In the most recent issue of The American Scholar, Melvin Bukiet disses Dave Eggers-like writers with a kind of academic succinctness that I have been struggling for years to articulate.
The argument, in short (and please read the essay) is that Brooklyn operates as a psychic designation, and that books penned by writers across America can be considered Brookyln Books of Wonder (BBoWs) if they rely on absurd triumphs over adversity. As Bukiet writes:
Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if saying: “I can’t really believe I’m writing this. And it’s such an honor that you’re reading it.” Actually, they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else, but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley façade of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in the low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan.
I admit that when Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was published, I fell head over heels for the enthusiasm! The knowing self-aggrandizing! Oh, the humility! It was like being invited to an end of the world party and realizing you actually love the world and, hey guys, we're like, all in this together no matter how dweeby you are!
But then Eggers' spawned a magazine, a colony, and then basically an entire generation of 'cute' writers. Six years later and even The New Yorker has bought the bull, publishing not one, but TWO pieces by BBoW flavour-of-the-month Miranda July in its most recent Fiction issue.
Cute! and Optimistic! and Totally Awkward! have become so branded that you can't walk through downtown Toronto without being confronted by bright child-like jumpsuits (fuck you very much American Apparel), oversized round 80's eyeglasses (because blind is the new sighted!) and impossibly thin girls clutching Toronto Public Library canvas bags (because literacy is hot!).
BBoWs reinforce a commodified sphere of hipness (that hipness being an exclusive club of carefully constructed not-hipness). The under-40 demographic has become seized by a culture of perpetual pubescence that rewards itself for precociousness (big words) and enthusiasm (big smiles). Right on!
Never mind that all the happy universalisms tend to erase more pressing complications like class or race (how many BBoWs were not written by white middle class people), and that in order for everything to be 'cool' a lot of serious fucking shit needs to be ignored, what really gets my goat is that this group of writers are coming to represent the voice of my generation. Holy shit. Sorry. Holy shit!
I think while the Foers, Eggers, Julys and even Hetis of the world continue to collect their publishing opportunities like so many bread crumbs in a fairy tale forest, I will sit in my dark apartment, drink too much, and despite the temptation when drunk, avoid waxing nostalgic for a time when Reagan was in power, AIDS was a gay disease, and Dallas was the best thing on TV.
