Larry at OF Blog’s recent review of What is the What, by Dave Eggers, prompts me to post this, which originally appeared in the TLS on June 13, 2007–
WHAT IS THE WHAT
Valentino Achak Deng watches as two of his companions are eaten by a lion. It is night. The lion emerges from the bush, kills a boy and drags him away. No one does anything. No one tries to do anything – except not hear the boy being eaten – and the lion comes out of the bush again and eats another boy. After that, they sleep in a circle. All through the night, the boys on the outside of the circle migrate inwards, displacing others.
Acts of witness have complex effects on the reader, one of which is a sense of guilty helplessness. In his life, Valentino has experienced a good deal of helplessness on behalf of other people, and this somehow multiplies the number of acts of witness taking place. By a subtle turnabout he manages to stand in for, represent in some way, his own interlocutors: we are, What Is the What reminds us, teller or listener, all in the same boat. None of this doubling, which thrusts us back into the oral tradition and makes us question what a story – a statement of witness –actually is, would be possible without the sophisticated intervention of Dave Eggers, who in this deceptive book appears to surrender his voice to the voice of a real person.
Eight or nine years old, displaced by the second Sudanese civil war, his parents killed and his village burned by the murahaleen militias, Valentino Achak Deng finds himself among the “Lost Boys”, endless lines of starving Dinka children, mostly male, some naked, all hungry, who walked through the deserts and forests to safety in Ethiopia, preyed on by animals, disease and soldiers. He watches his friends die. He survives, though he sees and experiences things we would rather forget, and all it leads to is ten years in the wrenching conditions of the Kakuma refugee camp.
Later, in America at last, grown up, working for a qualification, trying to understand and come to terms with the food and art of his adopted nation, he is pistol-whipped during a robbery. “In my life”, he remarks, “I have been struck in many ways, but never with the barrel of a gun.” His assailant, a black Atlantan called Powder, mistakes him for a Nigerian, then, after a certain loss of temper and some wild kicking, reduces him almost carefully to unconsciousness. “When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made”, observes Valentino; better to be robbed deliberately than killed by accident.
It is hard to say whether What Is the What, the result of years of collaboration between Eggers and Deng whose story this is, should be described as fiction or non-fiction. Content has overwhelmed form so completely that the book is released to become neither, existing first as a “human document” and then, paradoxically, as a pure act of writing –subtle, funny, fluid, elegant, poignantly clear and honest. The most demanding part of the task must have been to stand away from the subject matter and allow it to breathe. Eggers has been so successful at this that What Is the What acts, if nothing else, as a triumphant rebuttal of Martin Amis’s method for House of Meetings, a book in which the author’s need to add literary value tended to obscure the very facts he was writing about.
The art has gone into throwing Valentino’s voice. As a result, you receive it unquestioningly as the voice of an autobiographer. The only obviously novelistic choice has been to use Valentino’s experience of being robbed in Atlanta as a framing device for the cruelties of his life in Sudan. The ironies that spin off add to the reader’s sense of guilt at not being able to be there for the Lost Boy; but they are also the perfect compliment to Valentino’s quiet, sly, Dinka sense of humour. Not long after they have settled in the US, Valentino and his friend Achor Achor decide to watch The Exorcist. “We have an interest in the concept of evil, I admit it”, he says. The film terrifies them, and Achor cannot even stay in the same room with it. It would be a mistake to think that Dave Eggers has given up irony. What he has done is to send it deep into the text where it can do its work.
This is a wee bit off topic, but the posted review’s swipe at Martin Amis reminds me of one thing this Yank hasn’t figured out yet- Amis seems to loom large on the British fiction scene, and to be widely regarded as a villain. The British class hangup (which is quite different from the American class/race hangup) seems to be a factor. Having read and enjoyed a dollop of Amis’s work, I have yet to understand the reason he seems to occupy for contemporary England the role that Norman Mailer staked out for himself in middle-20th century US fiction.
Apologies for any terrible sentence structure as I am typing this while keeping brussel sprouts from burning.
Hi Aaron. I enjoyed his early, very technical stuff. & Money, though baggy & sloppy, seemed to me to be the perfect statement for the 80s. But apart from Time’s Arrow, a return to technicality & precision, he seemed to stay sloppy. McEwan followed a similar trajectory. House of Meetings reads like a too-conscious attempt to add “literary” value to events which should stand above (or away from, or something) the literary. I don’t know enough about Mailer to make the comparison.
Martin Amis used to be ‘good’, but after Yellow Dog and his rabid Islamophobic essays he’s just a dried up husk of shit. To use the acadamese.
About all I (think I) know about Mailer is that he was a big beast that people in the mid-20th century American fiction scene felt like they had to take sides about. I loved London Fields but maybe I’m easily impressed.
Oh, I also liked some essay he wrote about how violent entertainment does or doesn’t influence violent behavior… he made the case for a pecking order in the brain, in which ideas like “Let’s go kill someone because a dumb movie made it look fun” gets pecked down by better ideas, if better ideas are present.
Oops, “he” in the previous being Amis, not Mailer.