Heroes of the Frontier

THE GIFT OF COURAGE

This, I'm embarrassed to say, was my first exposure to Dave Eggers. The first hundred pages didn't win me over, but his writing — sentence by sentence — is clear, poignant and insightful, so I stuck with it and, by the end, I was a convert. Eggers takes his time and does a lot of meandering by way of looping flashbacks, but inexorably the narrative momentum builds to a glorious, overblown climax of near biblical proportions. You want to scream “preposterous,” and you'd have a perfect right to, but you're having a great time so you ride it out with him.

“Heroes” makes use of a classic “road picture” plot. Josie, the protagonist, is “on a journey to find herself” and the fact that she, with her young daughter and son in tow, are on a physical journey-to-nowhere is about as trite as you can get. But as they say, “clichés are clichés for a reason, because they work,” at least they do in the hands of skilled practitioners.

Josie's a hot mess — a runaway from an absurd marriage and a dental practice that clearly meant nothing to her. She spends endless hours beating herself up and self-questioning while her kids learn to fend for themselves. She berates herself for bad parenting, herself a product of a neglectful upbringing. But in their last ditch trek into the Alaskan wilderness, burning bridges as they go, Josie comes to realize the one thing she can impart to her children is just that — how to fend for themselves and learn to be courageous. In the end, isn't that what parenting is about? Teaching your kids to survive on their own? I had never thought of courage as a gift my parents gave me, and this book brought that fact to light. So for that and much more, thanks Mr. Eggers.