Eggers Shows How We Are Hungry

How We Are Hungry (HWAH), Dave Eggers’s third book, his only of short stories, published in 2004, after A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, a title that the book may have lived up to, and You Shall Know Out Velocity! (YSKOV!) and before What is the What, was also, coincidentally, the third book of his I have read.  I admit that the one I have not read is the “work of genius,” but after finishing this collection of short stories, I am already convinced.

Among other things, Eggers is very cool. If you aren’t familiar with Eggers, you probably should be, considering that in addition to the four books he has published, he also founded his own independent publishing company, McSweeney’s, which produces its own literary journal, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a monthly lit. mag., The Believer, and the DVD magazine Wholphin.  An amateur reviewer of the book sums it up nicely when he states “I didn't know much about Eggers besides the fact that hipper people than I adored him. Sexier, well-connected people.”  So, why has he received such attention from the literary community?  For one, there was a photo of him in GQ’s October 2007, 50^th Anniversary Issue, filling out one of the obligatory writer spots in the spread, there was also one of David Foster Wallace, that celebrated the most stylish men around.  Part of his cool comes from the fact that he is the quote unquote “magnetic center of a literary counterestablishment,” making him popular among the hipsters, and having his own independent company means he doesn’t have to play by the rules of publishing houses; for example, as A.O. Scott notes in his New York Times review, Eggers “released [this book] with a characteristic disdain for the rituals of the publishing industry: no reviewers' galleys, no back-cover blurbs, no publicity.”

But the main reason he comes off as someone you would just about die to meet at a bar is that he modestly captures the anxieties of a generation without being pretentious, for the most part, or preachy, and shit, the guy can write.  Everyone I know that likes Eggers has had a rough go at life and find his work soothing and his self-reflexive humor honest, while people I know that don’t like his work tend to be the of type that buy their whole wardrobes from Urban Outfitters who ironically think that “he tries too hard to be cool” or as Nicholas Taylor puts it in a review for PopMatters he’s a “too-cool, too-knowing, too-sarcastic edge of a smart-cracking wise ass.”  However, a few people whose opinions I respect have said that his self-referential, meta-style and his constant use of irony end up making his work “too cutsie.”  I too sort of think this at times during some of the pieces in HWAH and specifically in the section of YSKOV! aptly called “An Interruption" where Hand commandeers the narrative to go off on his own mostly unrelated rant, but even Hand’s absurd bit had its charm, and, for the most part, this stuff doesn’t get in the way of my enjoyment of his work and I sort of like some of the gimmicks despite themselves.

Conceding Scott’s point that the volume wavers between looking “like yet another late-postmodern grab bag of secondhand gimmicks and tried-and-true tricks,” readers must then begin “distinguishing one from the other” themselves “since Eggers excels at appearing at once utterly guileless and ultra-self-conscious.” With the task established, there were two stories in this collection that were self-conscious gimmick laden, “Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone” and “Quiet”, making the latter almost unreadable.  “Notes for a Story” is presented in just that fashion, the bullet points of a pretty interesting story about a man planning to have a final farewell bash where he slips away naturally in the company of over a 1,000 people all there to see him go.   However, in this experimental form, it comes off as sort of irritating, especially in reference to its constant self-revision as it goes along.  But it was at least interesting.  Though the same cannot be said for “Quiet” that is in practically everyway irredeemable and is unnecessarily gimmicky. 

With “Quiet,” there are way too many layers of irony to peal away before much sense is made of the story, but here is the gist of it:  It tells of two friends who have met in Scotland and how their relationship changes for the worse after the past resurfaces and a friendship-ending event come to fruition while on the trip, loops back in on itself like John Barth’s “Frame-tale” that opens his book of stories, Lost in the Funhouse.  Eggers manages to one up Barth though on the postmodern douchiness scale though by making his endless cycle of a story much longer than his counterpart’s literal loop.  “Quiet” begins with the narrator, Tom, telling us that when he previously told this story, he concluded it with a conversation he had with  “the nickly shimmer of the moon on a black lake” that took place after the events the story explains transcribe.  It then gives us the entire conversation, which starts with the apparition (?) saying “You are a lucky one, Tom, to have Erin and others like Erin” (85).  We learn that Erin is a girl that he worked with, having gotten her a job where he worked after they first met, and has been pretty much head-over-heals in love with ever since.  For her, Tom feels “blessed.”  But the shimmer foreshadows in its statement, “I saw you and Erin by the shed… I was there,” (86) that everything may not been awesome between them, Tom and Erin.  First, Tom berates Erin into telling her information that he doesn’t really want to know about her sexual history that involved a three-way encounter with two of their co-workers, guys they were both friends with.  After bullying her, he experiences “road rage” that culminates in him hitting and killing a sheep.  Things don’t seem to be going smoothly when Tom seems to have a change of heart following a supposed near-death-experience.  Back on speaking terms, they decide to check out a lighthouse in the area where the infamous barn resides.  When the reader eventually finds out what climactic event took place behind the barn, at best one of the most gruesomely awkward sexual encounters ever written that was possibly even a rape, the reader is appalled as the shock of this “fucked up” scene sets in.  In a moment of uncontrolled, unrequited (Erin never gets wet) passion, Tom sticks his penis in her from behind while she tells him to wait.  Afterwards, once he says sorry, she tells him “Don’t be sorry. That would make it weirder.”  Tom, then, correctly observes, “Oh shit! This is so bad,” (112).  The whole thing leaves everyone feeling deeply disturbed, reader included, and it ruins the friendship.  Spending the last couple days in Scotland awkwardly touching her hair, after which Tom and Erin would never speak, he looks out the window and sees the “nickly shimmer on the bay.”  It ends when “it smiled, eyed me with an unwelcome knowingness, and began to speak,” (114) bringing the story back to the beginning where one turns to read the concluding dialogue. 

Another story, “There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself,” mercifully omitted from the paperback edition used in this review, I guess he really learned to keep it to himself in the second go, also infuriates Eggers’s audience through its one pomo device: experimentation.  This “story” is so experimental it’s only a title followed by five white pages with only the title and page numbers disturbing the blankness.  A story that delivers absolutely nothing to the reader, literally, the postmodernist being weird for the sake of being weird.  Stuff like this tends to really annoy people and Ed Caesar, in his scathing review from The Independent, was so pissed off by the postmodern conventions that he wrote one quickly realizes that these pages of blank space “might be the best of the lot.”  Ouch.  Eggers, in an interview with Salon, tries to explain, saying, "There was a story there, seven pages, until a few weeks before we went to press. And it was a very personal and painful kind of story, and I thought it fit in the collection. But then I was advised that it wasn't such a good idea to put it in, and so instead I changed the title and left the pages blank."  But that really doesn't tell us why it was left in as blank space.  And his final words about the piece, "in a weird way it went from the most wrenching part of the book to what appears to be a quick gag," doesn't help his case against the charges that he uses irony as a crutch nor justify its postmodern weirdness.  

Other than these two pieces, three if you count the one left out of the paperback, they all can’t be winners now can they, the rest of the book proves solid, some of it, dare I say it again, genius.  The success of the other dozen stories depends, in most cases, on Eggers’s ability to generate characters the reader cares for, and he does it almost immediately. In the five extremely short pieces --"What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust"; "On Wanting to Have Three Walls up Before She Gets Home"; "She Waits, Seething, Blooming"; "Naveed"; and "About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her" -- this task gets done to varying degrees of effectiveness, but each of them is not without some merits.  The first, "What It Means," for example, one part title, two parts story, takes a single idea -- in this case, how a traumatic event thousands of miles away can cause despair for one unconnected man as it makes its way into his life via his television set.  This piece, as well as "On Wanting" and "Naveed," are some the best in the collection.  They're exceptional because they take the familiar Eggers concerns of guilt and longing and and romantic ideals and solipsism, etc., and move them from global empathy of the theoretical  "Over There," as explained by John Freeman of The San Francisco Chronicle, in "Velocity," and in making them more personal by giving us an intimate portrayal that brings their concerns "Right Here."

Most of Eggers’s characters fall into the same category of good, pleasant adults that have yet to mature which causes those around them to underestimate them and in turn leaves them feeling empty and wanting.  Their relationships and friendships are easy rather than complex, one gets the sense that they wouldn’t stay in them for very long if they were complex, and they shy away from responsibility.   As a result, many of them are dealing with deeply embedded feelings of loneliness and grief.  These are the type of characters found in YSKOV! with the protagonist, Will, who has just come into a substantial sum of money, and his best friend, Hand, who set out on a trip around the world where they go to different countries, spend like less than a day, and just throw a bunch of charity in someone’s face.  My first experience reading, or hearing about, Eggers came out of a course on African fiction, when after the first class, we were given a snippet of the book that appeared as a short story somewhere and in class we talked about how the bit was so typically American abroad—throwing aid/money at people, throwing off societal structure, without learning anything about the people or country they are traveling through.  Obsessed with motion, they purchase tickets with an airline that allows unlimited travel for one week so long as they go in the same direction with each flight.  But with only a few days to get across the globe, they spend most of their time in airports or on planes, showing that even the quickest mode of transportation doesn’t keep up with them.  It pisses them off and they long for teleportation, we have been promised this for years after all.  Their generosity then is all about them in their need for adventure and need to feel they have a purpose. 

In HWAH too we find constantly-on-the-move characters like Will and Hand who examine the morality of their actions abroad because of that subtle deference between what they see as sympathy and what the locals they encounter view as sympathy/pity, all the while seeking for something actually worth seek.  It’s Kafka’s really central joke, as David Foster Wallace wrote in the essay “Laughing with Kafka,”—“that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”  With four of the stories dealing directly with travel abroad—“Another;” “The Only Meaning of the Oil-wet Water;” the previously mentioned “Quiet;” and “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly”—many of the characters are just like Will and Hand; matter of fact, one of them actually is Hand.  After his part in YSKOV!, he reappears in one of this collection’s best stories, “The Only Meaning of the Oil-wet Water,” once again as a kind of sidekick who is that friend you know who if say falls into a gutter, Forest Gumps his way out with two Rolexes he just happened to, what dude, find.  Think of him as this generation’s Dean Moriarty, which would sort of make Eggers our Jack Kerouac.  In this story, Hand just shows up in Costa Rica, where he and his female friend, Pilar, mentioned in YSKOV!, whom he has known since his childhood in Wisconsin have a choreographed vacation together.

From the beginning, Pilar’s intentions are clear, the two have been flirting for years though Hand is “the only attractive old friend she'd never slept with” (23) and sees this time of surf and sun as the perfect opportunity to begin sexual relations.  However, as the words “oil” and “water” in the title allude, they don’t come together all that well. Their coming together sexually—hey, hey—has been long in the making and Pilar, at least, has been planning the whole thing for years.  It gets complicated, their hooking-up, as tends to happen, because of the baggage they carry with them—an easy connection to make here—for her, taking the form of insecurity and, for him, selfish attachments.  Because Eggers tells the reader early on “this story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love,” (24) it is safe to assume the two do not become a long-term item; thus, the story has to sort out the reasons why it ultimately doesn’t last, something that is not overtly explored, which puts the task of doing so entirely through the clues within the story.  This is exactly why the postmodern-metafictional elements/”tics” critics universally hated end up not only working but prove integral to understanding the story.  Even though they act awkwardly, make out in a funny way, and say all the inappropriate things, they still end up sleeping together, and when the story concludes, this seems to be just the start of a wonderful relationship.  Wrong, it can never be as we know that this story is not about that; it is about, as much as anything, why they cannot end up working things out in the end, but only for those that know what to look for. 

Beginning with Pilar, shortly into the account she comes off as silly and playful, saying that she wanted to go to Nicaragua because it “sounded dangerous,” thinking to herself that “It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table – Nicaragua!” (21).  However, as the reader gets to know her, it becomes increasingly clear that this was actually a lament over the suppression of her desires based on her self-consciousness that in the end proves debilitating.  As a result of her need to be liked, she plans out jokes to sound spontaneous, calculates every moment of premeditative sex in advance, tries to seem cooler than she believes she really is, etc., and ends up losing out on enjoying the moment for the fun that it provides.  For example, while out surfing for the first time, she can’t take pleasure in the act because “she was concerned that if she did [anything] wrong she would be laughed at or pointed at and removed,” and so, “she did as they did, even though, as often as not, they didn’t know either,” in failing to realize that “everyone was an amateur, everyone pretending at grace,” (35).  In other words, Pilar could never really give herself completely over to another because she is too concerned with appearance to find actual connection.  Hand, on the other… um, well, you get the idea, is more genuine but also has a hard time connecting because he is too self assured.  Possessing this persona that seems honest and sincere, he likes this person and how relates everything to it not how they really are.  Describing Hand’s work history, Pilar hits the nail on the freggin’ head, he likes things that are “well-paying”—i.e. self-beneficial—“low-commitment,” and like his jobs, he is “impossible to explain,” (20).  Impossible that is because as a master-manipulator, possible even unaware he’s doing it, he obscures the distinction between his wants and the one being manipulated, and thus they are in Costa Rica instead of Nicaragua.  Hand, therefore, works to have as little responsibility as possible so as to stay on his completely self-involved focus on personal gain since taking on more means losing a part of himself. 

Similarly, the story “Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance” also deals with characters who have long known each other but when it comes time to talk about something serious, social issues get in the way and they fail to connect.  Here, a young man named Fish drives a significant distance to visit his cousin Adam who has just attempted suicide by jumping off a hotel rooftop.  We learn of the things Fish wants to say to Adam about his repeated attempts to kill himself, however, he finds himself both literally and figuratively unable to say the things that need to be said because of the barrier, the locked hospital window, between them.  In the end, with all the things left unsaid still hanging in the air, it concludes with Fish shimmying up a tree next to his cousin’s hospital window and waving at him like an idiot not knowing how else to tell him he cares.

The protagonist in “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly” is another character who has been similarly afflicted due to her lack of voice that has snatched away love and the wanted responsibility of raising children.  There is no way to describe this story other than brilliant.   In it, he wholly forgoes any cuteness or gimmicks or experimental styles, with beautifully lithe prose, Eggers takes one of Hemingway’s greatest achievements “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in the short story genre of which he was master, and not only attempts to update it, but following the same thread, tries to improve upon the definitive account of climbing this mountain, or any for that matter.  Hemingway’s story tells of a writer named Harry who develops gangrene he knows will kill him while waiting for his and his wife, Helen, to be rescued after getting stranded during a safari in Africa.  Eggers, on the other hand, tells a similar story but from a vastly different perspective. First of all, the story is told from a female perspective, who, like Harry, trying to put her life back on track after her sheltered living of procrastination and solipsism, seeing the experience as one of struggle to achieve something difficult.  She is really searching for something authentic her in the exotic having not found anything to validate her life at home, in the states, and now hopes that traveling and doing will bring about something monumental—i.e. a new self.

Reviewing his life in a series of flashbacks, Harry too wants this as he thinks of his talent as a writer that was wasted after marrying Helen and also the sick, hollow feeling of being alone.  Occasionally this makes him be nice again for a moment but then he goes right back into insulting the wife.  Eventually, you realize the gangrene is just a metaphor and it is really the marriage or being married to this woman that is killing him.  Rita is filled with a sense of urgency that is much the same as Harry’s, both of whom are middle/upper-class Americans who feel guilt and anxiety for wasting their talents, with hers revolving around her parents taking the foster children she was trying to adopt to keep her from the added responsibility. With little to do but wait for a plane that he knows won’t reach him in time, Harry spends most of his time drinking and bitching about the life he has wasted and the faults of his wife.  Harry, then, is ultimately pissed that living off his wife’s wealth has pulled him down the slope toward artistic decline and once free of her, he sees his problems ending there.  As such, he imagines the rescue plane getting there in time to take him to Kilimanjaro’s snow-capped summit he equates with fulfillment.  At first, Rita too, views the climb through romantic lenses, but unlike Harry who probably still wouldn’t write, Rita, after the deaths of some of the porters carrying their things, is eventually forced to realize that she cannot run from her problems that follow her even as she ascends to new heights.  Hemingway romanticizes the whole deal but in this age that doesn’t work.  More is needed than transformative experience to break out of the unromantic, guarded cells postmodern man finds himself, it just shows you what you’ve been living in.  Rita learns this the hard way after reaching the peak where she is still haunted by the unrelenting ghosts of the frozen dead lining the mountainside just like the boy Harry recalls whose frozen body had been half-eaten by dogs after dying on a climb.  And now on foreign land, the hopeless present and the tormented past, leaves them even more distraught and feeling alone.  The only promise is escape through change, otherwise, you die like Harry, living through so much, though only for a moment, never with any regard for the future.

Another of the my-interesting-and-lonely-time-abroad stories is called “Another,” and though the title is stupid, especially considering it’s the frame tale, i.e. the first goddamn one in the collection, it is one of those great little eye-openers that really makes you reassess the homeland and the experience of foreign travel.  A couple of years back, the Hof-meister, went through a similar situation on a class field trip at the exact place the narrator has his own realization. Like the female companion, the narrator, in Egypt riding on horseback to see the pyramids, expects them to somehow transform his life, but to quote pretty much every kid that went on the pilgrimage to Gizeh and saw the pyramids from my former master’s program, “Hated it,” said in their best In Living Color voices.  But before she went with her classmates on said mission trip, I touched up on the old pyramid facts, which mostly consisted things I had read in some book on the original Seven Wonders of the World, and I really thought she would find herself in awe.  I was excited for her and I was spewing out knowledge trying to impress her, telling her the old proverb “men fear time, time fear the pyramids,” and all that was great, until I started looking into the U.S. Embassy’s tips when traveling to that country.  The government site basically concluded that you shouldn’t go unless you have to and not even then if you are female.  Shit.  Now I was a wreck with my worrying.  But I guess that it really isn’t a big deal and this amounts to scare tactics more than anything else, as I learned from my school’s pilgrims and from the narrator of Eggers’s story.  The narrator, “in Egypt, against the advice of [his] government… [unwise] with the poor state relations between our nation and the entire region,” (7) seems to have been drawn not there specifically, but away from home, finding “words like anxiety and depression… apt.”  But, of course, they don’t possess magical powers or anything and no one I know at least is really changed by visiting the oldest man-made historical monument.  Seeing this kids following their trips, it seemed they had come back from a rock concert more than bearing witness to a mass transformative experience—on their way back and shortly thereafter, they talked of nothing but the trip and once they got tired of cleaning their hookahs or smoked all their shisha, they were back here looking for jobs and dealing with the same shit that didn’t get worked out before they left.  When specifically talking about their disappointment over the pyramids, most talk about how they weren’t allowed to climb up on them or how they weren’t as big as they thought they would be or, like the narrator explains, they were constantly harassed by “the hawkers who work the Gizeh plateau—really some of the least charming charmers the world owns—were trying to sell me anything,” (8).  It turns out that the pyramids are more than anything, well, just boring, and what they really went on about and also what the narrator enjoys the most, is the movement/travel itself.

What is striking is that Eggers’s characters are always vividly real; especially true for those that aren’t even human.  As seen in “Quiet,” he writes the reflection of the moon into the story, giving it a voice, and elsewhere with say horses or the ocean.  But where he does this most brilliantly is in the story “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned,” my personal favorite, which chronicles the innocent yet wise spirit of a happy dog that loves nothing more than to run but is tragically killed doing what he loves.  (For an emotional, heartfelt review, see "What Really Knocks Me Out...").  I may be a sucker for dog fiction—see my review for Paul Auster’s Timbuktu, a somewhat similar tale featuring a dog as the protagonist—but I dare you to not find such fiction endearing.  It’s is touching to hear anyone say of what they are doing “Damn, I’m so in love with all of this,” (206) and was even more so in this tale.  This is a dog near and dear to my heart, much like one of my own, Cap n’ Crunch, who I could almost hear say “OH I’M A FAST DOG. I’m fast-fast. It’s true and I love being fast I admit It I love it. You know fast dogs. Dogs that just run by and you say, Damn! That’s a fast dog! Well that’s me. A fast dog. I’m a fast-fast dog. Hoooooooo! Hooooooooooooo!”  (205). Whatis great about both works of fiction is that we really trust these little guys and believe in their simple ambitions.  Plus we learn why dogs chase the squirrels the way they do—just saw Up in 3D and they deal with this in hilarious fashion—because “the squirrels have things to say,” (209).  And while this is going on, they offer us powerful critiques of the vain, wasteful lives of our species.  For instance, the story, and book, ends with the lines “everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know,” (218) which got to me as one who has his share of EXISTENTIAL MELTDOWNS.  Because that’s just it, I—like many of the characters in the book—just want to know, this dog though, he already does.

Throw an Old Dog a Bone: Paul Auster’s Timbuktu

Timbuktu, Paul Auster’s heartbreaking novel, tells us more about the we live in and the way we treat “the least of these” than any other book I have read in recent memory and has moved me into action on more than one occasion. Paul Auster, with his literary genius, which has touched more so than any other author (excluding DFW of course), achieves these great feats through the eyes of the kindest, gentlest, most innocent of soul ever to grace the pages of a novel. No human being could ever make you melt with a metaphorical kiss on the hand like Auster’s protagonist, Mr. Bones, in this brilliant work of fiction. And no human being does. That is because Mr. Bones is a dog.

The relationship between Willy G. Christmas and Mr. Bones is as touching as any relationship can be. They share a bond as well as what they have—they deeply and unconditionally care for one another. In their symbiotic relationship, the two of them are innocent, caring, intimate, connected, etc. and in the end this is what we are to walk away from the novel having learned—to live a life that is all of those things, which is so foreign to the way many of us out there live, going through the motions throughout one’s life and never really and truly caring for anyone else. It is a moral fable in this way with the three “masters” he has representing three different ways of life with only, I shall argue, Willy and him coming to the ideal relationship that leads to happiness.

Opening the novel in media res, the reader finds Mr. Bones traveling along side his only friend, a man without any other friends himself, Willy, whose vagabond days are numbered, dying a slow and painful death on the streets of Baltimore. His master’s death is imminent, sadly, and Mr. Bones knows it; but good old Bonesy sticks to Willy’s side so he doesn’t have to spend his final days’ void of friendship. It goes without saying that is an extraordinarily sad thing for a dog to lose its master just as it is for a person to lose their dog but here it doesn’t end up being as bad as it could have been because the two were able to say goodbye in a way that cushions the horrible blow through a dream Mr. Bones has just before Willy goes forth into the great beyond.

In this dream, Mr. Bones runs to the end of the corner while his master, a poet, is taken from the doorstep of the tragic 19th century author Edgar Allen Poe’s Baltimore home. Mr. Bones then dissociates from his canine self and becomes a fly who witnesses the final day and pleasant death of Willy who originally traveled to this city to find a former teacher so his manuscripts may live on after he parishes. The manuscripts, tucked away in a bus station storage locker, are eventually recovered with the help of that former teacher whom the hospital was lucky enough to track down. It was a beautiful, peaceful, and dignified death in the dream and it would serve as the duo’s sweet good bye.

Once the dream has ended, the real thing begins to take place. At first Mr. Bones isn’t sure what to make of the “vision” he just had. In a scene reminiscent of King Lear, when Lear checks his daughter’s breath over and over again, convincing himself in his incredible state of grief, Mr. Bones looks upon his master’s breath hoping for signs of life. This scene, found on page 64, coupled with the hope that Willy will recover and someone will find his manuscripts that have long gone unread, is a sincerely ingenious literary strategy that puts the reader on the same plane as the dog, we are also holding on to hope just like Mr. Bones. But the entire time, we know this will not end well, Willy is going to die and his writing will be lost. It is tragic but it is also intensely good fiction.

After a nice little diatribe to remember Willy by, the awful part of the dream sequence begins to take place in real life, but Mr. Bones doesn’t stop at the corner to watch this time because he already knows what is going to happen and that ending is good enough for him. As explained in the book, marked as a “tragic figure,” disqualified from “the rat race of vain hopes and sentimental illusions,” Willy was one bestowed with “an aura of legitimate suffering” who “indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world,” (15). But the thing that makes him truly odd, in that special way that only the wisest of holy men are odd in that their ascetic ways have led them closer “to the truth, to the gritty nub of existence,” is the militantly, anti-capitalist philosophy that takes as its most devastating critique on the whole consumeristic world the Christmas holiday.

According to Willy, “Christmas was a fraud, a season for quick bucks and ringing cash registers, and as the symbol of that season, as the very essence of the whole consumerist shebang, Santa was the biggest fake of them all,” (21). I tend to agree with Willy on this one, in my own anti-capitalist ways (I live off something like a couple of thousand dollars a year), but extreme asceticism isn’t the way to go either, (this I know from experience). Go that route and you more than likely end up like Willy, on the other extreme—finding meaning through earning money to buy things—and you end up unable to truly care for anyone but yourself, as can be seen by the end of the novel in the home that Mr. Bones eventually comes to live. There, a man named Dick reluctantly takes Mr. Bones in off the street after his wife and children had already seen the infinitely pure soul of the tough little guy. Dick financially provides a good home for his young family; however, he withholds his affection from everyone failing to see that in doing so, he makes all of those around him unhappy in imposing his misplaced values upon them. Thus even though he has purchased a home for his wife (Polly) that she loves, she never really loves her husband because to him it is enough to provide without any real connection (159). We learn that those things that make life comfortable really aren’t so bad, but putting absolute worth in them is exactly what Willy was trying to warn us not to do.

Dick is not nearly caring enough to recognize the greatness in a dog like Willy and thus treats him as a second class citizen. For example, Dick says of Mr. Bones to his daughter, “don’t feel sorry for him, Alice. He’s not a person, he’s a dog,” (144). Again, Dick shows that he is incapable of caring for others since this mindset also caries over into other relationships that he has and one doesn’t find it that much of a stretch to think that Dick would probably say something along the lines of “she’s not an adult, she’s a child,” in regards to Alice and “she’s not a provider, she’s a wife” in regards to Polly. Thus Mr. Bones “pitied him for not knowoing how to enjoy life,” (149) since his priorities are so out of whack. The first master he comes to after living with Willy also lacks the ability to truly connect and care for Bones in a significant way that elevates the relationship to that of the one he had just come from.

Immediately after Willy’s death, before he lives with Dick, Polly, and their kids, Mr. Bones comes to a most unlikely master in a young Chinese kid named Henry. Unlikely in two ways that oppose some of his former master’s most terrifying advice, (1) stay clear of children because they can be cruel and don’t make the call as to whether a dog stays or goes and (2) avoid Chinese restaurants like the plague because they will cook you up and eat you. But after being kicked and mistreated by some other boys, Bones finds himself and Henry developing a connection. Having lost much of his will and with the situation growing dire, Bones ends up following the kid home right into the “gates of hell.” On the one hand, “Henry proved that love was not a quantifiable substance,” (103) to Bones, but on the other, Henry’s lack of control disqualifies the two from being a real pair.

A deeply sad and lonely boy for which Mr. Bones, whom Henry renames Cal, can only do so much, and though all that he can do for Henry he does, the boy’s sadness goes beyond what any other being can help with. Not only this, but he also brings Bones down with him in his despair, as we see “dogs feel with their masters… [and] he had taken on the boy’s sadness as his own. Such is the way with dogs,” (113). Thus in taking on those feelings, the one’s unhappiness becomes a burden on both of them. You cannot totally rely on someone else for your own happiness just as you cannot rely on material goods either. Ultimately, the change must come from within him if Henry ever wishes to share a connection like the one enjoyed between Willy and his dog. But even with this understanding, it is no less heartbreaking when Henry’s controlling, anti-dog father discovers Bones and tears the pair apart while Henry pleads “Cal, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me Cal!” (115).

The final master of Bones is, as stated previously, a woman named Polly along with her kids and the already discussed Dick. While a very good master, one that is infinitely better than Dick in affection and able to provide in a mutual way that greatly exceeds Henry, she still makes the mistake of using Bones as a means of defiance over her husband, meaning their bond is ultimately not nearly as strong as the one shared with Willy. This leaves the only non-debased, truly whole relationship Bones has with Willy, who he clearly has the most love for of all his masters.

But what makes Mr. Bones so loveable and wise is his dogginess: “Mr. Bones was a dog, and the truth was that Willy took pleasure in that dogness, found no end of delight in watching the spectacle of his confrere’s canine habits,” (36-7). He is like a miniature Buddha, a dog with Buddha nature who has a rather Zen way of experiencing the world, “he was no more than a lame-brained pup, a nincompoop with floppy paws who ran after his own tail and chomped on his own shit, and if this was the only life he’d ever tasted, who was he to judge whether it was rich or poor in the stuff that makes life worth living?” (29) As a dog, he has simple desires that lead him to ask some of the ultimate questions about life and death and existence. For example, Auster writes that “Willy had judged him to be wholly and incorruptibly good. It wasn’t just that he knew that Mr. Bones had a soul. He knew that soul to be better than other souls, and the more he saw of it, the more refinement and nobility of spirit he found there,” (35). Mr. Bones in the end, not to give too much away, is a kind of John Donne of dogs.

Willy, convinced that Mr. Bones has a soul, asks “did it not stand to reason that a dog of such spiritual inclinations would aspire to loftier things – things not necessarily related to the needs and urgencies of his body, but spiritual things, artistic things, the immaterial hungers of the soul… Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe that such a thing was possible?” (40). Of course not, I have, I think of my dog, Cap n’ Crunch, who I have definitively come to answer the age old question of whether a dog can have Buddha Nature, my personal favorite koan. Actually there are a lot of similarities between Mr. Bones and my Cap n’ but I won’t try and prove that to you here, suffice it to say there are just some dogs who absolutely love being dogs and doing the things that dogs do and God bless them for it.

And once the book begins to come to a close, we hope that Mr. Bones will end up with Willy in Timbuktu, where they will be “at one with the universe, a speck of anti-matter lodged in the brain of God,” (49). We realize, that the same “dreads and agonies” and “unthinkable horror” (50) that grips us when we think about our own finiteness too much also effect Mr. Bones.

I find it repellant and bullshitty that many mainstream Christian sects don’t think animals have souls or what have you. One the hardest pills to swallow about dogma (no pun intended, I assure you) when you think about it logically, I might add, in its ego centricity. All things, I contest, have that same special breath of life that make all things resemble God.[*] That is because “life wasn’t for sale, and once you found yourself at death’s door, all the noodles in China weren’t going to stop that door from opening,” (31). When we are all pieces on the board and once we are taken off, man or four-legged friend, we are all worth the same—zilch. As Willy so elliquently puts it, “in the vile game of Ego” one is participating in “the one game that everyone loses, that no one can ever win,” (67). This novel is an example of giving a voice to those who are voiceless, much like the Coetzee does with Friday in his book Foe. As we read, we realize that dogs aren’t just marginal characters but have the potential for being the main story. That is what Auster does and he does it well.


[*] I am such a firm believer in this that one of the most traumatic experiences of my life came when I was a kid and some Sunday school teacher tried to tell me I was practically worshipping Satan for believing this. This was not a church I went to regularly as a child. I went there exactly once. I do not remember where it was but if I did I probably would have burned it to the ground a long time ago. The night before I spent the night with some kid and his family went to this church every Sunday. Being seven, maybe eight, I didn’t really know that different churches believed in different things so pretty much everything I heard I assumed was Gospel. This woman, I am sure she meant well, but I vowed to never attend Sunday school after her “lesson.” She told this room full of kids that animals do not have souls. They are put on this earth for our enjoyment (This always seemed to me like saying the stars are there because God wanted to light up the sky for us to navigate our ships which is just absurd and infuriating and stupid. It is that total ignoring science that gives some fundamentalists that “crazy” label. After all, Einstein said that “religion without science is blind but science without religion is dull.” I don’t think science ever really attacked religion the way religion attacked science. Saying that evolution is “just a theory” is totally ignoring all scientific data and misunderstanding what a capital T “Theory” really is) alone. I was not feeling this at all. I started to panic almost. My hand shot up and I told her, not these exact words of course, that my parents said God could be found in all things and that everything had a soul. She then replied that that was “New Aged crap.” (A comment made in that special confidence that is pretentious and also wrong.) And, let’s just say, my reaction more or less got me banned from that kid’s house like for life. But I stood firm and defended my actions. To think that we, as human beings, are the only life in the universe that God cares for and loves was just cruel and horrible.