, often there were bright lights, and the people
inside were illuminated as well as aquarium fish.
So on these
long walks she would often sit and watch the families sit, or cook, or undress,
and she found it reassuring and necessary. At a time, she doubted her place,
doubted she was doing anything right, doubted her skin was rally hers, doubted
that she walked correctly or dressed correctly and at a time when she covered
her mouth any time it was open, watching the quiet tedium of everyone else’s
lives gave her renewed confidence… And so in those dark woods, in the blue
light of these sad hoems, she realized she was no less normal than any of these
sorry souls.
