It seems like everyone has gotten off the Dave Eggers bus and I am just getting on. I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at the end of last year and I liked it when a lot of other people thought it was whiny. You Shall Know Our Velocity is the story of a guy who needs to get rid of $32,000 in a week and wants to do it by taking one of those around the world trips where you keep going in one direction for one price. The book is a little too long and you pretty much have the characters and their relationship figured out by page 300. Knowing what is going to happen at with a quarter left to go is frustrating.
The book also uses too many different unique tricks to try and be interesting. There is a surprise 50 page rebuttal from the secondary character in the middle of the book that seems gratuitous. Also, Eggers likes to have the main character have a conversation with a person and then also record an imagined internal conversation in the author's head between himself and whoever he is talking to where they talk about the "real, bigger" issue of economic oppression or ethnic diversity.
I really wanted to read a book about exciting world travel and about moving forward to escape pain but in the end having to confront it. This isn't that book. This book is about getting stuck and wallowing.
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