Cat People is filth.’) At least Eggers and his associates seem to be having fun. ( Bambi: ‘Filth.’ Casablanca: ‘This movie is filth.’ Cat People: ‘A race may civilise itself by language, not film. But it’s hard to cultivate whole-hearted disrespect for a bestselling author who uses his time and loot to publish other people’s squibs on the Internet – squibs called things like ‘The Ten Worst Films of 1942, as Reviewed by Ezra Pound over Italian Radio’. True, McSweeney’s, his periodical, can be almost incomprehensibly arch, while its website, Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, is like a version of the Onion for people who prefer smirking to laughing.

And McSweeney’s, Eggers’s publishing operation, does some interesting things. Still, AHWOSG was sometimes funny and sometimes moving. So he presented himself as a strange amalgam of feelingful mourner, idiot savant and smartarse. Eggers wanted it both ways – raw and cooked. But solipsism, knowingness, whimsy and a love of cute fonts are essential ingredients of the Eggers manner, too, and he can be off-puttingly keen to get this across: ‘The Self-Aggrandisement as Art Form Aspect’, ‘The Self-Flagellation as Art Form Aspect’, ‘The Self-Aggrandisement Disguised as Self-Flagellation as Even Higher Art Form Aspect’. Rage and grief are important emotions in AHWOSG, as he likes to call it. a cannibal or something.’Īnd owed, perhaps, as the book too often seems to assume, a sympathetic attitude to his capacity for huge self-indulgence. Owed, also, the right to move a few things around, to make people into characters, even to moralise – although he makes the remark when a composite figure called ‘John’ complains that the author is exploiting other people’s experiences: Owed, that is, the right to publish a memoir in his mid-twenties, because losing both parents to cancer and bringing up your younger brother obviously cuts you quite a bit of slack.

‘I am owed,’ says Dave Eggers – or ‘Dave Eggers’ – in his much admired A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

You shall know your velocity