The $80,000 burning a hole in his pocket has come from an ad agency, his reward for posing on a ladder screwing in lightbulbs and becoming a nationwide icon the picture is dutifully reproduced on page 42. The new book is more Don Quixote than Tristram Shandy, but Will, the narrator - young, artless and (it gradually emerges) death-haunted - feels familiar. JD Salinger met Laurence Sterne and, improbably, they became best friends. The risk Eggers ran was of sabotaging his own story - of dissipating the emotional authenticity of the content with the tricksiness of the form. But the endless notes, acknowledgments, corrections, clarifications, apologies, addenda and "rules and suggestions for enjoyment" (an extra 50 pages of them appended to the paperback edition) were also a hilarious critique of the confessional form - as well as a serious interrogation of the problems authors face when they write about "real" people and events. At its heart lay the strange but true story of how the 21-year-old Eggers, having lost both his parents to cancer, became prime carer to his eight-year-old brother, Toph. Of course, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was much more than a memoir. The book is fiction, but the narrative voice is at times indistinguishable from Eggers's own, as heard in his wonderful non-fiction memoir of three years ago.
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