Sudan novel defies being categorized

Every once in a while I'm lucky enough to read a novel that affects me. Something that hits home.

Dave Eggers' newest work, "What is the What," is one of those rare finds.

Some of you in the 30-years-and-under crowd may know Eggers. He wrote the best-selling "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in 2000.

Funny, irreverent, daring, AHWOSG is a memoir that thumbs its nose at the memoir genre. Even its title suggests one of those tear-jerkers written by people who (I can't help but think) are only too happy to trade personal tragedy for fame and a seat next to Oprah.

His book was determinedly different.

With Eggers we are invited to laugh at the "heartbreak" of our orphaned author and mistrust the "staggering genius" of the man who constantly makes fatal life choices.

As the memoir unfolds we careen along with Eggers as he auditions for MTV's "Real World," lovingly but irresponsibly rears his younger brother, throws his heart into editing a doomed magazine and teeters on the verge of self-destruction.

In the years since AHWOSG, money and fame have indeed found Eggers. And I won't say he's indifferent to it all, but his actions suggest an author with a real social conscience.

Recently, he founded a not-for-profit writing workshop and tutoring center in San Francisco. Also, he is donating all the profits from his most recent novel charities benefiting Sudanese refugees.

And his writing still shimmers.

"What is the What" is this latest example of Eggers' masterful abilities. With it, he offers a fictional account of a real-life person, Valentino Achak Deng, one of the fabled Lost Boys of Sudan.

The Lost Boys were a generation of children in southern Sudan who were orphaned and set adrift during the decades of civil war in that sun-scorched country. Some, like Achak, walked more than a thousand miles to reach a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Many died along the way from hunger, disease, military attack and other perils.

Theirs is a truly remarkable story.

But if you're like me, you may be privately rolling your eyes right now.

"Stop right there," you say. "I know the story is incredible, I know about all the suffering in Africa, but this isn't a book I want to read while I'm on vacation."

I hear you. Reading is a great distraction and escape.

Most of us don't read to wallow in suffering, pain or guilt. We get plenty of that every time we turn on the nightly news.

This book, though, is different. It simply defies categorization.

The main character, Achak, is not some advertisement for "Save the Children," he's quite real. And he moves through his world with so much love, so much humor and such compassion that it's impossible not to be charmed.

Over the course of his journey through Sudan, he's left to starve, he watches his friends die one at a time and yet he perseveres.

As an adult he comes to Atlanta for a better life and is beaten and robbed of all he owns in a violent assault.

Later still, tragedy befalls his girlfriend and he questions whether God has just plain forgotten him. But somehow he refuses to cave in.

If you want toughness, he's got it in spades. Achak's is a raw existentialism that would make the gruffiest character in an Ernest Hemingway novel blanch.

So I'd ask you to give this book a try. It gave me a valuable perspective on the tragic news coming out of Sudan. But more than that, it taught me a lesson in what it means to greet the best and worst of humanity with arms wide open.

TJ Greaney is a staff reporter for the Southeast Missourian.