Heroes of the Frontier (Eggers)

Heroes of the Frontier 
Dave Eggers, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101974636


Summary
A captivating, often hilarious novel of family, loss, wilderness, and the curse of a violent America from the bestselling author of The Circle, this is a powerful examination of our contemporary life and a rousing story of adventure.
 
Josie and her children’s father have split up, she’s been sued by a former patient and lost her dental practice, and she’s grieving the death of a young man senselessly killed.

When her ex asks to take the children to meet his new fiancée’s family, Josie makes a run for it, figuring Alaska is about as far as she can get without a passport. Josie and her kids, Paul and Ana, rent a rattling old RV named the Chateau, and at first their trip feels like a vacation: They see bears and bison, they eat hot dogs cooked on a bonfire, and they spend nights parked along icy cold rivers in dark forests.

But as they drive, pushed north by the ubiquitous wildfires, Josie is chased by enemies both real and imagined, past mistakes pursuing her tiny family, even to the very edge of civilization.
 
A tremendous new novel from the best-selling author of The Circle, Heroes of the Frontier is the darkly comic story of a mother and her two young children on a journey through an Alaskan wilderness plagued by wildfires and a uniquely American madness. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1970
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Raised—Lake Forest, Illinois
• Education—University of Illinois (no degree)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California


Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his more recent work as a novelist and screenwriter.

He is also the founder of McSweeney's, the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His works have appeared in several magazines, most notably The New Yorker. His works have received a significant amount of critical acclaim.

Personal life
Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, one of four siblings. His father was John K. Eggers (1936–1991), an attorney. His mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers (1940–1992), was a school teacher. When Eggers was still a child, the family moved to the upscale suburb of Lake Forest, near Chicago. He attended high school there and was a classmate of the actor Vince Vaughn. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, intending to get a degree in journalism, but his studies were interrupted by the deaths of both of his parents in 1991–1992—his father in 1991 from brain and lung cancer, and his mother in January 1992 from stomach cancer. Both were in their 50s.

These events were chronicled in his first book, the fictionalized A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. At the time, Eggers was 21, and his younger brother, Christopher ("Toph"), was 8 years old. The two eldest siblings, Bill and Beth, were unable to commit to care for Toph; his older brother had a full-time job and his sister was enrolled in law school. As a result, Dave Eggers took the responsibility.

He left the University of Illinois and moved to Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend Kirsten and his brother. They initially moved in with Eggers's sister, Beth, and her roommate, but eventually found a place in another part of town, which they paid for with money left to them by their parents. Toph attended a small private school, and Eggers did temp work and freelance graphic design for a local newspaper. Eventually, with his friend David Moodie, he took over a local free newspaper called Cups. This gradually evolved into the satirical magazine Might.

Eggers lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is married to Vendela Vida, also a writer. They have two children.

He was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients. His TED Prize wish was for community members to personally engage with local public schools The same year, Utne Reader named him one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World."

In 2005, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from Brown University. He delivered the baccalaureate address at the school in 2008.

Literary work
• Egger's first book was a memoir (with fictional elements), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which focused on the author's struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the deaths of both of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

• In 2002, Eggers published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. He has also published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically themed serials for Salon.com.

• In 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, a book of interviews with former prisoners sentenced to death and later exonerated. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, "a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses" and "a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies and a practicing clinician." Lawyer novelist Scott Turow wrote the introduction to Surviving Justice.

• Eggers' 2006 novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Eggers also edits the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.

• In 2009, he published Zeitoun and, as a result, was presented with the Courage in Media Award by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Zeitoun is the account of a Syrian immigrant, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, in New Orleans who was helping neighbors after Hurricane Katrina when he was arrested, imprisoned and suffered abuse. The book has been optioned by Jonathan Demme, who is working on a screenplay for an animated film-rendition of the work. To Demme, it "felt like the first in-depth immersion I’d ever had through literature or film into the Muslim-American family.... The moral was that they are like people of any other faith."

• Eggers published A Hologram for the King in July 2012, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel is the story of one man's struggle to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the new realities of a global economy.

• In 2013, he released The Circle, a satirical novel about the internet's subversive power over citizen privacy. The Circle is a combination of Facebook, Google, Twitter and more, as seen through the eyes of Mae Holland, a new hire who starts in customer service.

McSweeney's
In 1998, Eggers founded McSweeney's, an independent publishing house, which takes his mother's maiden name. Apart from its book list, McSweeney's also publishes the quarterly literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the daily-updated literature and humor site McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the monthly magazine The Believer, the quarterly food journal Lucky Peach, the sports journal Grantland Quarterly (in association with sports and pop culture website Grantland), and the quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. The publishing house also runs three additional imprints: Believer Books; McSweeney's McMullens, a children's book department; and the Collins Library.

826 National
In 2002, Eggers and educator Nínive Clements Calegari co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids ages 6–18 in San Francisco. It has since grown into seven chapters across the United States: Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Boston, and Washington, D.C., all under the auspices of the nonprofit organization 826 National.

In 2006, Eggers appeared at a series of fund-raising events, dubbed "Revenge of the Book–Eaters Tour," to support his educational programs. The Chicago show featured Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart, Davy Rothbart, and David Byrne.

In 2007, the Heinz Family Foundation awarded Eggers a $250,000 Heinz Award (given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals"). In accordance with Eggers' wishes, the award money was given to 826 National and The Teacher Salary Project. In April 2010, under the umbrella of 826 National, Eggers launched ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects donors with students to make college more affordable. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/17/2013.)

Book Reviews
[A] picaresque adventure and spiritual coming-of-age tale—On the Road crossed with Henderson the Rain King with some nods to National Lampoon's Vacation along the way…. Mr. Eggers has so mastered the art of old-fashioned, straight-ahead storytelling here that the reader quickly becomes immersed in Josie's funny-sad tale…. What injects Josie's story with heartfelt emotion is her relationship with Paul and Ana…. Mr. Eggers's cleareyed portraits of these children remind us of the indelible portrait he created in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius of his 8-year-old brother, Toph, whom he brought up after their parents died within weeks of each other….That bone-deep knowledge of a child's relationship with a parent informs Mr. Eggers's portraits of Paul and Ana, and their love for and dependence upon Josie—by far the strongest and most deeply affecting parts of this absorbing…novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


The common writerly mistake is to slight child characters for lack of a formed intelligence. But by around age 6, the psychologists tell us, we already have the I.Q. and most of the personality we're ever going to get. It's a rich combination—personhood unconstrained by the acquired prejudices of culture—and [Eggers] taps it here with impressive results. He likewise nails single parenthood in all its crowded loneliness and moral angst…Heroes of the Frontier…offers complex, believable characters…The heroes of this frontier are Ana and Paul, a dynamic duo who command us to pay attention to the objects we find in our path, and stop pretending we already know the drill.
Barbara Kingsolver - New York Times Book Review


Among his bestselling literary fiction peers, Dave Eggers alone is engaged in a sustained effort to write about contemporary America. He’s been going at it so regularly, and so swiftly, that he’s keeping pace with the times, if not getting a half-step ahead…. When Eggers draws the present into his fiction, it’s there not just as window dressing or setting; it tells us something about ourselves… Heroes gives us a woman who’s at the end of her rope, in a place of salvation without the wherewithal to seek it, as its promise goes up in flames.”
Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times  
 

This is a novel about America, about what forces people to leave ‘the lower 48’ to seek refuge in a forbidding, unpeopled landscape… Eggers renders it with such passion and good humour, and describes the ‘land of mountains and light’ in such stirring, lustrous prose… There is a feeling of utopianism about the novel, a sense that, in Alaska, some original American dream slumbers just beneath the ice… Heroes of the Frontier acts on the reader like a breath of Alaskan air, cleansing the spirit and lifting the heart.”
Alex Preston - Guardian (UK)


The frontier in Eggers’s appealing and affecting new novel is Alaska, but also, arguably, the adventures of its heroine, Josie.... Eggers’s shaggy plot may not be to all tastes, but his writing is fresh and full of empathy, his observations on modern society apt and insightful.
Publishers Weekly


Eggers, writing with exuberant imagination, incandescent precision, and breathless propulsion, casts divining light on human folly and generosity and the glories and terror of nature. This uproarious quest...is fueled by uncanny insight, revolutionary humor, and profound pleasure in the absurd and the sublime. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


[Josie] is an archetypal figure, representative of how modern living corrodes our psyches.... But...the overall baggy and rambling nature of the story...doesn't meaningfully develop Josie's character.... An ungainly, overlong merger of an adventure tale and social critique.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Heroes of the Frontier...then take off on your own :

1. Describe Josie. Is she merely hapless, unusually prone to trouble and mistakes. Or is she simply beset by pressures common to many of us? She seems restless yet weary of life, impatient yet  self-doubting. What else is she? Consider, also, her childhood and the way it has shaped her life.

2. What kind of a mother is Josie? She dreams of a new beginning for Paul and Ana, how all three might reinvent themselves in the frontier of Alaska. Is it right of her to deprive the children of what order and ritual they have in their lives? Is it fair to subject them to the uncertainty of her own rather amorphous dreams?

3. To what degree, if any is Josie responsible for Jeremy's death? Was she wrong to tell him to follow his dream, a dream that would place him directly in harm's way?

4. In Alaska, Josie expects to find  "a plain-spoken and linear existence centered around work and trees and sky." What kind of life—and people—does she find instead?

5. Think of Josie's road trip, like all mythical journeys, as a journey to self-discovery. What does Josie learn about herself in the course of the novel? How does she grow?

6. What do her children learn on the trip? How do they change?

7. In what way does this novel comment on the American way of life? What are its observations about what Americans value as a society and how we live our lives?

8. What is the symbolic significance of the novel's title: Heroes of the Frontier? Obviously, one frontier is Alaska, but what other kind of frontier is being explored? Who are the heroes of the book?

m. Explore the idea that the ramshackle R.V. Jose and kids travel and live in is a stand-in for civilization...and that wilderness with its forest fires represents a sort of dystopia. What might the book be commenting on?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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