Heartbreaking? Certainly. Staggering? Yes, I'd say so. And if genius is capturing the universal in a fresh and memorable way, call it that too. Is this how all orphans would speak? I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know, if they had Dave Eggers's prodigious linguistic gifts. For he does write wonderfully, and this is an extremely impressive debut. A virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a staggeringly talented new writer. Exhilarating, profoundly moving, occasionally angry, and often hilarious, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is, finally, a finite book of jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly. What is really shocking and exciting is the book's sheer rage. It is truly ferocious, like any work of genius. Eggers is self-reliant, transcendent, expansive—Emerson's ideal Young American. The book does itself justice: it is a settling of accounts. And it is almost too good to be believed. A hilarious book, in it, literary gamesmanship and self-consciousness are trained on life's most unendurable experience, used to examine a memory too scorching to stare at, as one views an eclipse by projecting sunlight onto paper through a pinhole. Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger. He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear. His book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries.