In a country obsessed with reinvention, Alaska is shorthand for a fresh start. Its wilderness offers the life-changing promise of renewal – and also the real possibility of disaster. The state’s beauty can be a siren song that tempts romantics and then destroys them.
The archetypal Alaska story is hauntingly told in Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction account of the life of Chris McCandless, the would-be frontiersman who starved to death in the wilderness. More than 20 years after McCandless died, his story continues to pose questions: brave or stupid? Inspirational or selfish? Hero or fool?
Similar questions surround Josie, the impetuous heroine of Dave Eggers’s seventh novel. Like McCandless, she has heard the siren song of Alaska and come to renew herself in the country’s “barbarian heart”. Josie is a single mother running from the police, fleeing a comically deadbeat ex-husband, a collapsed business and vindictive lawsuits. And like previous Alaskan runaways, she is trying to escape an America that feels tainted and lost. She is fed up with the atomisation, the inequality and the ubiquitous sense of disappointment. Throughout the book, her outrage is exquisitely articulated and very funny. The novel is studded with jeremiads on incivility and selfishness, on high-end grocery stores where the food is “curated”, on pushy cyclists and leaf blowers: “A leaf blower. The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of all humanity is to watch, for 20 minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do it with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently that I could with a rake.”
An alluring combination of Walt Whitman, Bridget Jones and an angry standup comedian, Josie is seduced by the hope of escape. But she is also intermittently aware that driving aimlessly around Alaska in a broken-down Winnebago may not be the best thing for her children, eight-year-old Paul and five-year-old Ana.
Where previous escapees to Alaska – McCandless, Jack London – have been light-travelling individualists, Josie bears the heavy burdens of parenthood. Her children are drawn with wonderful vividness: preternatually mature Paul with his priestly bearing, whose precocious parenting skills are a kind of rebuke to his mother; disinhibited semi-barbarian Ana, who is constantly on the brink of death or serious injury.
Having set Josie and her children in crazed motion through a world of more or less random encounters, Eggers forgoes obvious plot twists and simply gives himself the task of knowing this woman as completely as wit and empathy will permit. There is a flavour of Jonathan Franzen here, in Eggers’s knack of folding exposition lightly into the action. The novel demands a certain attentiveness on the part of the reader. In his careful unpacking of Josie’s family background, Eggers is asking us to observe subtle patterns: her decision to become a dentist, for example, he suggests, with the lightest of emphasis, is an off-the-peg identity copied from her guardian.
Josie is a memorably articulate critic of America, but the most reliable target of her carping is Josie herself. Shifting between euphoria and melancholy, evasions and grandiosity, she is drunken, loving, distracted, hopeful and scathing about her own shortcomings as a human and as a parent. And you can’t help wondering how much of Eggers himself is woven into his protagonist’s life and preoccupations.
What Eggers and Josie clearly share is a moralist’s indignation at the way the world is. This is a road trip that seems to owe as much to John Bunyan as Jack Kerouac. With his last novel, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, Eggers earned some criticism for too obviously allowing the corners of his soapbox to protrude through the shape of the story. Here, the anger and moralising are plausibly embodied in a character. And while you enjoy the vim of Josie’s scathing diatribes, you are also gauging how disconnected she has become from reality.
In spite of its picaresque structure, the novel has a strong sense of urgency: how long can our heroine keep moving, keep resisting the demands of civilisation? And as Josie’s behaviour grows more wayward, the reader’s sympathy is balanced by a concern that she is on the verge of losing it entirely.
“Fiction,” wrote the philosopher Richard Rorty, “gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended.” In earlier books, Eggers merged reportage and fiction to tell the story of child soldiers in What is the What, or a survivor of Hurricane Katrina in Zeitoun. Here, he gives us a specific American parent in detail so credible that much of it feels reported, a woman tormented by her own punitive conscience. At the same time, Josie is an Everymum, whose hopes and struggle will strike a chord with anyone who has tried to balance the contradictions of parenthood – the terrible responsibility of being a friend, mentor, teacher, slave and magistrate – as well as anyone who has flirted with the possibility of an entirely fresh start.
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