Dave Eggers, flamboyantly humble, ashamed of his success,
wallowing in that same success, the biggest dork of all, has
second-order vanity, bad. He has had it since he edited the
irreverent, sometimes hilarious, and ultimately shallow Might
magazine. He thinks quite a lot of himself, but he knows that is
not good. Consider the author photo for his first book, the
mega-block-buster Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The
photo is blurry; author photos do not matter to him. In the
blurry picture, there are two dogs and a bird, as if he were
saying: “Don’t look at me, look at these two dogs, and this odd
bird on my shoulder.” The bio states that Eggers has no pets.
“Think about it: there are three animals in the photo, none of
them mine.” One tends to look at the author photo for a very long
time to figure out what is going on. Now everyone knows what he
looks like. He is shrewd, this Eggers.
His first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is out from his own
house, McSweeney’s. There is no author photo. There is no dust
jacket. There is a natural gray cardboard cover, with the first
paragraph of the book printed on it in capital letters. The front-cover
endpaper picks up the text. One is tempted to make comparisons to
early Surrealist experiments