I have to admit, I'm totally jealous of Dave Eggers.
Which is why I bought Zeitoun.
I hoped I would hate it. Because seriously—what is Dave Eggers’ problem? Normal people start one world-changing nonprofit organization, publish one groundbreaking literary magazine, write one New York Times bestseller, and are, thenceforth, satisfied.
Not Dave Eggers, as he proves with Zeitoun. The mind behind A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 826 National, McSweeney’s, and a whole grip of other awesome literary miscellany, had written a novel that combined Hurricane Katrina, the Muslim American experience, really hip cover art, and the twee appeal of boating.
He was really beginning to annoy me.
So I bought Zeitoun, and I read it, hoping to be vindicated.
The first few chapters satisfied my desire for disappointment to the utmost. They were dry and wordy, distant and slow. “Ha!” I thought. “It’s bad!” I put it back on my bookshelf. A couple of weeks later, I started reading it again—to put myself to sleep.
But much to my chagrin, the book had a slow burn. Before I knew it, I was staying up until odd hours of the night, lured deeper and deeper into the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun—Syrian immigrant, New Orleans building contractor, and devout Muslim—who stays behind after Hurricane Katrina to paddle around his flooded, semi-post-apocalyptic city in a second-hand aluminum canoe. The journalistic chill in Dave Eggers' narrative adapts itself well to his stalwart, level-headed protagonist, who takes the reader into dangerous situations in a way that allows us to sight-see without getting too worried.
In fact, the book is a lot about sight-seeing: through the calm eyes of Zeitoun, we are allowed to be voyeurs into the tragedy of Katrina without feeling, well, tragic. His wife, Kathy, a Midwest Baptist who converted to Islam against her family's wishes, creates a comfortable window into scenes of the everyday discrimination faced by Muslim Americans. As Zeitoun stands on the steps of his house and momentarily admires the beauty of his living room filling up with water, we are allowed a truly, sinfully postmodern moment of thoughtless appreciation, like that guy in American Beauty who takes videos of dancing plastic bags. Even when Zeitoun gets threatened by a band of armed looters, all that we feel is a twinge of ethnographic interest for the young men in the baggy pants. It's like the rest of the postmodern world: you're high on Xanax, and the experience of life is never so tough that you feel you need to look away.
Dave Eggers, you've foiled me again. I'm not entirely convinced of your greatness. I'm not about to join a fan club. But I'd recommend your book to a friend.
And not to help with falling asleep.
