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Out of frying pan, into the wild

Dave Eggers’ latest book, Heroes of the Frontier, is his most satisfying work since 2000’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Dave Eggers’ latest book, Heroes of the Frontier, is his most satisfying work since 2000’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Then there is the happiness of one's personal slum. The happiness of being alone, and tipsy on red wine, in the passenger seat of an ancient recreational vehicle parked somewhere in Alaska's deep south, staring into a scribble of black trees, afraid to go to sleep for fear that at any moment someone will get past the toy lock on the RV door and murder you and your two small children sleeping above.

-- Dave Eggers, Heroes of the Frontier

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Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers

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Dr. Knox by Peter Spiegelman

Nothing is promised. You can follow the rules and things still go sideways.

You are born to unlucky parents who get caught up in things that are (maybe) beyond their control and are unable to provide you with the basic support suburban Americans usually rely on. So you take matters into your own hands, find a surrogate guardian and petition for legal emancipation. You acquire a new jury-rigged family, you go to school and study and learn some practical skills. More than that, you become a dentist, a professional, an entrepreneur, a great American thing -- a small businesswoman in the swing state of Ohio, where furious ponytailed women drive "at dangerous speeds on their way to yoga and Pilates, tailgating other drivers, honking."

You find a lover, a man who, while perhaps too insubstantial (and too protean) for marriage, makes you laugh. You have children together. You somehow form a family, with you the steady one, the provider, while he dotes and dreams and wanders about as childish men will. What's perfect? It is a kind of life, with cars and houses and consumer goods. After a while, you start to forget it's all provisional.

Something happens, call it a mistake. You encourage a charming boy to follow his passion; he enlists in the Marines and dies in Afghanistan. He troubles your sleep. Then an older patient gets sick and claims you should have diagnosed her cancer. Her estate is vindictive; writs fly. You sign away your faltering practice. Let them have it.

And the father of your children, the one who didn't believe in anything so bourgeois and corny as marriage, has headed off to Florida where he has met an heiress. He wants you and your children at his wedding. He wants to show them off, to show his would-be in-laws he's a person of substance, not some man-child flake.

This is one of those stories of contemporary America -- the America that most people live in, the one that can shift and barrel roll and leave you upended. "Disrupted," as they say. It's a story set in an America with a threadbare fabric of material prosperity stretched tightly over its hard land. It's one of those stories where someone gets pushed too far, where something snaps, where someone inevitably lights out for the territory.

Dave Eggers has not been on a roll recently. His recent books -- everything since 2009's nonfiction tour de force Zeitoun, about a Syrian-American painting contractor accused of terrorism amid the chaos of post-Katrina New Orleans -- have simultaneously felt minor and overambitious.

While Eggers has, perhaps more than any other major contemporary American novelist, sought to seriously investigate the ways we live right now, too often his characters have seemed sketchy and emblematic, like chess pieces to be moved back and forth through institutions and phenomena of authorial interest. Since Zeitoun, Eggers' books -- especially 2013's mega-seller The Circle and 2014's didactic Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? -- have seemed to be less about people than ideas.

But the warm and human-scaled Heroes of the Frontier (Knopf, $28.95), Eggers' most satisfying book since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius brought him to the attention of the wider world back in 2000, is mostly about Josie.

She is the former dentist, who, after her fragile life breaks up, absconds with her kids -- Paul, a hyper-responsible 8-year-old with "ice priest" eyes, and Ana, a semi-feral 3-year-old with neither fear nor filter -- to Alaska because it is the most foreign place she can get to without a passport. It is not a book about the American prerogative for reinvention or an allegory about the call of the blank white frontier. It is not about the "Alaska of magic and clarity" that Josie fails to find. (Instead, it's like Kentucky, only colder.) It's more a middle-age crazy story; the kind survivors sometimes tell about how they went mad for a time and how their madness may have saved their life.

Josie has rented a ramshackle 30-year-old motor home ("the Chateau") and is driving it south from Anchorage with the vague plan of meeting her "sister" -- another emancipated minor taken in by the same woman who became Josie's guardian -- in Homer. Sam has attained a sort of happiness -- or at least a kind of stasis -- and she provides Josie with at least a pretext for the adventure.

They are on the lam. Carl, her husband, has no idea she has taken their children out of Ohio. Josie and the kids are living out of a bag of cash in order to avoid using traceable credit cards (and discovering that Alaska is prohibitively expensive). Right there at the beginning she tells us she "was fully justified in leaving," but even as we empathize we worry at the rashness of her reactions, the way she drinks a little too much and reacts a little too skittishly; we remember Chris McCandless dying in a rusted-out bus not too far from what passes for civilization in the 49th state. We worry about Josie, about her apparent shortsightedness and the desperation that's apparent but unacknowledged. (Whither goest thou, in thy crappy motor home at night?)

It's apparent she's stripping herself and her family of the accoutrements of suburban privilege, that she's slipping down the socio-economic ladder. They're separated from homelessness by a rented motor home, moving from overpriced RV park to overpriced RV park as wildfires rage in the mountains and choking smoke spoils the view. At times she parks, exhausted, on the roadside. They reach Sam's and discover the alienating strangeness of other lives. It's not long before they're moving on, running again. It's not long before they're squatting in a cabin evacuated by a ranger, presumably called away to fight the flames.

They can't go on this way forever, crashing through the dark while lightning flashes all around them, but Eggers has something other than the expected in mind. Near the end, even as the forests burn closer and closer, they achieve something like an ecstatic bond with one another and their environment. As irresponsible as Josie sometimes seems, her children don't seem to suffer -- the hardships provide the little family a bracing resistance but never surmount them. Paul becomes less timid; Ana more kind. And Josie, depressed and angry Josie (casting directors please note) achieves a kind of peace. And a little more happiness.

Like everything else in the world, it may be transitory. But for a while it's sweet.

...

Los Angeles has always been a kind of exploded city, less dense than New York or Chicago, with plenty of seams and cracks allowing for the trafficking of evil. The best L.A. crime novels sometimes catch the changeling nature of the place, the shifting of invisible power along buried, but real, faults.

If Peter Spiegelman's Dr. Knox (Knopf, $27.95) is not in the first rank of these, it at least catches some of the bizarre glamour of the city's underground. The titular hero is a former do-gooder who did his time easing suffering in the Republic of Congo and now finds himself running a nearly free clinic near the city's about-to-be gentrified Skid Row. In order to keep the lights on he makes off-the-books house calls thanks to his connections with a former Special Forces operative turned underworld fixer. In exchange for healthy sums, he anonymously patches up gunshot celebrities and dying armed robbers.

Things get complicated when a young, apparently shell-shocked boy is abandoned at his clinic. Knox goes looking for the mother, which brings him into the orbit of Russian mobsters, a damaged executive and, ultimately, a conservative think tank-funding billionaire.

While the book is strictly an over-the-top atmospheric genre piece, it's a fun experience that makes for an excellent palate cleanser. Spiegelman is a pro with a terrific understated voice that skews closer to the exuberance of Warren Zevon's wildman vision than James Ellroy's permanent nighttime.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 08/14/2016

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