You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers

You Shall Know Our Velocity! – by Dave Eggers
ISBN: 9781400033546
8.5/10 dropps

Many who are in touch with what’s hip in the literary world will know Dave Eggers for his work with the publication McSweeney’s, his nonprofit student writers’ resource Valencia 826, and the Away We Goscreenplay that he co-wrote with his wife and fellow writer Vendela Vida. Eggers’s novels and nonfiction work have at once been heralded as the archetype for post-modernity in the new millennium, and derided for their self-consciousness and what may come off to some as cutesy, gimmicky structure.

Though Eggers’s first longer work was his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his first novel came (in several releases, re-releases, and editions) with 2002’s You Shall Know Our Velocity!, which centers on the fractured wanderlust of the novel’s two main characters, Will and Hand. From the outset, we are told that Will has come into tens of thousands of dollars, and that he aims to give the money to the world’s poor and destitute on a weeklong, globetrotting expedition.

Throughout the narrative, Will and Hand are anything but successful with their efforts (instead of making it to countries they had planned on seeing like Greenland and Egypt, they get stuck in places like Senegal, Estonia, and Latvia), largely leaving both themselves and others confused in their wake. Essentially, anything that can go wrong for these characters does, as they constantly miss flights, become caught up in the red tape of airport security, and disagree with or estrange natives. As things become more desperate and Will’s sporadic existential breakdowns become more frequent, Eggers begins to expertly weave in the idea of a third character, named Jack, who was best friends with the other two and who is the reason for the voyage.

Eggers is quite unhurried in revealing to us the main characters’ relationship to Jack, and, at the time I was reading it, this seemed a detriment to the first hundred or so pages. It was a difficult story to get into and with which to become engaged at first, but in retrospect, I realized that through this first segment, Will is also unengaged, and without this seemingly baseless beginning, we wouldn’t feel the satisfaction of anything that Will learns in the end.
As is the case with his other works, Eggers’s descriptive language in YSKOV! is painfully beautiful, varying from artful, sweeping watercolorish scenic moments to flashes (especially when Will’s stream-of-conscious is invoked) of wistful delight that seems inspired by the works of magical realists like Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The places where he executes this best are with Will’s flashbacks to his own childhood, where he longs for and reflects upon the simpler time when, desiring to be stuntmen, he and Hand would practice jumping from the garage roof – a time where a sober kiss from an adolescent girl was complete satisfaction.

Most of the novel grapples with Will’s issues surrounding his place in the world and his connection (or, for the lion’s share of the book, his disconnection) with the people around him, as well as what it means to truly live and be a “good” human being. I tend to not have sympathy for literary characters who consistently can’t get their shit together or who trumpet their woe-is-me horn one too many times, so it really says something about Eggers’s character-building skills that I was able to get past Will’s panic attacks and really enjoy his and Hand’s adventure, however far off from their original goal it may have been.
Since YSKOV! Dave Eggers has released other works of fiction, including What is the What and The Wild Things, inspired by Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are. You can find these, as well as collections of his short fiction and copies of McSweeney’s sister publication, The Believer, at your local bookstore.

-Emily Simpson