I’ve just finished reading Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Amazing. A little weak in some parts, a little directionless in some, but hey, he warned me at the beginning that it would be so. Plenty of disclaimers throughout the book. Does that make it alright? It’s funny. As a critic, I read that book and say, “Oh, transparent plot mechanism here. Weak dialogue there. Too much profanity and italics covering up for lack of substance here. Not enough revision there. Etc.” And, hey, he’d reply, it’s non-fiction. What do you want? Yet it still amazed me. All the criticism of thinking too much about thinking too much in the most self-conscious book ever written. C. and I talked about it for a long time at the restaurant the other day while we were waiting for Andrew Wright to speak. He’s a professional storyteller, originally from England, now living in Hungary. He was really good. The interesting thing about that sequence of events—first the talking, almost arguing at times, about what it means for a novel to be absolutely autobiographical, even to a fault, even when it interferes, followed soon thereafter by a storyteller who decides that on that night he will only tell stories from his own life, no old standards, no traditional tales. Just stories about himself and his friends, interesting people he has met, a man with a generator (well, being a Brit, his word was ’dynamo’), for instance, attached to the rear wheel of his bicycle, who rides an out-of-town loop from the park to the top of the hill five times, just long and far enough to hear the Friday evening radio theater productions on his old transistor radio.

C. and I arrived late. We couldn’t find the building at first, realized at the last minute that it was across town from the building where the rest of the TEFL conference was being held. We ran to the tram, got off in a neighborhood we’d never before seen, and wandered up the hill and through the looming 1940s communist postmodern architecture of the university dorms, atop a hill with a view of all the neon in town and the paneláky, rushed in through an echoing hallway that looked like a horrible hospital waiting room and toward a room where, once we arrived, we realized that our loud and echoing footsteps had made listening difficult for the entire audience sitting on collapsible chairs around a man we couldn’t see. The room was illuminated by one gooseneck lamp aimed at the faux wood paneling behind the storytelling man, steadier and less distracting than the fire circle which I’m sure was its model, or at least its inspiration. It looked spur of the moment—he could have spoken, and everyone could have sat more comfortably, in the lecture hall not 20 feet away—but the effect of the light and the togetherness and spontaneity was tangible. We felt his stories, felt that something real and true was filtering into us through the dim light, that we, an audience who had never met, were somehow united by this experience, had been through it together, and we all left smiling, tired and ready for bed. It was not too heavy, no ridiculous irony or melancholy sentiments: just an old guy who had known some interesting folks in his day and knew how to pace his retelling, which words to choose, when to pause in a completely uncalculated way long enough that our minds would start wandering just where he hoped they would.