‘The Eyes & the Impossible’ by Dave Eggers   (2023) – 249 pages

There is Sonya the squirrel, Angus the raccoon, Bertrand the sea gull, Yolanda the pelican, Helene the goat, and of course, Johannes the dog who narrates this story of this group of animals, each with their disparate skill, working together to accomplish a critical goal.

“Yolanda landed with her usual chaos-clatter of wings and feet. Yolanda is a pelican, and a clumsy one, which is saying something, given all pelicans are clumsy, ungainly, unlikely in their shape and ludicrous in their flight.”

Freya, Meredith, and Samuel are bison; they have ruled the park for millions of years or more But wouldn’t they be happier on the mainland instead of on this tiny island?

When I heard about ‘The Eyes & the Impossible’ by Dave Eggers, my first impulse was to compose a list of all the adult novels I had read in which all the main characters were animals. However I found there were very few of these novels. My list did not extend much beyond ‘Watership Down’ by Richard Adams and ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell.

It seems to me that writers are missing a good bet by not writing more of these anthropomorphizing novels for adults that we remember so fondly from our childhoods.

When I was a child there was an entire series of children’s books by Thornton Burgess called Old Mother West-Wind which included as characters Peter Cottontail (later to be known as Peter Rabbit), Jimmy Skunk, Sammy Jay, etc.

As a kid, I did not read superhero comic books; instead I read comics with Donald Duck, his girlfriend Daisy Duck, his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and his rich Uncle Scrooge McDuck. And then there was Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, and their gang.

When I became a parent, I found that many of the books for little children had animals as their main characters such as the Russell Hoban series about the badger Frances – ‘Bedtime for Frances’, ‘Bread and Jam for Frances’, etc. George and Martha in the James Marshall series are two hippos. Then there were the ‘Curious George’ books about a funny little monkey.

There is something innately humorous about having animals talk and act like humans, and ‘The Eyes & the Impossible’ captures that. They are advertising this book for readers of all ages.

I doubt that it will be a classic like ‘Watership Down’, but it was a pleasant enough time for me reading this book.

Grade :   A

‘Heroes of the Frontier’ by Dave Eggers   (2016) – 385 pages

Here is an appealing novel about a woman and her two kids traveling around Alaska.  One trend I have recently noticed is that a few male fiction writers including Graham Swift, Colson Whitehead, Yuri Herrera, Rupert Thomson, and here Dave Eggers will create a female main character or narrator for their novels.  This is a healthy trend since it stretches the imagination of the male writer to see things in a different view from his usual own.  But ultimately it all depends on the execution…

In ‘Heroes of the Frontier’, things have fallen apart for mother Josie in her late thirties back in Ohio, so she took her two kids, eight year-old Paul and five year-old Ana, up to Alaska without telling anyone.

What better way to move about in the great spaces of Alaska than in a used RV called ‘The Chateau’?  So ‘Heroes of the Frontier’ is essentially a road trip with no destination, just traveling around this monster state.  Josie and her kids encounter scenic mountains and breathtaking views, eccentric people in RV parks, forest rangers, ferocious and not-so-ferocious animals, wild fires, thunderstorms, and everywhere exorbitant prices for campgrounds, groceries, and restaurants.

If you are looking for a tightly plotted adventure story, ‘Heroes of the Frontier’ is not for you.  This story meanders from RV park to RV park.  We get Josie’s backstory, why she had to leave Ohio.  There’s an insufferable ex- who is now marrying someone else and a lawsuit that destroyed her practice as a dentist.

Although not much happens in real time in this story, the writing here is likeable and engaging and held my interest throughout.  I practically coined the term “pleasantly uneventful”, but this novel takes it to extremes I never even considered.  Much of the story is about mother Josie dealing with her two kids, and the kids emerge as major characters in the story. Only the ever present dangers of uncontrollable forest fires and spine-cracking thunder and lightning storms give the story any urgency.

But the story has its diversions along the way.  Consider the following bit about leaf blowers to which I concur:

“Oh no. A leaf blower.  The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of all humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower.  With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet.  I will destroy the aural plane.  And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake.” 

So far I have read four Dave Eggers novels.  I considered ‘A Hologram for the King’ and ‘The Circle’ spectacularly good, but ‘Your Fathers, Where Are They…’ was a disappointment.  I see ‘Heroes of the Frontier’ a solid comeback of sorts, perhaps not quite to the level of the first two novels, but a well-written engaging read.  It does capture Alaska except for some of its crazier people, and really there is nothing more heroic than being a good mother.

I will eagerly look forward to reading my next Dave Eggers novel whether it has a male or female main character.

Grade:   B+

‘Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?’ By Dave Eggers    (2014) – 212 pages

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This new novel by Dave Eggers is about a young man who takes several hostages and chains them to fixtures at a decommissioned deserted army base (Fort Ord?) in California in order to ask them questions that are important to him but certainly not important to me.  His hostages include an astronaut, a Congressman, a sixth grade teacher, a policeman, and the young man’s own mother.

The young man kidnaps the astronaut, because the young man is upset that the NASA space shuttle program was cancelled.

 “And now we kill it all, and we pay the Russians for a backseat on their rockets.  You couldn’t write a sicker ending to the whole story.  How do the Russians have the money for rockets and we don’t?”

 I’ve read and liked two of Dave Eggers novels before, ‘Hologram for the King’ and ‘The Circle’.  Both of these novels made my yearly Top Ten lists.  However ‘Your Fathers, Where Are They?…’ did not work for me at all.  I found this novel with the very long title a very thin gruel.

The main problem I believe here is that Eggers is trying to have things two opposite ways at the same time.  First he has as his main character a young man who is extremely angry and frustrated almost to the point of incoherence.  This young man is acting out his anger and frustration by taking these people hostage and asking them strident questions like those he asks the astronaut about the space program.  Yet somehow Eggers apparently thinks this inane dialogue between this confused young man and his hostages will be meaningful and scintillating to the reader.  It is not.

There is a half-hearted attempt at providing a more valid reason for the hostage taking which involves the policeman’s shooting and killing of the young man’s friend  who apparently was molested by the teacher as a boy.  However the first two hostages have nothing to do with this incident at all.

Later the young man meets a woman on the beach to whom he is attracted, but that situation is tacked on and has nothing to do with the hostage taking.

The novel is all dialogue, all conversations between this disturbed young man and his hostages.  With no outside context for the dialogue, it all seemed terribly sparse.  I know it would be artificial if a young person today were eloquent and well spoken, but perhaps sub-expressive people should not be allowed to talk much in a novel.  All this dialogue is less than interesting as it is. There is not enough variation in talking styles, so the dialogue all seems monotonic.

From now on, I won’t automatically read Dave Eggers’ next novel without making absolutely sure it is worth reading.