Dave Eggers, pictured in the San Francisco office of his nonprofit writing organization, is ‘happily retired’ from the publishing house McSweeney’s.
Dave Eggers, the 46-year-old novelist and founder of the influential publishing house McSweeney's, has endured what he describes as "some harried experiences" during his years as a hiker. "I rarely travel with an itinerary. I'll take any trailhead. I'll walk wherever. I'm bad at planning ahead or knowing what's around the corner." He seems modestly proud of this particular fact. "But I do find those are the best kinds of trips. The ones where I feel most satisfied afterward are not the ones where I know exactly what's going to happen."
Of course, it's possible to "look at a map - or these days a GPS - and know exactly where every tree and every hill are," he says. "We can get every answer to everything. We can know how long it takes to drive from this place to that place, what the traffic is like, who's there already.
"But we can still have experiences that have some kind of parallel to what you might have experienced as an explorer without a map, and without knowing what was around the next bend," he continues. "I still think we can live that way if we choose to. If we choose to embrace the unknown."
His superb new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, which arrived in bookstores this week, concerns a young family who embrace the unknown by decamping suburban Ohio for the Alaskan wilderness. It's a richly imagined, darkly comic adventure about parenthood, courage, and how one should navigate the modern world, with or without a map.
Josie is a dentist and single mother of two small children - Paul, a sensitive eight-year-old who Josie relies on more than she'd ever admit, and young Ana, a furious ball of energy constantly, albeit accidentally, endangering her own and life and those of her family members. She's also one of the most fully realized characters Eggers has ever created - a funny, insightful, imperfect and, above all, devoted parent who has the peculiar habit of looking at life through the prism of Broadway musicals, choreographing elaborate song-and-dance routines and composing show-stopping tunes to help make sense of (or perhaps mask) the troubled state of her life. ("I felt like they mirror the American way of daily life - they're so loud and manic and [there's] dancing everywhere," says Eggers of the musical genre. "There's this artifice that's kind of astounding, but the songs can be so beautiful and affecting, but also so unrealistic - breaking out into song in the middle of a sentence.
There's exclamation points and pyrotechnics and all of that. To me it felt like the same kind of outsized, exaggerated existence that I think we favour [in America].") Convinced she's about to lose custody of her children to her good-for-nothing soon-to-bemarried ex-boyfriend, Josie flees the lower 48 states for Alaska, where she rents an ancient RV and sets out on the road, trying to find "a newer and better version of herself."
"I wanted to look at the idea of, well, maybe by moving and leaving and discovering a new place, maybe you can fortify yourself and become something stronger and better," says Eggers.
"Maybe it isn't a matter of marinating in the disappointments of your Ohio suburb. Maybe you can be a better self, a braver self, and your kids can transform into courageous beings when given the change to challenge themselves, and have agency, and real independence, in a place like Alaska."
In 2011, Eggers began jotting down notes on pieces of scrap paper under the heading "dentist." ("I know a lot of very interesting dentists," he laughs. "I just thought it was a fascinating career.") He had little idea of what the novel would become, or even if it would become a novel at all, but, around this time, he made his first trip to Alaska, where he found the perfect setting.
"It has this sort of mixed mythology, where it's in the U.S. but we consider those people a little different, the Alaskans - that's why there's like 12 reality shows about Alaska," he says.
"The feel of it, for us, is the last frontier. Vast swaths of it are unpopulated. You can actually really get lost up there, if you wanted to disappear."
Far from disappearing, Eggers is in the middle of one of the most productive periods of an already productive career, which kicked-off in 2000 with the publication of his groundbreaking memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which recounts his life after the death of his parents.
Heroes of the Frontier is his fourth novel since 2012, including A Hologram for the King and the unfairly maligned The Circle, both of which are making their way to the big-screen this year, and both of which, coincidentally, star Tom Hanks. Although he's "happily retired" from McSweeney's, the publishing house/literary journal he established in 1998, and which made him not just one of his generation's most influential writers, but publishing figures as well, he's still involved in some of the many spinoff organizations and publications that have grown out of McSweeney's. These include Voice of Witness, a series of oral histories devoted to human rights and justice, and the 826 creative writing and tutoring centres, which have spread across the country from San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, the writer Vendela Vida, and their two children.
He's actually sitting in the office of 826 Valencia Tenderloin, San Francisco's second location, which opened in May, when he calls one evening in June. It's the night of the Brexit referedum and the results begin to trickle in, and the British pound begins its precipitous drop, during the hour we're on the phone. "I think they won't be the last," he says of the vote.
"All of our trade agreements are being questioned right now - NAFTA is considered a mistake now and Trump has everybody feeling like we need to go back to isolationalist and aggressively protectionist trade policies.
There are things in the air that haven't really been in the air for 20 years. The EU is one thing, but why it's coming up here, now, it isn't tied to any one event or economic downturn. It's a funny time to be thinking about it."
Here, I'm reminded of a line from the novel - Josie's remark that "we live in a vengeful time."
(It comes during one of her many digressions, this one on the subject of disappointment, which culminates with the idea of Disappointed: The Musical, "a litany of complaint set to a jaunty score.") Vengeance and disappointment, I suggest, both seem to be driving forces these days, and Eggers agrees his latest is a commentary on modern American life, but more specifically, "the inherently and very strangely and stubbornly violent nature of American life, and our incredibly high tolerance for violence on a daily basis here and abroad. That, I think, runs through a few other books I've done." (Track down a copy of his last novel, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? for more on the subject.) Then he adds, "and it's an ever-present concern and something I'm not finished talking about.
"I think that we are very unique, and maybe kind of unusual, and maybe even strange people, where we can have such a high tolerance for violence and mayhem in our own cities and towns and schools and clubs and churches and then at the same time have these questionable adventures abroad that we're not even sure are still [going] on," he continues, our interview coming less than two weeks after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. "We share so much with Canadians, but I think that Canadians have taken all the same elements and have evolved one step further than the Americans. ... Why is it that we can't shake the cycle of violence? And why is it that we have such a high tolerance for it and can live in a state of constant cognitive dissonance where we think we're a peaceful people, but all around us and every day are these horrors that should not be tolerated and they should not be swept away and they should provoke direct and permanent change of our ways?
But we're already past the moment that Orlando would have changed us. It takes us a week to forget, or Congress to forget, and then we move on. It makes us a strange people."
Although a family of gun-totting off-gridders make an appearence in Heroes of the Frontier ("She had fled the polite, muted violence of her life in Ohio, only to drive her family into the country's barbarian heart," Eggers writes. "We are not civilized people, she realized. All questions about national character and motivations and aggression could be answered when we acknowledged this elemental truth,") the dangers that Josie and her children face are more of the natural - and internal - variety, including out-ofcontrol wildfires sweeping the state, the guilt Josie feels over the death of a patient-turnedsoldier who died in Afghanistan (she blames herself for his enlisting), and her constant doubts regarding her abilities as a mother.
"I want some readers to think she's terrible and unfit," Eggers says of Josie, who probably drinks too much, has in essence kidnapped her children (not to mention taken them across state lines), and is constantly putting their safety at risk. But whether Josie is a good mother or not, Eggers himself has no doubt.
"She's a model parent, actually."
Her methods, even if they are by accident and not design, are ones that other parents should consider embracing.
"I see it all the time - just kids being completely at home in the woods, completely in their element, going back to their essential cave people-ness, their savagery," he says. "Kids are animals and they are very much savage, feral beasts. And I think we've got to allow them that, sometimes, because there's a glow to their skin and their eyes when you see a kid that's really been let loose outdoors for a while. This is something that Josie discovers, too."
He doesn't fault helicopter parents for their behaviour. "We love our children so much that we want them to be free from any possibility of danger. That's an admirable thing." Caution is to be expected, of course. "But at the same time they do need to be challenged and they do need to interact with the natural world. And because they are born of the natural world, and they are inherently capable of handling so much of it, and far beyond what we normally give them credit for. Even if it means that we just let them loose in a shallow creek for a day, and let them play and make dams and do whatever they want to and get dirty and bloody and wet.
That's okay. But I think that increasingly we try to keep them not just from harm but from discomfort. And that's probably a mistake.
"It goes back to the idea of what are we preparing our kids for?" he continues. "Are we raising our kids for future employment? Is that what the purpose of childhood and families and parents is - making them appropriate, employable people? Or is there something else, too? Can we make them great? Can we make them brave? Can we make them people of courage and integrity and vision? People open to discovery? I would think that would be an equally important goal."