Eggers’ trail of broken hearts

This is Dave Eggers country. Two hundred people -- that’s a mob for a literary reading -- packed the Berkeley bookstore where he debuted his new book this month.

“Any of my old neighbors here?” he asked. Hands shot up. He smiled, dark eyes crinkling, dark hair so tightly curled it stood up. “He was darker when I knew him -- I mean inside,” a gray-bearded man in the back murmured. At City Lights in North Beach, fans filled three rooms and a balcony. In Santa Cruz, they played hooky in mid-workday to see him.

“He’s here!” a young woman crowed to her friends. “I shook his hand on the way in! It was all sweaty! You can still see his sweat on my hand, even! Look! Wanna feel?”

That’s how people here tend to respond to Eggers, the gifted, 32-year-old author whose 2000 career-making memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” was set in the Bay Area. This, as his readers will tell you, was where he moved in his 20s after his parents died in suburban Chicago, leaving him and his siblings to raise Toph, their little brother. This is where he lives now that Toph is a college sophomore. This is where he moved his literary journal and publishing imprint, McSweeney’s, last year.

His second book, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” has not received the universal acclaim of the first one. The New York Times’ influential critic Michiko Kakutani called “Velocity,” his first novel, a “messy, unconvincing assemblage” that was “neither staggering nor heartbreaking, only wearying.” Entertainment Weekly, which liked it, gave it a B.

But here, everything Eggers does, including the novel, only serves to stoke his star power. His decision to sell the book only through independent booksellers has been seen as pure Northern California, rewarding the small, socially conscious underdogs over the big, corporate chain stores. His novel’s plot -- in which sudden riches and a sudden death prompt a young man to travel the world with a friend, giving away money -- has parallels with his own life, but he has also implied that it was inspired by San Francisco’s own disparities in income.

A nonprofit writing lab, 826 Valencia, that he quietly founded this summer for Bay Area schoolchildren ended up being hailed on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle as “A Heartwarming Work of Literary Altruism.” When he ran an ad for volunteers to staff its writing workshops and in-school writing assistance programs, he got 200 applications in four days and contributions from Amy Tan, Michael Chabon and a host of other local writers. For part of the summer, there was a waiting list to tutor there.

“It’s a whole scene,” said a laughing Heather Stiteler, a 29-year-old San Franciscan who, with members of her book club, has attended benefits for Eggers’ center, which runs on donations and proceeds from a whimsical “pirate supply” shop in its lobby. “There was one [fundraising] party there a while ago where, instead of getting a stamp on your hand, you got anointed with these scented oils that were, like, his personal fragrance. He’s all over the place here. Actually, it’s to the point that a lot of my friends are like, ‘Oh, God, Dave Eggers! Could I please never see that name again?’ ”

Eggers can scarcely be accused of courting the attention. He rents in Marin County, as opposed to the city’s close, nosy quarters and, though he invites audiences at readings to ask questions, the onetime journalism student routinely declines press interviews.

“It just complicates things,” he said, politely refusing to speak to The Times for this article. He later elaborated to an audience in San Francisco: “It just becomes the job, and you don’t get anything else done, I mean, with the whole media thing.” In fact, he told fans in Santa Cruz, he has come to find nonfiction in general to be problematic. “It’s never right, and it can never be right for everybody all the time,” he said, adding that if he had his first book to do over, “I might have fictionalized it. Or made it semiautobiographical fiction. Or set it in the Old West.”

On his McSweeney’s Web site, he wrote that he has “been at the point for two years now, where I get a queasy feeling every time I see my name in print.”

A publishing experiment

And yet, Eggers’ press aversion has been its own publicity magnet, as has his tendency to experiment with the conventions of publishing. The book tour for “A.H.W.O.S.G.,” as fans refer to the first book, featured absurdist twists such as post-reading field trips and panel discussions on itching.

This time, Eggers’ experiment is with publishing itself. Three years ago, he launched McSweeney’s, a densely formatted quarterly and Web site for offbeat fiction, essays and humor. Last year, it expanded to books. So far, nine have been published, from a short-story collection, “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant,” by Lydia Davis, to “The New Sins,” an exploration of modern transgression by David Byrne, the Talking Heads frontman. Printings have tended to be done in small batches by a small printer in Iceland. The vast majority of profits go to the authors after publishing costs.

Literary agents have said that, with the success of his first book, Eggers could easily have commanded an advance on royalties from another publisher in the millions of dollars. His advance from Vintage Books for the paperback rights to his memoir was more than $1.4 million (of which, he has said, far more than half went to taxes, agents and other costs of doing business and much of the rest went to such charitable causes as cancer research). Rights to “A Heartbreaking Work” -- which Eggers says is being adapted by Nick Hornby and D.V. DeVincentis, who worked on Hornby’s “High Fidelity” screenplay -- were reported to have sold for $2 million.

Sussing out his motives

This time, Eggers has opted to publish under his own imprint with an initial run of only 50,000 copies. “Everyone else had taken that risk,” he explained to the City Lights audience, referring to other McSweeney’s authors.

But besides that -- and channeling all the available copies to his own Web site and the independent stores that have long supported McSweeney’s -- he has earmarked the proceeds from online sales for his 826 Valencia nonprofit. In other words, the payoff for Eggers with this book isn’t likely to be financial.

“What he’s done is completely unusual,” said Amy Thomas, owner of the independent Pegasus & Pendragon bookstores in Berkeley and Oakland, which sold 75 copies of Eggers’ novel on the night of his kickoff reading. “It may not be the only time something like this has happened, but it’s certainly the most spectacular time. I just love it that someone who is very successful is willing to take some financial hits this way.”

“It’s sort of him putting his money where his mouth is,” agreed Gary Baum, a 19-year-old USC journalism student from Calabasas who until last year, when he started college, tracked the arc of Eggers’ celebrity in an online column.

Those who are more inclined to look at the commercial angle have noted that with a small press run, Eggers actually loses very little money if the book doesn’t sell. At least one exchange on Readerville, the literary forum, noted that if “Velocity’s” sales are poor, Eggers can say he depressed them on purpose. Also, the novel’s scarcity -- only 10,000 copies were printed for online sales, with an additional 40,000 or so for the bookstores -- makes it a collectible. The $22 copies sold over the Web site were all signed by Eggers. As of this week, they were selling for as much as double the retail sales price on EBay.

Meanwhile, close readers wonder whether Eggers’ motives are psychological, like those of his narrator, who decides that giving away a financial windfall he’s received will cleanse him of confusion and help him get over a friend’s death.

As if the loss of both parents was not devastating enough, Eggers also lost his older sister, Beth, last year. It was because of Beth, he wrote in his memoir, that the family moved to California, where she was attending UC Berkeley’s law school. After the first book’s success, she accused him on Baum’s Web site of understating her role in helping to raise their brother, then later apologized and recanted. Coroners’ records indicate she died in a Davis hospital after an overdose of acetaminophen and benzodiazepine, a Valium derivative associated with antidepressants. Investigators at the Yolo County coroner’s office classified it as a suicide. “Velocity” is dedicated to Beth.

“There are times when my brothers and I just look around and can’t believe there’s only three of us left. You really can’t do the math or you’d lose your mind,” Eggers wrote in an e-mail to McSweeney’s readers.

In any case, Dave Eggers has only so much to say about himself and his motives, and those who know him insist he really just wants to be a regular guy. “He’s so averse to promoting himself that it is the canniest act of self-promotion,” said Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and a columnist for McSweeney’s. “”He really doesn’t care -- really. But that’s hard for anyone in the frenzy business to believe.”