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Summary
Summary
A captivating, often hilarious novel of family, loss, wilderness, and the curse of a violent America, Dave Eggers's Heroes of the Frontier 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 bestselling 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.
Author Notes
Dave Eggers was born on March 12th, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts. His family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois when he was a child. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, until his parents' deaths in 1991 and 1992. The loss left him responsible for his eight-year-old brother and later became the inspiration for his highly acclaimed memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Published in 2000, the memoir was nominated for a nonfiction Pulitzer the following year.
Eggers edits the popular "The Best American Nonrequired Reading" published annually. In 1998, he founded the independent publishing house, McSweeney's which publishes a variety of magazines and literary journals. Eggers has also opened several nonprofit writing centers for high school students across the United States.
Eggers has written several novels and his title, A Hologram for the King, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. His most recent work of fiction, entitled The Circle, was published in 2013. His recent nonfiction books are The Monk of Mokha (January 2018) and What Can a Citizen Do? (Illustrated by Shawn Harris)(September 2018).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Reader Lowman's fervent reading highlights the comic pathos of Eggers's latest novel, a character study of a 30-something Josie who has abandoned her failing dental practice and conventional life in Ohio, in search of something she can't exactly define but knows that she needs. Without breaking the flow of the narrative, Lowman gives voice and character to Josie's children, accident-prone five-year-old Ana and precocious eight-year-old Paul. Lowman easily distinguishes the friendly and hostile people the family encounters on their picaresque Alaskan adventures. She makes Josie's irrational, often ditzy decisions ring true: run away from troubles, fly to Alaska (which is as far as she can go without a passport), rent an ancient RV, subject your children to fierce forest fires and periods of fear and hunger, as well as lots of happy encounters with nature and people. In short, give the kids the freedom to grow healthy, smart, and strong. A Knopf hardcover. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Adept at literary reinvention, Eggers (Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, 2014) steers his ongoing social critique in an especially liberating new direction in this comedic outlaw odyssey. Josie is a dentist in Ohio with two children: somber and kind eight-year-old Paul and tempestuous five-year-old Ana. Josie's useless ex is in Florida, and there is no way she will allow the children to visit. Instead, she takes them to Alaska, renting a rattletrap RV with a vague plan to connect with a woman she refers to as her stepsister. It turns out that wildfires are rampaging the state, and Josie's own blazing fury induces her to take outrageous risks. Over the course of Josie's hilarious and scathing inner monologue about the depravity of our species, Eggers offers glimpses into her molten sorrows, including the death of her favorite patient in Afghanistan and a decimating malpractice lawsuit. As this trio of surprisingly resilient fugitives careens haphazardly from peril to refuge and back again, 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, this breathless journey from lost to found, this delirious American road-trip saga, is fueled by uncanny insight, revolutionary humor, and profound pleasure in the absurd and the sublime. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Eggers is a sure bet for library holds, and this brilliant, funny, fast-moving novel will catch on quickly.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HOW EVERYTHING BECAME WAR AND THE MILITARY BECAME EVERYTHING: Tales From the Pentagon, by Rosa Brooks. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) As a former high-ranking Pentagon official, Brooks was, as she put it, "part of a vast bureaucratic death-dealing enterprise." In her book - equal parts memoir and history - she charts the United States' shift in military strategy, accompanied by an uncomfortable blurring of boundaries between peace and war. THE INSEPARABLES, by Stuart Nadler. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) In this wise and witty novel, three generations of women suffer indignities in a time of increased scrutiny: Henrietta, widowed and desperate to improve her finances, has approved the reissue of the book she wrote decades earlier (and has regretted ever since); her daughter, Oona; and her granddaughter, Lydia, reeling and humiliated after a nude photo of her circulated among her classmates. JACKSON, 1964: And Other Dispatches From Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America, by Calvin Trillin. (Random House, $18.) As a reporter, first for Time and now The New Yorker, Trillin has covered over five decades of the civil rights movement and its aftermath. His book comprises essays and reporting from across the country, standing as a reminder of the progress that has, and has not, been made. THE SUNLIGHT PILGRIMS, by Jenni Fagan. (Hogarth, $16.) At the outset of Fagan's novel, it's 2020 and the residents of a fictional Scottish town are bracing for an unthinkably cold winter. The story centers on three characters: Dylan, a hapless Londoner; a woman, Constance; and her transgendered child, Stella, whose transition depends on getting the hormones she needs. Stella's inner turmoil matches the impending storm; our reviewer, Marisa Silver, praised how "ordinary, even banal, life dramas unfold while the existential noose is tightening." PINPOINT: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds, by Greg Milner. (Norton, $16.95.) Milner examines how the Global Positioning System, better known as GPS, soared from its military origins to become a staple of everyday life, with a focus on its success as an engineering and technical marvel. Along with history, Milner looks at practical considerations that spring from knowing our exact location. HEROES OF THE FRONTIER, by Dave Eggers. (Vintage, $16.95.) Fleeing suburban life, a woman brings along her two children on a road trip to Alaska. The children, Ana and Paul, soulful and intelligent, form the novel's emotional core; our reviewer, Barbara Kingsolver, called them "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."
Guardian Review
A mother on the run with her children takes a road trip through Alaska in a novel driven by wit, empathy and moral indignation 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. - Marcel Theroux.
Kirkus Review
A troubled dentist pulls up stakes and moves herself and her two children to Alaska.Josie, like the heroes of prior Eggers novels A Hologram for the King (2012) and The Circle (2013), is an archetypal figure, representative of how modern living corrodes our psyches. Josie has split from the slacker father of her two children, Ana and Paul; she's tormented by having encouraged a patient to sign up for the Marines who is then killed in action; and a malpractice suit effectively annihilates her practice. The only thing to be done, apparently, is to buy an RV and head from Ohio to southern Alaska, where her "stepsister who was not quite a stepsister" lives. Every romantic notion about heading for the hills is wrecked in short order: the RV is slow and hard to manage, let alone park; every beautiful vista abuts a tourist trap where staples are wildly overpriced; and Josie's stepsister has a cultic relationship with the locals that forbids sticking around. (And that "not a quite a stepsister" situation, once it's explained, is understandably awkward.) Between the novel's title, its episodic structure, and the scenes of rain and wildfire that shape the book's second half, it's clear Eggers means to craft a contemporary epic in which the bad guy is our lack of connection with nature. (Josie's stepsister lives in Homer.) Josie herself is an intermittently poignant and affecting figure, prone to comic musings about writing a musical about her hapless experiences or dourly fixating on a daymare of a bottle breaking across her face. But those details can't compensate for the overall baggy and rambling nature of the story, which doesn't meaningfully develop Josie's character and mainly reduces her children into plot complications. "We are not civilized people," Josie muses. But this novel is an unpersuasive glimpse into our nascent ferality. An ungainly, overlong merger of an adventure tale and social critique. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In Eggers's (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) latest novel, lead character Josie faces a series of disasters in her personal life. She is trapped in a dead-end relationship with an aimless man, her dental practice closes owing to legal problems, and she feels out a place in small-town Ohio. So Josie, her wise-beyond-his-years son Paul, and wild-child daughter Anna rent a secondhand RV and set out on a cross-country journey, setting their sights on Alaska. During their adventure, they encounter a series of colorful characters and suffer various missteps while avoiding wildfires engulfing the wilderness and someone trying to serve legal papers on Josie. All along, Josie muses on what she sees as the sad state of both contemporary American society and her life. Eggers presents this account of a personal crisis in powerful, vivid prose that paints a stark picture of the Alaskan wilderness and a soul in torment. Rebecca Lowman excellently presents the story. VERDICT A terrific audiobook; recommended to all readers.-Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 There is proud happiness, happiness born of doing good work in the light of day, years of worthwhile labor, and afterward being tired, and content, and surrounded by family and friends, bathed in satisfaction and ready for a deserved rest--sleep or death, it would not matter. Then there is the happiness of one's personal slum. The happiness of being alone, and tipsy on red wine, in the passenger seat of an ancient recreational vehicle parked somewhere in Alaska's deep south, staring into a scribble of black trees, afraid to go to sleep for fear that at any moment someone will get past the toy lock on the RV door and murder you and your two small children sleeping above. Josie squinted into the low light of a long summer evening at a rest stop in southern Alaska. She was happy this night, with her pinot, in this RV in the dark, surrounded by unknown woods, and became less afraid with every new sip from her yellow plastic cup. She was content, though she knew this was a fleeting and artificial contentment, she knew this was all wrong--she should not be in Alaska, not like this. She had been a dentist and was no father of her children, an invertebrate, a loose-boweled man named Carl, a man who had told Josie marriage-by-documentation was a sham, the paper superfluous and reductive, had, eighteen months after he'd moved out, found a different woman to marry him. He'd met and now was, improbably, impossibly, marrying some other person, a person from Florida. It was happening in September, and Josie was fully justified in leaving, in disappearing until it was all over. Carl had no idea she had taken the children out of Ohio. Almost out of North America. And he could not know. And what could better grant her invisibility than this, a rolling home, no fixed address, a white RV in a state with a million other wayward travelers, all of them in white RVs? No one could ever find her. She'd contemplated leaving the country altogether, but Ana didn't have a passport and Carl was needed to get one, so that option was out. Alaska was at once the same country but another country, was almost Russia, was almost oblivion, and if Josie left her phone and used only cash--she'd brought three thousand dollars in the kind of velvet bag meant to hold gold coins or magic beans--she was untraceable, untrackable. And she'd been a Girl Scout. She could tie a knot, gut a fish, start a fire. Alaska did not daunt her. She and the kids had landed in Anchorage earlier that day, a grey day without promise or beauty, but the moment she'd stepped off the plane she found herself inspired. "Okay guys!" she'd said to her exhausted, hungry children. They had never expressed any interest in Alaska, and now here they were. "Here we are!" she'd said, and she'd done a celebratory little march. Neither child smiled. ....... Excerpted from Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
