Stylistically, Eggers’ newest novel is a total departure from all of his earlier ventures, as it is entirely a set of dialogues between a disturbed young man named Thomas and his various abductees, all of them being held at an abandoned military base not far from the town he grew up in along the California coast. But Fathers is fundamentally a morality play transplanted into the 21st century and, as such, is not unlike his earlier novels such as Hologram for the King and The Circle. Dave Eggers has a lot to say about our present-day society and its failings, and employs the dialogue form in Fathers to confront his readers with these, head-on.
What Eggers does is put in Thomas’ words the confusion, resentment, even desperation that many of us experience on one level or another towards a world beyond our control, but which few of us give voice—or action—to, as Thomas does. Thomas is obsessed with kidnap victim number 1, an astronaut who had all the “right stuff” and worked his butt off to realize his dream, only to be thwarted in the end by budget cuts. [It reminded me—if on a smaller scale—of the case of my depression-era mother who went to college in her forties to realize her dream of becoming a teacher, only to graduate with certificate in hand but facing a city-wide freeze on hiring which stopped her cold.] Eggers also introduces us to a petty bureaucrat who forgets the human element in her day-to-day job; to a cop who murders in the name of the law; to a politician who explains why wars can be funded, but not education; to a parent who failed to protect her child; and others.
I’ll confess that, as I read Fathers, I flip-flopped between a certain irritation at Eggers’ overt moralizing (much as in The Circle) and at the same time a genuine appreciation for his courage and determination to raise issues which impact every one of us and which we generally prefer to file under the category of “you can’t fight City Hall.” Eggers manages to make us fully aware of Thomas’ lunacy even while we feel a growing empathy for this guy whose distress over his own social invisibility has caused him to force people to sit down and listen to him, even if it means kidnapping them and chaining them to a post. Once he has them, the dialogue begins. And while some reviewers may call this a story of revenge, I would argue that this is rather a story of revelation. Not the most successful of Egger’s endeavors in literary terms, Fathers is nonetheless a powerful and provocative statement about the world we live in.
