You Shall Know Our Velocity!

This book doesn't have a plot; furthermore, the protagonists (Will and Hand) have abysmal foresight and end up disgracing themselves in public and worse. This is ironic, considering that their goal is to give thirty two thousand dollars to the poor.

Will is motivated by guilt and by grief. He's been beaten by anonymous people, and had Jack, an almost anonymous friend die. He's paid by a faceless corporation more money than he feels he deserves for a trivial amount of work. So what better way to redress the balance by giving it back to the nameless of the world?

Well, lots. There are several things they do wrong:

1. Will was given eighty thousand dollars. That's nice, but not huge even for Will.
2. They try to give all the money away in a week, to people they don't know, in poor countries they've just arrived in. This is like throwing around hand grenades. Sure, Will's motives are good. But his method is appalling; he doesn't know that the money will stay in those peoples hands, or if they may be killed for it, or even if he's giving it to murderers. His sole criteria is that they make him feel good for giving it away.
3. In spite of the total clusterfuck which they rapidly find themselves in, they come to no greater understanding of their situation. Will does not try to link his efforts to the U.N. or Live Aid, or Russia, or Afghanistan, or even laudable acts like um, supporting the Contras or advising in Vietnam.
4. As acts of grief go, wouldn't it be nice to do something that the person you're grieving would actually approve of?
5. When throwing large amounts of money around in nightclubs, do not be surprised if you come into the proximity of hookers and mafia.

So there's the first problem: it's hard to enjoy a book when you're thumping it against a chair and swearing at the protagonists.

The bigger problem is that AYSKOV really is a book without a plot. Eggers got as far as setting up a premise, but then after that the book coasts. Without an understanding of the lives that Will and Hand are changing (and Will makes every effort not to know), the book is reduced to Will's soliloquy. His friend is dead, and never coming back, and he feels sad. Then he feels guilty. Fine, for the first hundred pages or so. But then after that... well, it just keeps on going. There's a catharsis, but it's pretty hard to distinguish from the background noise, and the countries blend into each other, so do the repeated characters in Will's play, and they become meaningless background noise, static.

This book reminded me of Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet, from the viewpoint of Tyler, the protagonist who doesn't know what the hell's going on, manipulated by people smarter than him. The scene which saved Shampoo Planet was not the protagonist's ravings or his sulking after the inevitable denouement, but the letter from his hippie mother, who has been mocked and trivialized by her son. She knows what has happened. She knows his story and how he has felt, and she knows the darkness inside people's souls. Her letter is without artiface, without any postmodern trappings. It manages to be true and clear when everything in Tyler is confused and self-loathing.

There is no such clarity in this book. There is no velocity; there is speed, but no direction. So I finished the book, and thought to myself... So what? And that's where I'll leave it.