Read this.
I’ve been slacking on my reading about as much as I’ve been slacking on keeping this site current. What can I say, sometimes work is busy and I prefer to spend my commute focused on honorable activities, such as trying to not fall asleep on strangers. And playing games on my phone.
Anyhow, when last I was reading, I was reading this. It was good, though tough for me to stick with at times, and ultimately satisfying. So why, if I’m giving such a seemingly meh review should any of you run out and grab this book?
Excellent question.
You Shall Know Our Velocity accomplishes something. Reading that last page, closing the book and feeling the heft of it in my hand in the end, I felt like I saw it, the big picture of it. The drawn out parts that wound between gorgeous descriptions and moving narrative all made sense. I saw why they needed to be there, every last one of them.
This story follows 2 men on a mission to give away a small fortune after the sudden death of their friend. Eggers balances his present-time storytelling with flashbacks. Flashbacks can be gimmicky (like their cousin “the voice over” in tv & film) when used incorrectly or heavy-handedly, but thankfully he avoids that pitfall here by peppering them in sparingly and, most importantly, meaningfully. The flashbacks surface in blurred snippets that allow the reader to piece together everything that came before. Flashbacks fill in the blanks, showing us how Jack died, how Will’s face ended up in its present state, why Hand and Will are bonded to each other in the first place.
So what’s my point? Here’s a book about forward momentum, about living and dying, about cars and planes, about secluded beaches and foreign tongues. Forward, always forward. And all those draw out sections of the book? All those circuitous paths between the meat of the story? They are the story. The body of it sprawls out like a map when you stand back and really take it all in. Those routes, tangents, dead ends are as crucial to the book as a whole as the characters themselves.
In true Dave Eggers form, he’s “doin’ a thing” here, and I loved him for it. Eventually.
