FICTION Adventure
Heroes of the Frontier
By Dave Eggers (Knopf)
There’s a cathartic moment in “Heroes of the Frontier,” the new novel by Dave Eggers that takes place at a low-budget wedding reception in an Alaskan RV park. We don’t know who the bride and groom are; as it happens, they’re wholly unimportant to the story. Josie, the novel’s self-effacing heroine, doesn’t know them, either. But thatap not enough to keep the father of the groom from extending a spontaneous invitation for Josie, a single mom, and her two children to join the festivities — an invitation that Josie humbly accepts, through great sobs of embarrassed gratitude.
“If you talk to single parents, you’ll find that a lot,” Dave Eggers told me over the phone from his home in the San Francisco Bay area. “They’re alone, and on guard, and overtired, and they can often feel like they don’t have an ally. So when someone really reaches out to them and invites them to rejoin the human band, it can be kind of overwhelming.”
Eggers, 46, has emerged as a kind of literary frontier hero in his own right in the 16 years since the publication of his best-selling memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” The founder of an independent publishing house (McSweeney’s), he’s also started a literary journal (the Believer); launched a successful national literacy nonprofit (826 National); written screenplays (“Where the Wild Things Are”); and published more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, most of which have been met warmly by critics. His forthcoming novel (which publishes July 26), with its endearingly sympathetic female heroine, seems likely to appeal even to those readers immune to Eggers’ status as a hipster-lit Renaissance man.
When we’re introduced to Josie, she’s teetering on the edge. Reeling from a career-ending lawsuit, she has abruptly left her Ohio dental practice and absconded with her kids to Alaska — a place she has never been and about which she knows little — without telling her children’s father, who is now living in Florida with his new wife. Unemployed, unmoored and supremely uneasy, Josie decides that the only logical thing left to do is to rent a wobbly RV and aimlessly explore the 49th state with no cellphone, no credit cards and no fixed destination. Ostensibly she’s in search of adventure, but in her wine-fueled moments of candid self-awareness, she’ll also admit that she’s looking to become “untraceable, untrackable.”
Josie, in other words, is looking to disappear. Maybe for just a little while, maybe forever; she hasn’t really thought this whole thing through yet. Still, even just a few days into her half-baked escapade, she’s already “tired of being apart from the world.”
The only two people she seems to understand — or who seem to understand her, for that matter — are her children, Paul, 8, and Ana, 5. They gamely go along with their mother’s completely improvised itinerary, which on any given day might involve meeting up with (and then ghosting on) Josie’s adopted sister; gently breaking into empty cabins, Goldilocks-style; or frantically trying to steer clear of the literal wildfires that troublingly mirror Josie’s state of emotional combustion.
Asked whether Josie is “pulling a geographic” — 12-stepper jargon for attempting to escape one’s private demons by changing locales — Eggers launches a spirited, if conditional, defense of the practice. “We all know that we can’t run away from our problems,” he says. But in Josie’s case, he adds, there comes a point when she realizes that she’s no longer running away: “She’s running toward something. There’s meaning in her motion. The daily challenge of the adventure is actually beginning to improve her and her kids; itap making them stronger, braver, more empathetic and enlightened. I wanted the novel to pivot at a certain point, where it could change from a journey of escape to the realization that this may well be where she and her kids can become their best selves.”
Itap this faith in the virtue of adversity that transforms “Heroes of the Frontier” from one kind of story into another, midway through its telling. When Josie, Paul and Ana come across the site of an abandoned silver mine, they decide to make it their home for a while. And itap there that they do, indeed, start to “become their best selves.” They learn a little more every day about how to live in the wild. They also learn how to rely on their own instincts, and on each other, for all that they really need.
Ultimately, Josie discovers how her quixotic-seeming journey has in fact made her stronger, smarter and braver. “She’s gotten back to a sense of pure adventure,” says Eggers, the sense of “not knowing whatap around the next corner, or even necessarily where you’ll be staying the next night.”
That Josie hasn’t brought her cellphone with her helps to make her untraceable, but it also does something else: It liberates her from our cultural dependency on getting information at the press of a button. “We live in a time when there just isn’t all that much thatap unknown; when we go somewhere, we can learn all about it ahead of time, right down to the location of every last tree and rock,” Eggers says. “But I do believe that going somewhere without a planned itinerary — maybe even going on a trip where you’re not completely prepared, or don’t know until the last moment whatap going to happen — can be profoundly important for personal growth.”
Connecting with this sense of pure adventure “Heroes of the Frontier” strongly suggests is essential for our development. And fortunately, says Eggers, “itap still available. This country is still so vast that you don’t even have to go too far to find it. Itap important. Itap embedded deep within the American psyche. And every now and then, it comes out and reasserts itself.”
