Dave Eggers: ‘There should be a rule that you can’t change a dead author’s text’
“When I wrote The Circle I got into such a dark, paranoid place,” he says of his 2013 novel about a malign, omnipotent internet company (motto: “Secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft”), which was made into a film in 2017 starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks. “I didn’t learn my lesson and went back into it with The Every [his 2021 sequel]. I’m ready to opt out at this point.”
As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area since 1992, Dave Eggers, 54, has been well-placed to pick up insider gossip about the activities of his neighbours in Silicon Valley. At the same time he admits he’s been at some disadvantage writing about the tech world because “I don’t interact with technology the same way that a lot of people have to.”
He eschews smartphones and, as far as possible, the internet. Today, having rung up his publisher who’s relaying the call to me through Zoom, he’s speaking to me from his Wi-Fi-free office: a boat berthed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. “It’s very foggy so you’ll be hearing the tug boats trying to guide the ships through the channel.”
These days Eggers is no longer conjuring futuristic nightmares on his boat, but rather writing “about the things I’m more passionate about, like art and nature”. Hence his new book, The Eyes and the Impossible, about the exploits of a wild dog called Johannes, which shares his creator’s enthusiasm for surrealist art. “I think I’m more of a fan than I would have been had I pursued [art] full-time and been a better painter than I became,” says Eggers, a “failed art student”.
The book has already received the most prestigious children’s literature prize in the US, the 102-year-old Newbery Medal, although Eggers insists he wrote it for readers of all ages. “I didn’t expect it to reach much of an audience because I thought it was so odd, so it’s really gratifying that it’s connected with people. This is the most fun I’ve ever had writing by a long shot.”
Johannes’s adventures include being rescued from kidnappers by his pals – a gull, a pelican and a squirrel – and becoming a reluctant celebrity after saving a baby girl from drowning. Eggers bats aside my suggestion that the book should be read as an exploration of his familiar theme of the value of freedom and privacy. “Orwell messed it up for the rest of us. Nobody should feel obligated to try to find some kind of corollary between the animals and human counterparts. This is not an allegory.”
Eggers’s own favourite writers as a child included Roald Dahl, the wholesale rewriting of whose works seems to have been anticipated in The Every: it featured a “FictFix” algorithm that “corrects” novels from the past so that they suit contemporary tastes and mores. The Dahl debacle, he says, “was a terrible thing and I’ve railed against it at a lot of library events in the past year or two. We need a straightforward rule: under no circumstances can any text be changed without the author’s approval. Which means if the author’s dead it cannot be changed.”
Eggers has been a victim of the current zeal for censorship himself, as outlined in a recent documentary film, To Be Destroyed. “The Circle, which is sometimes taught to seniors, has been banned in about 12 school districts now. It’s because there are a couple of sex scenes that underline how awkward intimacy has become for people who work in a place like The Circle. They’re not sexy; if anything they would encourage abstinence among the readers.
“It started in Rapid City, South Dakota, where my book and some others were pulled from the three high schools there and slated to be destroyed: hundreds of brand-new books being pulped or burned. There were no complaints from pupils or parents: it’s [Right-wing] groups like Moms for Liberty that go through books that are assigned in schools and find objectionable aspects. Even in a conservative state like South Dakota, most people are outraged by this and want no part of the banning of books.”
Eggers is more usually regarded as a saintly figure than a potential corruptor; his friend Nick Hornby once observed that “the only other writer I can think of with the same kind of reforming zeal is Charles Dickens”. Paid $2 million for the film rights to his acclaimed first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) – a memoir of bringing up his eight-year-old brother when he was 21, after his parents died of cancer in rapid succession – Eggers has ploughed the money into philanthropy.
Since then he has founded organisations such as 826 Valencia, a writing school for children housed in a shop otherwise dedicated to selling pirate costumes. The proceeds from his 2006 novel What Is the What, a fictionalised account of the life of Sudanese child refugee Valentino Achak Deng, have been used to build a network of schools in Sudan, which Deng now runs.
It’s a level of commitment to good works hardly typical of rich novelists, but when I ask Eggers what drives it, he falls back on slightly tongue-tied modesty. “You’ll see a pattern in that I can sometimes get these things moving and then I am, I guess, wise enough to let the management of these organisations be done by far more qualified people than myself. I’m ready if I’m called upon to help but otherwise I stay out of the way.”
Eggers has also used his clout to stand up to Amazon, refusing to allow the retailer to sell The Every when it came out in hardback. “It’s throwing pebbles at a battleship. It’s down to the regulators to make things a little bit more fair for small booksellers. Antitrust laws are there for a reason.”
Eggers is also well known as founder (in 1998) of the independent publisher McSweeney’s and of the influential literary magazine of the same name; he conceived the magazine as “a refuge” for experimental writing.
McSweeney’s also publishes a magazine for children, Illustoria. “That’s ever-faster-growing. When my kids were younger [he has two teenage children with his wife, writer Vendela Vida] we always made sure that they subscribed to magazines: it was such an event getting them through the mail every month. We assume kids always want more screen time, which I don’t think is the case if you offer them an alternative. We’re ceding that fight too quickly, and that’s doing them a permanent disservice.”
He worries that children – and adults – are becoming too disconnected from the natural world. “I think we’re separating ourselves from nature drastically: it’s accelerated 100-fold in the past 10 or 12 years, and there’s no wonder we’re getting sicker and more fragile and less content.”
This is why he bought himself an office-boat. “Now I work surrounded by herons and pelicans and seals and sea lions, and I feel more balanced. Even this cottony fog is enough to satisfy my beauty quota for the day and then I can go on about my business.”
The Eyes and the Impossible is published on Sept 19 by Anderson Press
