SCOTT'S STRENGTH as a critic, which is considerable, derives in no small part from his aversion to the literary and academic post-next-new thing; but here this aversion leads him to mistake the materials of Wallace's fiction for fashion. Because it is one of Wallace's primary insights that, for many of his readers, those very intellectual fads have become part of the landscape and the language; they are the given with which a serious novelist must now work. This may very well be anathema to the ghost of Raymond Carver, which hovers over this piece in silent rebuke. It is in part Scott's allegience to Carver which leads him to mistake Wallace's sarcastic dismissal of New Realism's emotional sleight-of-hand � "Some of the most heartbreaking stuff available at any fine bookseller's anywhere" � as an endorsement. This is unfortunate, given that our writing programs and literary journals are only now beginning to emerge from the dark years of the Ford-Carver administration.
This mode � stories of inexpressive people drinking inexpensive drinks � achieved its height in the eighties but proved irresistible to a generation of imitators, becoming virtually synonymous with the pre-manufactured fictions churned out by MFAs. Although largely ignored, for obvious reasons, by English departments, this is the style that poses a real threat: it has, after all, some accouterments of the human � do we not drink a great deal? do we not speak in chopped, meaningless phrases? � but its dim, thin view of our lives threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If this is the nourishment of our literate public, what possible vision of the human might they produce? As Wallace has put it, "We can all of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?"
Yet Wallace has, for his part, been even harder on the metafictionists, who strike him, because of his own formal concerns, closer to the quick. The heroine of his long story "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," for instance, introduces herself as a "postmodernist" but ends up writing ad copy. She is a vicious send-up of the pretentious avant-gardist circa 1988, but for all of Wallace's skepticism, conceptualism remains a primary concern both in his work and his criticism. He has recently praised writers as different, but also as conceptually interesting, as George Saunders, who writes stories about pathetic human longing ensconced in sci-fi simulacra, and Ken Kalfus, who practices a realist style but maintains close contact with the fantastic.
The trick, for Wallace, is not to find a return path to prelapsarian ideals, but to incorporate the complexity of human relations into the framework of a fiction that, in its formal intelligence, makes itself recognizable to people living in a technologically overbearing world. His great strength resides in his ability to imbue philosophical thickets with real thorns � if you prick his metaphysics, they will bleed. "Westward's" writer-protagonist "hopes, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you're going to die. Maybe it's called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn't know. He wonders who the hell really cares." The truth is that no one does, and that we all want to write it � as countless writers have said over the years, the best work is Realism, no matter its form. Scott believes that Wallace "can't have it both ways"; that he must either choose between his pomo tricks or his emotional intensity. But it is the courage, if also perhaps the folly, of Wallace's latest collection that it demands both. It might be that Wallace has reached, as he has elsewhere put it, "some line's end's end" and will have to retreat and retrench; the collection is, in some ways, a series of increasingly desperate "raids," as Eliot has it, "on the inarticulate." But it has properly been called "heroic" because it holds so steadfastly to its ground; and one thinks that if Wallace ever decides to write about intelligent, emotionally capable characters whom he does not feel the need to parody, it will be on this ground that his greatest work will come.
Nearly all of Wallace's own criticism has been directed toward outlining the contours of this synthesis, somewhere beyond both postmodern "no-handsism" and conventional realism's earthy tones. It is in this regard unfortunate that the conclusion to his justly famous essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," is probably the most quoted passage in his oeuvre. Not only because there's a great deal of fiction that wants reading, but because his musings on what the "next rebels" might be like, and their embrace of "single-entendre principles" seems to be a rhetorical jest. Like Fredric Jameson declaring in the 1970s that the next new thing would have to be... Realism, Wallace is proposing a logical conundrum, or a joke, but by no means a call to arms.
The next real rebel, to return happily to Wallace's phrase, will not be Jed Purdy, but someone who fits the culture of irony so comfortably that she could forge from its discontinuous shards a sincere language and work upon it a sort of Barthelmeic magic; who could transform our language of apathy into a cri de coeur. In any case, Wallace's famous pronouncement has had the baneful effect of encouraging the frenetic "what's-next" quality of our criticism, which re-creates in publishing house editorial meetings the atmosphere of a high-pressure, high-tech investment fund. So we cast about for heroes: Is Wallace our savior? Is Rick Moody? The KGB Bar on 4th Street, with its Stalinist kitsch and now anthologized reading series? Like the Whitman that Allen Ginsberg conjured in a California supermarket, we approach every new grocery clerk with desperate, incommensurate hope: "Are you my angel?"

ENTER, onto this soft, expectant stage, Dave Eggers, the 29-year-old editor of (and the best thing about) the para-journal sensation McSweeney's. In a short time, Eggers, whose pronouncements on the magazine's website have a hilarious, oracular quality, has become the new literary superstar, almost a Beatle. McSweeney's has unleashed a torrent of enthusiasm, both in the popular press and among his readership, with people standing for hours outside his Park Slope apartment to hand him manuscripts. And Eggers' book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, released this month, rocketed immediately to #52 on Amazon.com's best-sellers, where it wedged between Memoirs of a Geisha and Anne Alexander's (forthcoming) self-help masterpiece, Win the Fat War. Might Eggers, then, be our savior? Someone both hilariously sarcastic and blisteringly honest, Caesar and Cicero, Woody Allen and Sergeant Slaughter? A "resounding answer," as Time put it, to poor Jedediah Purdy? Has Eggers, at long last, won the fat war? It is difficult to say. Even more than McSweeney's itself, the manic memoir is written so masterfully, with such a deft evocation of our current sensibility, that one doesn't really know what to make of it.
There are, however, some clues. On the cover, we have a painting by Komar and Melamid, two moderately talented Russian artists who've made a brilliant career in what The New Republic called "the irony racket." In the old country, Komar & Melamid burlesqued Soviet culture's ruling images with mock-heroic paintings that effectively substituted Stalin's mug for Warhol's soup can. Here, they've painted a floridly handsome sunrise, an explosion of purple and orange, upon which opens a luxurious theater curtain, as if the natural world were indeed created for our amusement. You're welcome to think it's pretty, but finding it fulsome is also okay, since the painters have anticipated this, and if you find their anticipation silly, well, they've anticipated that, too, because, look, the colors are pretty. Get it?

In a worst-case scenario, Eggers is merely this sort of pomo gag in cool-guy clothing. His magazine's greatest attraction is its whimsical disregard for convention � why not put text here, and here, and why not write a story about the font, and announce that submissions ought to be "exactly 820 words, but will be edited down to 450?" Yes, why not? It is a refreshing mode, to be sure, but difficult to sustain: most journals look the way they do not, primarily, because they have no sense of style but because there are certain rewards to the conventions: They create an aura of authority, leisure, and so forth. The magazine will ultimately have more interesting content than the other magazines, or it will not (so far, it mostly has). And the same questions must be asked of the book. The prefatory note on "The Knowingness About the Book's Self-Consciousness Aspect" is pure Wallace, but funnier:
While the author is self-conscious about being self-referential, he is also knowing about that self-conscious self-referentiality. Furthermore he plans to be clearly, obviously aware of his knowingness about his self-consciousness of self-referentiality. Further, he is fully cognizant, way ahead of you, in terms of knowing about and fully admitting...
The "way ahead of you" is nice. But there might also be something more, for Eggers insists � and the crucial question is whether we believe him � that the book's persistent self-devouring is a "device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story, which is both too black and blinding to look at � avert...your...eyes!"
The material of his memoir � the sudden death of both his parents, the subsequent raising of his little brother � allows Eggers this conceit and the book a wonderful, Biblical justification for what Scott terms the "cheap postmodern highs." It is, after all, pretty dark stuff. And it is not as if Eggers is seeking refuge in obliquity: the physical details of his mother's death are related in painful, painstaking detail. Despite comparisons with Wallace, the book most resembles that other self-flagellating contemporary Bildungsroman Portnoy's Complaint. But whereas Philip Roth is not Portnoy, Eggers is Eggers.
And why, he might properly ask, should he not be? One of the serious questions Eggers' book repeatedly poses is the propriety of its own exhibitionism. It's a question which diagnoses our double bind. For on the one hand, our experience is perpetually mediated by television and advertising, distancing us from physical reality. At the same time, we are inundated by the excruciating memoiristic detail of other people's lives, on talk shows, in tell-alls, before impeachments. The less we feel our neighbors' physical presence, the more we seem to know of their sex lives. So it is fitting that Eggers' book, which proceeds, like Roth's, along a series of increasingly hilarious skits, has at its center a 47-page confession-slash-transcript of Eggers' audition for the sly, institutionalized exhibitionism of MTV's The Real World. Eggers despises the show's manipulative market-group orientation, but wants to use it nonetheless, despises himself for trying out for the show, and so forth, in an infinte regress. Once again, we find ourselves in a recursive loop: He knows all this, and we know he knows, and he knows we know... But where are we to go with this knowledge and what are we to do with it? Does this book, in short, contain the resources for a journey of hope?
Perhaps we could say: It contains them, but does not yield them up. Eggers has a magnificent eye for the machinations of our culture, and his humor is a trenchant, sharp-edged tool. There is a sense, here and there, that Eggers meant to use it to rescue Generation X, and that he had sought out the center of its activity, the San Francisco of the early nineties, to save its soul. There is a strangely messianic flavor to all this, explicitly so in a bizarre final scene, and one message to be culled is that Dave Eggers died for our sins. Eggers, it bears repeating, is incredibly funny, and yet there is also a despair here, born, I think, of the sense that the dialectic between his sorrow and his humor has no synthesis, that the knowingness of Might magazine might have been merely a funhouse mirror image of Gen-X culture, with no real alternative, or even opposition, to propose. Where Wallace struggles, Eggers describes a long process of giving in.
There is, for example, a line toward the end of the book, when Eggers finds he's had enough of The City: "San Francisco was getting small, and everyone is dying. The summers are getting colder, and the falls aren't what they used to be." There is a characteristic change of tense here, which is one of Eggers' endearing narrative tics, but it's also the first mention of an epidemic, and so it would seem he means AIDS. A strange thing to notice in 1997, after six years in San Francisco. But perhaps the lines bring our attention to the narcissistic belatedness of Eggers' realization: he only noticed the dying, like the weather, once he stopped having a good time. These are either beautiful lines or they reveal, inadvertantly, a blinding narcissism. I suspect the former, but it may be too early to tell. This is a book that, for all its undeniable surface brilliance, will not resolve itself until we've been convinced of the fundamental seriousness of the author's intention.
Is Eggers' manic irony and insistent tragedy a stride forward, then, in the evolution of our literature? Not exactly, and not yet. His style would, in any case, be silly to even try without his comic genius. But there is something else here, too, that is less about genres and innovations than about the effects that language still can have. In my relentless Google search for Eggers' soul, I came across an old article from a local paper which rated Eggers the sixteenth-most-annoying individual in San Francisco. "He's every cool person who made fun of our hair," its author said, "taunted us for listening to REO Speedwagon, and generally made us feel inadequate when we were in high school."
Though this was written of Eggers the Might editor, and not the memoirist, it is as damning a criticism as a writer can receive. And some of it holds for this book as well, where, for all the suburban loneliness and actual tragedy it details, there is always a sheen of cool, a tally of women. Writers are understandably loath to speculate about who their readers might be, but it would not hurt to recall, as a counterweight to the pressures of elite culture, that in the long run books are not written for the editors of prestigious magazines or the professors of fashionable theories; they are written for lonely teenagers, swaggering along streets flanked by cars they do not own, listening, perhaps, to the lyrics of REO Speedwagon's lyrical smash hit "I Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore (I've Forgotten What I Started Fighting For)." The displaced and uncomfortable and acne-ridden who, though they watch 17 hours of television each day and know no other language, are still wounded by the sophistication and sarcasm of our culture. Who will save them? At this point, one feels that both Wallace, who has already done so much, and Eggers, who's been granted an enormous advance on future accomplishments, could go either way. And indeed, in McSweeney's #3, a very short story by Wallace appears on the spine of the journal. His contributor's note reads: "David Foster Wallace lives in Illinois. This is his first published work." It's a good, a proper point: we are only just beginning, and there is still room, for the moment, for hope.

Keith Gessen is a contributing editor at FEED.

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arguments out of alignment
In the first place, Scott misapplies Bloom's theory of influence. Wallace is taken to task, for instance, for parodying John Barth while employing Barth's own avant-garde devices. But for Bloom, the larger the anxiety, the greater the writer (to take one of his examples, a "haunted" Shakespeare parodied his predecessor, Christopher Marlowe, in Titus Andronicus). Scott finds himself unimpressed by the "Pynchonesque" and "secondhand" political satire of Infinite Jest, and indeed a good many gags in that book are plainly cribbed from the postmodern masters; yet here, too, a theorist of influence so august as T. S. Eliot reminds us that while the young writer imitates, the mature writer steals. Scott, you suspect, knows all this very well, but his antagonism to "cheap postmodern highs," the standard account of which Wallace is said to have "absorbed," is so strong that he glosses over the inconsistencies.

as of opinions already formed
Comparing them unfavorably to Richard Powers, here is what Scott wrote of Pynchon and Wallace in The New York Review of Books in 1998: "Their novels are like perpetual motion machines. And one feels, encountering them, a rather chilled admiration: they move, all right, but they don't move you."

its persistent peekaboo-ish flaunting in the text
This is what we mean now, I think, when we say postmodernism. That is, while modernist classics like Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Pound's Cantos were, to an unprecedented degree, intertextual, alluding to other texts in order to enlarge their own universes, the postmodernist classics (Gravity's Rainbow, The Recognitions, Lost in the Funhouse) have been intra-textual, bringing attention to themselves as texts ("horizontal chorus-lines of dye," in Wallace's phrase). And just as the modernist's linguistic density lent itself to a certain type of formalist textual exegesis -- American New Criticism -- so, also, have the text-as-artifact, writing-as-coercion postmodern masters found a home in the bosom of the poststructuralist academy, which never much cared for literature anyhow.

Jedediah Purdy
It is remarkable that, in an essay on modern fiction, the only name Scott opposes to Wallace is Purdy's. As much as Wallace (and now, Dave Eggers) has become synonymous with the latest incarnation of the postmodern tradition, Purdy is just as facilely tied to its less well-defined opposite. Anti-postmodernism? Ante-postmodernism? Modernism? The absurdity of this is not merely that Wallace and Purdy largely concur in their objections to the easy sarcasms of contemporary culture, but that Wallace is a major novelist while Purdy is a bright young man who strung together a series of Harvard papers which, were it not for the seeming incongruity of their old-person sentiments with his youthful visage, would have gone fairly well unnoticed. In any case, such oppositions are poor critical constructs, another branch, really, of demographics marketing, and they make it difficult to name names that are anything more than symbolic straw-men.

how we can, in effect, start playing dumb
This is what Barth had in mind in 1979 when he wrote: "I deplore the artistic and critical cast of mind that repudiates the whole modernist enterprise as an aberration and sets to work as if it hadn�t happened... It did happen: Freud and Einstein and two world wars and the Russian and sexual revolutions and automobiles and airplanes and telephones and radios and movies and urbanization, and now nuclear weaponry and television and microchip technology and the new feminism and the rest, and except as readers there's no going back to Tolstoy and Dickens."

describe the way we live
A brief history of Postmodernism's end:

If it's clear, incidentally, as the constant use of the term now seems to indicate, that postmodernism is dead, it is much less certain when this happened. The history of postmodernism, unlike the history of Romanticism, or Rome, has blurred, collapsing edges. It has always been suspicious of the mythic consciousness of modernism, the sort of metanarrative bluster that could prompt Virginia Woolf to announce that, "On or about December 1910 human nature changed." This is a typically exact date for the beginning of high modernism (there are others, as exact), while even the very origin of the term "postmodern" has been shrouded in veils of misunderstanding: The incredible Irving Howe seems to have coined it in 1959 to hail such disparate characters as Bellow, Salinger, and... Herbert Gold, but disowned the postmodern when the people we now associate with it (Howe mentions Burroughs, Warhol, and postmodern PR-master Susan Sontag) emerged in the 60s. Given this lack of clarity, we can imagine the smug glee taken by devotees of writing-as-absence in seeing critics now storming a tower that has long been vacated. In this sense, actually, Scott�s attack on postmodernism does resemble the sacking of Rome in 410 A.D. Full of homicidal rage and pregnant with symbolic significance, the barbarians were nonetheless too late -- the seat of empire had long since removed to Constantinople, after all, and there, perched upon a cliff, it would be safe for centuries to come.

rocketed immediately
In no small part, perhaps, because Eggers appeared in the February 7, 2000 issue of Time. Four years ago, Jonathan Franzen began his lament on the marginal place of the writer in American culture by remarking that, though his book was well reviewed, he was not on the cover of Time, whose red frames had, earlier in the century, twice surrounded the face of James Joyce. Eggers did not receive Joyce's frames, but there is a full-page photo, and though on the magazine's website Eggers comments on the experience with a cool disdain, the question is not why he decided to do it (why on earth not?), but what makes him so attractive to Time in the first place. Was Might, Eggers' initial Gen-X parody magazine, merely another Spy, a magazine Wired editors and MTV producers could read over mocha frappes for a chuckle and get right back to manufacturing desire? Is he now being used as the entertainment industry's Brooklyn-based response to what it might perceive as a latent Jed Purdy-ism in the nation's youth? Is it just demographics research, all over again?


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