Dave Eggers

The Niceness Racket A review by Lee SiegelI.As I was trying to make sense of Dave Eggers's strange new book,I came across a piece of writing that captured the general culturalatmosphere in which Eggers's book took shape. Not long ago, inthe course of reviewing Martin Amis's novel House of Meetings,most of which takes place in a Soviet gulag, Joan Acocella bestowedon readers of The New Yorker this illumination: "Amis, like PrimoLevi, his great predecessor in prison-camp memorialization, isable to calculate degrees of anguish."Amis's great predecessor in prison-camp memorialization! If youhad the sublime luck to be sitting in your dentist's waiting roomwhen you read that, you could have tried faking a sudden painfulabscess and begging the nurse to infuse you with a triple doseof Demerol. That way, you might have lost consciousness beforeAcocella's sentence became stored in your memory cells. Her remarkwas shockingly and multivalently out of kilter. "Predecessor"implies a position and function kindred to those of the eventual"successor," and Amis is planets away from both Levi's experienceand his evocative power. Auschwitz was not a "prison camp," itwas a death camp. Levi's testimony cannot adequately be describedwith the bland "memorialization". And real writers, imaginativewriters, writers such as Levi, do not "calculate" anything, letalone incalculable anguish.