An everyday morning in the Student Direct: Mancunion office, uncoloured by novelty or pleasure; hours of essaying in John Rylands to look forward to; and a slump towards another packed lunch furtively eaten in the Veggie Cafe – but –– wait! What’s this in the literature inbox? The new book by Dave Eggers – oh my, oh my, delight of delights! I can barely keep on my feet in the blaze of excitement, excited by the book held between these beautifully illustrated dulcet covers.
Now – if you’ll excuse the overdramatised vignette, the point I’m trying to make: I’m already somewhat a Dave Eggers fan, and so the following review absolutely isn’t an objective or fair approach to the book. In his short career Eggers imagines life into the everyday better than any other living writing I’m aware of; he genuinely pushes the formal boundaries of the short story and the memoir in his small body of work.
And, having said that, in Zeitoun we see Eggers engaged in a strikingly different project: here we have, like 2006’s What is the What?, an essentially straight retelling of momentous events from the perspective of a real-life witness. And more than ever Eggers is attempting to suppress his own writing style in order to provide a realistic portrait – in this case of the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.
And it works, of course: the detail is perfect and the story riveting – and, furthermore, I was left truly infuriated by the incompetent and uncaring response of the American government. Another layer of interest comes with the fact that Abdulrahman Zeitoun, our narrator, is a Syrian immigrant, and his perspective of being a Muslim in America after 2001 is intriguing. But with that comes the uncomfortable feeling, occasionally, that the book is slightly too preoccupied with being ‘educational’ – as it pauses to explain Islam to a readership it obviously expects (although is depressingly likely) to be uneducated – and its rhetoric and instruction sometimes forms a stumbling block for the smooth telling of the story by which this book lives or dies.
So Zeitoun is almost perfect as a moral artefact – it preaches understanding without being evangelical; it lays bare the failings and humiliating abuses perpetrated by Bush’s government without being exaggeratedly inflammatory; and it promises that all proceeds from the book will go to charities helping the New Orleans underprivileged to rebuild their lives.
So I have a split recommendation to end with: If you want to know what a city and an uncaring government can be like after a natural disaster, certainly read this book. But if you want more of Dave Eggers’ usual post-modernising genius, keep clear.
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