Review of “Your Fathers, Where Are They…” Novel by Dave Eggers
Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first Dave Eggers book I’ve ever read…(Spoiler Alert, I vent the plot here some)
I chose this book more or less randomly from a list of books by Dave Eggers. I thought it was about fathers and sons. And it was, to a point. But I don’t think the story lived up to the title, or maybe the title missed the story or something. Maybe if the title was “A psychotic and his Captee’s” or “Where the unfathomable questions lead” I wouldn’t have selected it from the list. Instead of an investigation into family life and father-son bonding, the story explored the great injustices in life and why bad things happen to good or at least ordinary people.
(Note: I coined the term “captee” because “hostage” usually refers to a bargaining chip in a negotiation and that was not the role of any of the characters in this story. They were just being held against their will.)
The lead character is a psychotic who is “confused” enough to sincerely want to believe that the average individual should be able to, and motivated to, change the balance of good and evil in the world. He keeps asking questions that assume that most people should care enough and have the will to evaluate any situation and take a stand. Instead, he sees people acting in their own best interest or at least along a path of least resistance.
As a result, he see’s the world in a downward spiral stacking the odds against himself and everyone who comes after him from ever meeting their potential, that is when he’s not in a state of messianic delusion.
Eggers does an excellent job of portraying a widely varying cast of characters, each trying to come to grips with their common situation, independently. It’s all through their interaction with the main character, the psychotic who has kidnapped them. They try various ruses, logic, common sense, even maternal love to change the relationship of captor – captee. And the psychotic, as in many crime stories, is articulate, thoughtful, even empathetic with his victims. He is capable of careful research, planning, and execution of stated goal. Yet, these capabilities somehow did not serve him in producing a successful life, a lock on the American dream.
This dissonance between mental agility and mental state seems incongruent at first. The reader wants to believe that maybe there is a moral imperative to the psychotic’s behavior. As in war, the regrettable cost of a few lives on the battlefield save millions of lives on the home front. Only, the psychotic’s intentions, if he is to be believed, are to harm no one, just to bring the truth of some specific injustices into clarity for himself, and perhaps his captors. This is what separates this novel about psychotics and traditional psychotic story characters. Many are described as having a capacity for civil discourse and a motivation that is at least partially based on a moral foundation (think of the Illuminati in Dave Brown novels). But the standard psychotic doesn’t have an off button when it comes to exacting their revenge on society. When they can’t twist normal peoples views to align with their own thru persuasion, even when they have their targets complete attention, then they usually get angry and resort to violence. The psychotic in this book never gets there. He seems to believe up until the very end, that given enough time, a statement of carefully chosen facts under specific conditions e.g. his childhood and parenting, the circumstances of his friend Don’s untimely death, even the career path of the astronaut, will bring his captives around to believing that they acted in a criminal way. And the psychotic in this book doesn’t seem to be interested in effecting a specific resolution to the injustices he see’s, just an acknowledgement that they were wrong and he is right. Like maybe, by getting this particular group of people from his past to admit this, it might somehow change the future, if not correct the past.
Where this logic breaks down, and thus exposes the psychosis of the character, is that the individual pieces of evidence, as chosen by the psychotic at least, that demonstrate that life is not fair, let alone sufficiently interesting for most people, are not representative of anything particularly new or revelational, or general about society as a whole. Life sucks for 99% of us, even for some astronauts. Sucks for some more than others, And while life is downright pathetic for a large portion of the earths population, it is what it is and rubbing a few peoples nose in it, doesn’t change a thing. It might of when there were only 1 million people in the world. But the problems of life are way out of scale. Like trying to understand how a few billion neurons can paint the Mona Lisa. It’s too complex. Organized religions didn’t prevent us from getting here. Myriad variations on economic models and social structures caused as many problems as they solved. Technology will only expedite the problems in the short term. The only system big enough and complex enough and powerful enough to impact the state of mankind is nature itself. Our best hope is accomodation. The psychotic is beating his head against this wall in a fit of denial. The sad part is that, ultimately, people like him, with his qualities of character, will be wasted rotting in jail or worse.
There is an exception to the earlier mentioned mismatch between the plot line and the first part of the title. This is described in the psychotic’s evolving relation with one of his captees, a retired congressman. In their discussions, the congressman constantly calls the psychotic “Son” in a very paternal way. This may be a very clever ruse by the congressman for getting into the psychotic’s mind and talking sense to him.
Or it may be the author’s finely articulated character definition of a tired, aged, Vietnam vet turned congressman who has seen too much, come to grips with life’s unfairness, and really has distilled life down to a few plain and simple rules to live by. One rule is that all younger males, less enriched with life experience than he, are “sons” in an informal mentoring relation with him. Either way, this is an effective plot device and ties the story to the first part of the title.
Ultimately, I think that the last part of the title is metaphorical. The “prophets” is really just the understanding and internalization of the surreal path of mankind, not as a collection of individual human personalities, capabilities and relationships, but as an evolving, insanely complex ecology and the absurdity of any individual or group of individuals trying to engineer all of life into a perfect process.
As humans, none of us have the capacity for that kind of knowledge. We are not supposed to. In this life, we’re just specialized neurons in the hive-mind of mankind, with an anxiety complex. I think this is the point of the second part of the title.
Structurally, the book is near perfect. the author’s use of room numbers as chapter titles to distinguish his plots and subplots appeals to the data administrator in me.
He manages the pace of the story with the cadence of the character’s speech and the rate at which the psychotic’s world view evolves. These techniques build a compelling arc of suspense.
There are a few places where he gets a little pedantic. For example, there are pages of detailed explanation of the policeman’s day and the events leading up to the shooting of the Vietnamese person by the police squad.
If the author’s goal here is to rail against a militarized police force or the blunt stick methods of maintaining the peace, then he loses some credibility in his hashing and re-hashing of mundane details. But I can scan over much of this and not lose the story.
I just raised the rating another star, because it made me think thru all of this. Thats a sign of a good book.
-jgp