Anyway, he mentioned that today is not only Dave Eggers' birthday, but also Jack Kerouac's. I found that interesting not least because these two writers (with a couple of crucial stops in between) did so much to shape the way that not only their respective generations looked at literature and the written word, but also the way the generation that followed did the same.
I posit the following -- without Jack Kerouac, there would have been no Hunter S. Thompson.
Now, this might seem a somewhat revolutionary sentiment, and I certainly mean no disrespect to the late, great Dr. Gonzo's voice, style, or originality. But I really believe that Thompson looked at the way Kerouac wrote what he lived and emulated that in a (mostly) nonfiction milieu. And let's face it -- Kerouac's best work was thinly veiled nonfiction at best anyway.
Look at On the Road. Drugs, the road, depravity, enlightened and admired companionship, and a little dash of homoeroticism. That pretty much sums up Thompson's work as well, in my opinion, except Thompson did his work in a more journalistic way; i.e., he sought these qualities out in people he didn't know or noticed these characteristics in the subjects he wrote about.
Moreover, there's a link from Kerouac to Thompson to the so-called "transgressive" writers of the 1980s such as Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. The major difference that I can see between Kerouac and the literary Brat Pack is that Kerouac (and Thompson, for that matter) never seemed to think there was anything wrong with or anything to apologize for in either their work or their lives. In that sense, the main point of separation between these writers is their level of self-awareness and understanding.
Which brings me to Dave Eggers, a writer who much more recently changed the literary landscape for a generation. While I think that Eggers shares a basic interest in self-reference and understanding with writers like Ellis and McInerney, he departs enough that it's tempting to place him in an entirely different generation, even though he's a mere six years younger than Bret Easton Ellis.
From the get go, Eggers' writing was so steeped in irony and postmodern self-reference. Ellis' work, on the other hand, may have been based on his own life, but there was no indication that he wanted or needed the reader to understand that he had lived through the events depicted in Less Than Zero. If the reader assumed that, fine. If the reader thought it was a complete fiction, then that was fine too.
Not Eggers, though. Without him, and his audience's perception of him, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius wouldn't have succeeded the way it did. Like Bret Eason Ellis' first three (but especially the first and third) novels, it so perfectly captured the tone of its time, it's hard to imagine the time existing without the book or vice-versa.
And maybe that's why I compare Eggers to Kerouac. For those of us who weren't there, On The Road sums up this super-cool little portion of the 1950s -- the counterpoint to the lame Squaresville depicted in by so many books and movies. Hunter S. Thompson's books look like we imagine the Sixties to be -- drug and meaning-soaked in equal portions. Ditto Ellis and McInerney's depiction of the 80s. Lose the meaning, up the drug quotient, and throw in some hints of postmodern self-recognition. Carry the last of those on through to Eggers, and we have the end of the 90s -- earnest and ironic all at the same time, all while winking at the audience and hoping they get the joke that the author is maybe too bored to finish telling.
Come to think of it, maybe all of the authors mentioned in this article were telling the same joke, just in different ways.
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