Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?
Dave Eggers
[Hamish Hamilton]
Dave Eggers has a tendency towards grandiose titles; his books labelling themselves ‘heartbreaking’ works that express our contemporary society’s ‘velocity’, circularity and hunger. With each new title, Eggers is less apologetic about his own ambition, and he has made clear that snark, irony and second-guessing no longer have any place in his project. This latest novel, Your Fathers, Where are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, strips away the last vestiges of postmodern distance, unabashedly asking weighty political and metaphysical questions in an oddly compelling mashup of the ancient philosophical dialogue with the social consciousness novel.
The story is told through dialogues between ‘confused young man’ Thomas and the six people he kidnaps and interrogates at an abandoned military base. This hostage-drama frame is engaging, even if its protagonist sometimes moves into sitcom psychopath territory, veering wildly between pathetic naivete and detached, obsessive cruelty. Thomas’s tangled lines of reasoning crystallize as each new hostage is taken, revealing the personal and social disappointments that have fed his fury. Certainly, the novel’s catalogue of male anger is wide-ranging, speaking of Vietnam veterans, sexual consent, police brutality and America’s failed space missions. Eggers occasionally supplants the ambiguity of these matters with didactic moral certainty, avoiding snark but losing with it the sting of scathing nuance. Yet at their best, these conversations provoke new shocks of realization on well-tread issues, with Eggers’ sparse, minimalist language powerfully and strangely sketching a wretched world of ‘dispensable’ humans.
Words: Gill Moore
