You Shall Know Our Velocity (Paperback)

Even when I did buy this paperback edition, whatever I was reading beforehand I kept putting aside to glance at the Eggers, on absolutely no logical base whatever except that I had fallen victim to Hype. Eggers of course made a largeish splash a few years ago with his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which not only had much typographical and formatting trickery ("Mercy is not a cure. Quiet has its own set of problems" embossed on the front inside cover, to name but one), but also a remarkably disarming and honest assessment of the book by the author at the start, the most notable element of which was his advice just to read the book up to "page 109, which is a nice novella sort of length. The book thereafter is kind of uneven." Sure enough: the book thereafter was kind of uneven.

And also. If you're the sort of person who reads broadsheet books pages, he crops up more than his reasonable or decent for a man with just two books under his belt. Well, he edits the much-vaunted literary quarterly, McSweeney's, for one; he founded a writers' workshop in San Francisco called 826 Valencia; he's chums with Zadie Smith - "oh yeah; that lot", as Alan Partridge would say. And so susceptible am I to all this folderol which has nothing whatever to do with the books that I actually found myself becoming excited about reading You Shall Know Our Velocity despite knowing that it had garnered mixed reviews at best.

So finally I read it. It's not perfect: there is pointless further typographical trickery such as Sebaldian photos in the text and blank space to represent a journey (used by, among others, Martin Amis in London Fields in 1989; Iain Banks in The Bridge in 1984, to great effect, when a coma patient's monologue would suddenly skip a line when he was being trolleyed over a bump in the floor in real life; and, oh yeah, by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy as long ago as 1759; so it's not exactly a novelty); it shares with AHWOSG (as he insists on referring to it) and its paperback back-to-back supplement Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, a portentous and meaningless title; the narrator, for no particularly good reason, is telling his story from beyond the grave, although this is only referred to in the first and last sentences; and it's too long at 350 pages. But! It's very very good.

The thing about Eggers is that, like Martin Amis, you may hate him for all these extraneous and ... er, intraneous reasons, but he can really write. Even now some of his effortlessly throwaway images are bouncing about in my head - a table "standing on tiptoes," people coming from a narrow alley into an expansive quandrangle "bleeding into the square", and so on. The standard of the prose really is impeccable, and his dialogue is excellent too, particularly when his narrator, Will, holds imaginary conversations with people, and suddenly everyone gets to be as smart as Eggers is.

The plot is simple: Will and his friend Hand have come into money, about $38,000, and want to give it all away. They plan to circumnavigate the globe in a week, giving money to needy people and seeing a few sights into the bargain (sunrise over the pyramids ranks high in their agenda). Needless to say, they quickly discover that life is what happens when you're making other plans. The deeper we go into the storyline, however, the more we find out about their real motives. Their 'other friend', Jack, died in a horrible car accident a few months previously and Will and Hand are still trying to recover from their grief. The journey is really part of their need to keep moving, to avoid thinking too much about what happened (although Will finds it creeps up on him inevitably, first when he can't sleep, and then when he can), and to deny death in their own small way. When he turns to this, Eggers is surprisingly heartfelt and sincere in his expressions of grief - surprisingly, that is, for an author who conforms to the cool Hype, as opposed to the fine writer he really is.

Highly recommended.

Of course, the real journey Will's trying to make is one that will enable him to come to terms with his best friend's accidental death. He wants to make sense of the world and his place within it so there's lot of American naïvety. Like the French tourists who say America pays for the world (unlikely) and his surprise that other countries aren't hanging around America's gates like smokers outside an office, wishing they could come in from the cold. And that's the book's purpose, in a way, to expose America in a new way, that is, by the points of difference and discomfort with the foreignness of everything else.

So does his character arc? Well when a novel's first person opening paragraph tells you this story is post-mortem, how can it do anything else?

So anyway, I think You Shall Know Our Velocity might have slightly more widespread appeal than Genius did. It has a little bit more of a plot at least, it's not openly just Dave talking about his life. He keeps the extremely personal first-person technique though, and you get the feeling that a lot of the stuff he's writing about is again coming straight from his own life. The main characters are two best friends, Will and Hand, who are trying to come to terms with the recent death of their other best friend, Jack. Will, THE main character, the one telling the story, also has a lot of money he doesn't know what to do with. He has the idea that getting rid of all the money, giving it away to strangers, will have some kind of cleansing effect - get rid of the misplaced guilt he feels for Jack's death, make him understand things better. So he embarks on a one-week trip around the world with Hand, planning to give away $30,000 by handing out treasure maps and taping cash to donkeys.

I can't really explain why I like this book so much. It's like - you know how you want all your friends to write books? How their postcards and stories on the internet and notes taped to your door are great, but what you would really love is for everybody to write long, awesome, incredible BOOKS? That's what this book is like. You don't actually KNOW Will/Eggers, but it doesn't matter. He's constantly having these ideas ridiculously similar to ideas I've always had and doing things I've always wanted to do, and his writing style is just so personal, that you feel like you know this guy, that he's your best friend.

Staggering Genius was incredibly sad at times, and someone told me that Velocity left them terribly depressed, so I was sort of worried about reading it. The book focuses a lot on death, so it IS pretty paranoid and depressing at times, but I thought that as a whole it was actually pretty, um, "uplifting", though not at all in a corny or roll-your-eyes kind of way.

I would recommend this book to basically anyone who likes to read (and if you don't I hate you). It's hilarious but not stupidly and obviously so, and is also very moving at times. An all-around great book. Along with You Shall Know Our Velocity, I recommend The Losers Club by Richard Perez and of course Eggers first book. Enjoy!