Dave Eggers’ new novel takes place entirely in the barracks of an abandoned military base on California’s Monterey coast. His troubled 30-something protagonist, Thomas, has tased, chloroformed and kidnapped Kev, a college acquaintance and U.S. astronaut. He has chained Kev to a pole inside Building 52 and insists he just wants to talk.
If only Kev had answered Thomas’ obsessive letters, Eggers may not have had to write this peculiar, marginal novel that unfolds with only dialogue, no narrative, in a scant 208 pages.
But that’s enough pages for the tormented yet, at first, seemingly innocuous Thomas to kidnap others. He imprisons a retired congressman he once met as a child. He abducts his middle-school math teacher who probably molested him and other students. He grabs his wretched addict mother who tells him he was “screwy out of the womb.” He nabs a local cop who fired one of the shots that killed his deranged, knife-wielding best friend years ago. And he holds captive a sweet beach-walking woman, convinced she is the love of his life, his salvation.
Thomas’ brain is haywire. His relentless questioning is weary and scary for his prisoners and becomes tedious for readers. He interrogates each captive in search of minute clues that might shed light on why he is the way he is, why life is unfair. The questions endlessly hammer his mind, strangle him at night. He gets migraines. He can’t sleep. You do the psychology.
The prolific, best-selling author of nine books, including the acclaimed memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and his most recent novels, The Circle and A Hologram for the King, Eggers is known for cutting-edge portrayals of modern angst and injustice. A stellar voice in New Literature, he writes contemporary morality plays — dark tales of dystopia that illuminate bright shining mirrors of today’s societal complexities.
So, Eggers’ latest novel should sound familiar. Read yesterday’s headlines. While not the massacre-mad persona America saw last month in the disturbing video 22-year-old Elliot Rodger made before he killed six people and wounded eight near the University of California-Santa Barbara in retribution for his pathetic life, Thomas is cut from the same unraveling cloth. We’ve seen it time and time again — the 26-year-old shooter at Seattle Pacific University, the demented killers at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the theater in Aurora, Colo., even the psycho benchmark 1999 massacre at Columbine High School.
This is one more story about someone who takes revenge against the world because he can’t fathom how he fits into it. Thomas is psychologically disemboweled by the banality and futility of his life. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a man over 30 who’s never had anything happen to him,” he says, taking no responsibility for his own shortcomings or actions.
The book’s title comes from the Bible, Zechariah 1:5, where God warns sinful Israelites that without repenting they will suffer the same fate as their fathers and their fathers’ prophets. And so history repeats itself, even in really long titles.
Eggers writes strange well, and in this tale along the lines of E.L. Doctorow’s recent exceptional novel Andrew’s Brain, only weirder and not as rich. This is a one-sitting read, good for a long flight or a nothing-better weekend. Insightful, yes, but sadly no more memorable than tomorrow’s headlines.
Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?
By Dave Eggers
Knopf, 208 pp.
** out of four
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