What is the What (2006)
Dave Eggers
Impression published on Saturday, 2010-06-19 | Novel | 2 stars
No one decides to pick up a 500 page novel about the short, unhappy lives of Sudanese refugees for "pleasure", but resolving yourself to chew through this much Dave Eggers is nothing short of masochism.
The story of Valentino Achak Deng, Sudan's second-most famous son (after supernaturally lanky one-time NBA phenom Manute Bol*), is, as anyone who follows the news can imagine, a predictably harrowing one. In the name of purging political dissidents and at the behest of the not-quite-legitimate Sudanese government in Karthoum, Islamic raiders raze the isolated and desolate sub-Saharan hamlet called Marial Bal--Deng's childhood home--and send Deng on an international Exodus that has since become a cause celebre for NGO-types the world over. On his piteous and calamitous 15 year journey from Sudan to Atlanta, Georgia, Deng manages to shake hands with nearly every malignity (barring sex and drugs) imaginable: on one page he is a starving refugee child weakly attempting to shoo vultures from the body of a fallen playmate, on another he is a pitifully naive young man outwitted utterly by moronic opportunists whose drop-dead simple cons could scarcely fool an First World infant and on another he is a grown man, bound by telephone cord and held captive in his own living room by an African American child.
The story of Valentino Achak Deng and the African refugee experience that his life and times typify is the sort of story that beggars sentimentality and charity while simultaneously inspiring both: the Deng of the novel is very much torn between two worlds--half-victim and half-survivor, half-proud and half-ashamed--and his profound ambivalence towards the hostility of his God are as attractive as they are repulsive.
But while Deng's ambivalence, where it comes through, is intriguing and exciting, the stylistic paroxysms (e.g. cutting rapidly from action to languor to philosophy, etc.) and shotgun, American Beauty faux-profundity of glory-hound Dave Eggers are nothing but infuriating. In the hands of an author capable of more than simply stringing together idiotic character vignettes cribbed from the most cringe-worthy of Hollywood tropes**, the story of Valentino Achak Deng's flight from Sudan would be an instant classic.
Instead, however, What is the What is nearly 500 pages of Dave Eggers--who keeps one foot on the floor and the other on the back of Deng's head--cramming the square peg of Deng's tale into the round hole of Eggers' own idea of what the NYT Best Seller crowd expects: another of God's world-weary cast-offs trudging resolvedly through the secular Hell-scapes of African genocide, NGO purgatory and a year in the life of the American "working poor", cherishing a handful of impossibly trite missionary school metaphors and the incidental, PG-13, summer-camp pratfalls of life among Africa's miraculously un-killable human refuse in Kakuma*** above nearly everything else except that single pearl of inscrutable tribal wisdom imparted by his fondly and frequently remembered father.
Honestly, to endure Eggers' cynical and guileless reduction of the wanderings and tribulations of Achak Deng to "Black Forest Gump" is like listening to multi-millionaire professional politicians rehearse their empathy for their minimum-wage constituency: it's grating, it's fake, it's not even close to convincing and the worst thing it does is to vitiate the urgency of the plight of the Sudanese (and of Africa's refugees in general) by setting up the story of Valentino Achack Deng like it was the Christmas day release of a Big Studio prestige picture starring Russel Crowe and Djimon Hounsou.
* Whose untimely death took place on the day of the publishing of this impression.
** Deng monologues internally to people who are fundamentally indifferent to his plight; Deng swallows his pride and acts selflessly again; Deng asks simple questions of his God and then declares that the cruel silence of that God's response is evidence of an deep...whatever.
*** A huge refugee camp in Nigeria.
