New Yorker Fiction 2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J. G. Ballard
Born November 15, 1930

 November 17, 2014, Dave Eggers, “Alaska of Giants and Gods”: Josie, thirty-eight-year-old mother of two, leaves her husband and profession as a dentist behind to begin a new life with her two kids in Seward, Alaska. ¶ Eggers is an individualist, writing the way he wishes to, for example, occasionally wending his way into the third person omniscient. Contemporary writing teachers sometimes refer to this practice as head-hopping, particularly when amateurs do it, but Eggers performs this magic with aplomb, instantly--“Now the old man was delighted. His face came alive, he lost twenty years, forgot all the funerals” (77)—and effectively, because he's slipping into the man's head through Josie's suppositions. ¶ Eggers leads readers on what they may believe to be a journey through the Alaskan wilderness—after all, Josie the ex-dentist has left her husband, disenfranchised her children—and then readers wind up climbing aboard one of those huge white cruise ships (just like that, guests of a crazy old man) to witness the show of a magician from Luxembourg. Josie consumes three glasses of wine in short order, and a certain insight hits her:


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Eggers Is Magic

“With incredible clarity she knew, then, that the answer to her life was that at every opportunity she’d made precisely the wrong choice. She had been a dentist for a decade but for most of that time had not wanted to be a dentist. What could she do now? (80).

What Josie does is something we're not privy to, but we certainly feel, intuit, that with all imaginable hope, Josie’s life will now be different. Eggers’s latest book is Your Fathers, Where Are they? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?
[The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.]

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book, "My Long-Playing Records," the Story