Heroes of the Frontier

Heroes of the Frontier (2016) by Dave Eggers

Genre: Novel about escaping the troubles that have piled up on the doorstep of a mundane and exhausting life and hoping that Alaska can change all of that.

Recommended For: Someone who can imagine the setting of novels like Into The Wild flipped into a mother trying to figure out what being a good person looks like, what being a good mother should entail and begging Alaska to help.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

I went to see Dave Eggers speak about eight or nine years ago. I went with my older sister. It was one of those community speaking engagements where some very well-intentioned person who works for the city, planning events and helping make various positive things available for ordinary people to participate and engage with, probably read one of Eggers’ more famous books or heard him on NPR or was a fan of McSweeney’s (the literary journal he published) and successfully spent a good deal of their budget on getting him to speak at this suburb of Dallas.

I personally was a big fan of McSweeney’s in high school and college. It was something to read that was interesting and unexpected and well-written. I’d pick it up and read it and be happy I did, and to this day, that is more or less all I can ask for of something. Its internet version, McSweeney’s Online Tendency, was pretty formative in my sense of humor. I wrote for them at one point later much to my effort and enthusiasm. I had already written humor for the New Yorker at that point, so I had enough clout for them to read my pitch. They sort of made a thing of it being a selection process, but ultimately said yes, and I allowed myself to feel honored. I am almost positive they didn’t pay me any money for my work.

As a writer, Eggers is…good. It feels like he tries to tackle and solve a whole idea in his books and you wonder “why are you doing that?” but he knows how to set things up quickly and engage you and make messy stuff easy to remember, which is a good quality for a novelist to have. In Heroes of the Frontier, he is telling a familiar story: the feeling of it all unraveling and the urge to run away. The unfamiliar part is that the main character does indeed pack up her two young children and runs to Alaska in an RV. The children don’t know what’s going on. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. And we’re there for that whole tense, exciting process.

I do sort of wonder why Eggers chose to make the protagonist a woman. I don’t think there is really enough commentary about what women go through in America coming out of the subtext to make up for how cringe it is that most of her worst decisions are preceded by glasses of wine. Or how any middle-aged man writes about a sexual encounter from a woman’s perspective.

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At the talk Eggers went on about not having a smart phone, something that he has talked about in interviews as well. It’s one of those things that’s pretty annoying for a best-selling author to say, like when someone tells you they don’t have a television and you don’t really know what to do with that information.

Over time though, I think about that logic more and I’m split on how to react. I’ve written here about my feelings on social media and wanting to stay away from it for my child’s sake. Perpetually trying to figure out what’s realistic in the world that we live in and hearing Eggers, who has made a good deal of money as a literary figure, with a structure in place to theoretically continue to do that, preach about a lifestyle that not only is he potentially afforded by his career but one that sort of puts a nice little Intellectual brand on it, while the rest of us are getting emails from our bosses and expected to reply during red lights…is pretty obnoxious.

On the other hand, Eggers did attempt to keep his 2021 book off of Amazon, which is a pretty enormous sacrifice for an author to make in the name of humanity’s survival over technology. But perhaps more importantly, the bigger question is, is it just impossible to detangle from the apps or is being annoyed with someone who doesn’t have a smartphone pure projection? My wife turned her phone into a dumbphone in the weeks before our baby was born and the weeks after he was born and ultimately survived (though it was sort of a pain in the ass in some ways). And I will reiterate that my advice to new parents is to stay off social media, not necessarily because it makes you compare yourself to others or is evil and toxic (it is all of those things), but because you have such little time that is not spent on your baby or your work and you should use it on things that fill your cup. And if your baby is contact napping on you and you have a free hand, read great newsletters like this one or get in touch with me I can recommend dozens, don’t scroll Instragram.

That’s all to say, I don’t know if Eggers was telling us about his smartphone opinions because he really wanted the world to be a better place or because he thinks he’s better than you and me. I also legitimately don’t know how realistic it is for you and me to get rid of our smartphones. Tough questions to not know the answers to.

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-From Selma to Minneapolis

-Frozen Water And You