The Review of Contemporary Fiction

You Shall Know Our Velocity, by Dave Eggers
reviewed by Tim Feeney

Dave Eggers. You Shall Know Our Velocity. McSweeney’s, 2002. 371 pp. $22.00.

Y.S.K.O.V.’s narrative—two guys attempt to travel the world, giving away thousands of guiltily gotten dollars to whomever they decide deserves or needs it—begins on the cover, continues onto the inside front, and proceeds without a break until the final page. This urgency, literal and thematic, is countered by the narrator’s spiritual impotence: he wants “every option, simultaneously,” but we soon realize that he wouldn’t know what to do with those options were they available to him. He’s like one of Mark Pauline’s self-destructing machines, the frames of which are too weak for the strength of their motors: his heart is big beyond his ability to follow through, a will with no way, and he tends to end up flopping around in helpless, indecisive fury. (His name is Will, not incidentally.) Eggers’s first novel is both sort of slight—it’s basically a Road Novel; there’ve been a few—and startlingly earnest and profound. With A Heartbreaking Work etc. Eggers pushed snarkiness to the limit of readers’ endurance. It was fun, but relentless, and left you feeling a little like you’d been spoken down to. Here he moves to something more heartfelt, wrestling with sincerity in a complicated and pitiless world. Will, bearing an uncanny verbal and characteristic resemblance to the Eggers of Heartbreaking, isn’t recoiling from modernity so much as he’s stumbling from it, overwhelmed, driving the multiplicity-of-truths concept further by accepting all truths simultaneously. Throw in some comfortable-white-American-male guilt and the consequence is a man so stunned by modern discord that he can function only in fits. When the guys, following whims, ask airline agents to suggest destinations, the agents respond by asking them where they want to go. They don’t know; they want to be told. Their velocity is that of flux: they writhe in place.