Heroes of the Frontier

Dave Eggers

Hamish Hamilton, £18.99

Reviewed by Stephen Phelan

THE next generation of American fiction writers may yet be inspired or stymied by the state of the nation in 2016 – how many millions have to blink at the TV, rub their eyes and repeat that “you couldn’t make this up” before budding novelists take this as a challenge or a reason to quit? Dave Eggers, whose own prodigious career began in the (Bill) Clinton era, may be well-placed to help in the time of Trump (and Hillary).

Having set a certain tone for millennial literature with his well-intentioned, self-conscious meta-memoir A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, Eggers built a small but influential non-profit empire that encompasses publishing and journalism (McSweeney’s), children's writing workshops (826 Valencia), the oral history-based education programme Voices of Witness, and the ScholarMatch sponsorship scheme for young talent.

Not to knock a guy who’s become such force for good, but Eggers’s novels have been pretty patchy. What Is The What boldly ventriloquised the true story of Sudanese lost boy Valentino Achak Deng, while The Circle seemed mostly clueless and toothless in its satire of Silicon Valley. His latest, Heroes Of The Frontier, is by far his most fun work of fiction, and maybe also his most substantial – expressing something of the bone-deep moral and cultural exhaustion that might drive a middle-aged American liberal to flee the country.

“We are not civilised people,” observes Josie, a 40-year-old dentist on the run from two unrelated lawsuits, a shambolic ex-husband, and an enervating contemporary atmosphere that seems to her poisoned by grievance and vengeance.

“All questions about national character and motivations and aggression could be answered when we acknowledged this elemental truth.” Not that Josie makes it any further than Alaska – Sarah Palin territory – cruising through the 50th state in an ancient, rented motor home with her young son Paul and younger, more unruly daughter Ana.

They are highly domesticated creatures released into the wilderness, and their story takes the barely plotted form of an episodic travelogue. The first portent is the sight of a sheep at a dismal animal park being carried off by an eagle. Later incidents and accidents take them deeper into a tonal grey zone between dirty realism and comic absurdity – from their inadvertent break-in at a guest lodge to their more deliberate occupation of an abandoned mining village, via ever-closer encounters with spreading summer bushfires and run-ins with generally benevolent locals. A prison work crew help with a flat tire; a small-town hootenanny circle provide an unlikely musical portal to some kind of transcendence.

The reader goes along with all of this, because it’s almost possible to believe, and because our nominal heroes are impossible to dislike. Eggers, a father of two, renders the kids in a vivid, credible mess of colours and details, and their mother as a broadly empathetic figure with a tendency to mischief, tipsiness and wayward decision-making.

Most of Josie’s observations seem fair enough, the plausible products of suburban reflection, as when she considers “these new angry people … always rushing to angrily go jogging, to angrily explain, to angrily expound, to explode when interrupted or slowed down, ready to be disappointed … every disappointment a crime”.

In storytelling terms, there is something assured, mature, even old-fashioned about this book. This is an author who seemed to share the post-modernist doubts of peers like David Foster Wallace as to the form and purpose of fiction practised by elders such as Updike and Cheever. But there are moments here that achieve a kind of Updike effect, finding rays of the sublime or even divine that cut right through the quotidian. Some passages reach further back to the tradition of Thoreau or Emerson. Eggers is especially good on the Alaskan weather and landscape as they alter Josie’s mood, albeit often with the aid of a third glass of chardonnay: “The light as it passed through the cotton of the willows! The light as it haloed the trees and grass and weeds!”

Her children, meanwhile, are improved by the fresh air in a manner that might almost read as conservative. “They were stronger, smarter, more moral, ethical, logical, considerate and brave.” Depending on your politics, of course, this gentle, forceful novel might equally serve as a reminder that the frontier spirit still guides the loftiest American ideals, as well as the betrayed, disfigured and debased.