San Francisco — This is Dave Eggers country. Two hundred people -- that's a mob for a literary reading -- packed the Berkeley bookstore where he debuted his new book this month.
"Any of my old neighbors here?" he asked. Hands shot up. He smiled, dark eyes crinkling, dark hair so tightly curled it stood up. "He was darker when I knew him -- I mean inside," a gray-bearded man in the back murmured. At City Lights in North Beach, fans filled three rooms and a balcony. In Santa Cruz, they played hooky in mid-workday to see him.
"He's here!" a young woman crowed to her friends. "I shook his hand on the way in! It was all sweaty! You can still see his sweat on my hand, even! Look! Wanna feel?"
That's how people here tend to respond to Eggers, the gifted, 32-year-old author whose 2000 career-making memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," was set in the Bay Area. This, as his readers will tell you, was where he moved in his 20s after his parents died in suburban Chicago, leaving him and his siblings to raise Toph, their little brother. This is where he lives now that Toph is a college sophomore. This is where he moved his literary journal and publishing imprint, McSweeney's, last year.
His second book, "You Shall Know Our Velocity," has not received the universal acclaim of the first one. The New York Times' influential critic Michiko Kakutani called "Velocity," his first novel, a "messy, unconvincing assemblage" that was "neither staggering nor heartbreaking, only wearying." Entertainment Weekly, which liked it, gave it a B.
But here, everything Eggers does, including the novel, only serves to stoke his star power. His decision to sell the book only through independent booksellers has been seen as pure Northern California, rewarding the small, socially conscious underdogs over the big, corporate chain stores. His novel's plot -- in which sudden riches and a sudden death prompt a young man to travel the world with a friend, giving away money -- has parallels with his own life, but he has also implied that it was inspired by San Francisco's own disparities in income.
A nonprofit writing lab, 826 Valencia, that he quietly founded this summer for Bay Area schoolchildren ended up being hailed on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle as "A Heartwarming Work of Literary Altruism." When he ran an ad for volunteers to staff its writing workshops and in-school writing assistance programs, he got 200 applications in four days and contributions from Amy Tan, Michael Chabon and a host of other local writers. For part of the summer, there was a waiting list to tutor there.
