What is the What by Dave Eggers

My first book of the year that qualifies under my Long Books Program.

I'd been reading a lot of ho-hum books lately, so I decided that maybe the answer was to violate my rule against reading long books.

Generally, I'm not a huge fan of anything long. Books, movies, drives, pretzel rods. Most of that stuff just needs a good editor. If they'd just hired an editor at the pretzel rod factory we'd be living in a very different and better world right now.

Anyway, because things weren't working out, it was time for a change. So then plan is to try and read four or five long books this year, keeping in mind that a long book for me is anything over 500 pages.

Some candidates:

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Sunnyside by Glen David Gold

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Instructions by Adam Levin

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

A Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown

Moby Dick

At any rate, here's book one.

What is the What is the fictionalized version of Valentino Achak Deng's life story as one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. This is kind of a problem for me.

After using my library skills (aka Relentless Googling) I couldn't figure out exactly which parts of the narrative were real and which were fake, or at least massaged in for the sake of creating a cohesive narrative and a compelling story.

The best explanation is on the McSweeney's website, where an FAQ says that Valentino's life and events in his life were the structure of the story. He wanted to tell his story, but didn't feel that his written English was up to the task at the time. Perhaps most telling:

Valentino and Dave decided that the best way to tell the story would be to tell it in Valentino's voice. But because Valentino was very young when many of the book's events took place, there is no way he can recount his life with a degree of detail necessary for a compelling nonfiction book. In a book that is classified as nonfiction, for instance, there can be little or no dialogue, for it's impossible for anyone to recount conversations from 20 years ago with the accuracy necessary to call it fact. A book without any dialogue would make for a different, and drier, reading experience. There are many other art forms that take facts from life and weave them into a more artful form, including historical fiction. Historical fiction takes the dry outline of history and fills it with color, with a level of novelistic detail and specificity that's impossible when conforming strictly to the dictates of nonfiction. To get beyond the brief accounts of the conflicts in Sudan and to humanize the country's suffering, it was necessary to include all the elements of effective storytelling—detail, dialogue, and a comprehensible narrative.

Okay, so we have to guess from there, which drove me a little bit insane, I'm ashamed to say.

I do, however, have a theory on the whole thing.

It's notable that the whole James Frey/Oprah scandal happened only nine months before the publication of What is the What. For those who don't remember, this was partly James Frey's part, partly the fault of Oprah viewers who don't really understand books. I'm sorry, but it's true. It's unfortunate that Frey lied, but on the other hand, so does every memoirist. Nobody remembers exact dialogue. We trust a memoirist to recreate things as near to truth as they can, and any deviation that comes from it is accidental. So he was wrong to put in stuff he knew damn well wasn't true, but to go through a memoir with a fine tooth comb kills the magic of it and scares people off the genre.

Which brings us to Valentino and Dave. My theory is that they may not have originally planned this as a work of fiction, but after this whole scandal erupted, they felt it best to go under the fiction banner. If you publish fiction and just happen to hit the truth, no biggie.

The thing is, it still made me wonder constantly what was true and what wasn't. Was the boy William K. truly a teller of tall tales, or was that a character trait added by Eggers to keep things straight? Was Valentino really robbed in his own apartment in Atlanta? There are a lot of Lost Boys standards in there, such as boys taken by lions and bombings. But those, for whatever reason, feel very real. I think this ultimately stems from the fact that pieces of the story that seem to frame the narrative well feel manufactured, regardless of whether or not they are, while the events themselves have a good feel of realism to them.

For example, the story is structured so that Valentino is always telling his story to someone who is not really listening. There is Michael, a boy whose parents tie up Valentino and rob him. There is Julian, an orderly at a hospital. And then there is a series of faces on the computer, faces that come up when Valentino swipes their gym membership cards. All of these are targets for the story, and except for the last set, the idea of Valentino creating his own witnesses works pretty well.

What didn't work so well for me were the more drawn-out political portions. Reading about the Lost Boys was pretty gripping, and hearing about their adjustments to American life were also very revealing and the sort of thing one doesn't hear about too often. But the portions that discussed the in-group politics once the Boys (now men) were in the United States tended to drag on a little.

I'd say that if you are interested in the story of the Lost Boys, this is a great choice. In a way, it feels more genuine than some of the non-fiction accounts as it's not attempting to sell itself on any of the more terrible and morbid aspects of the whole trip. Because hell, who knows if it's real anyway?

The biggest piece of advice I would give is to not get too worried about following the politics of the Sudanese civil wars. There are so many names, so many dates, and so many differing opinions on exactly what the hell happened that it's nearly impossible to parse, and the book doesn't help too much on that end either.