Dave Eggers, flamboyantly humble, ashamed of his success,

wallowing in that same success, the biggest dork of all, has

second-order vanity, bad. He has had it since he edited the

irreverent, sometimes hilarious, and ultimately shallow Might

magazine. He thinks quite a lot of himself, but he knows that is

not good. Consider the author photo for his first book, the

mega-block-buster Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The

photo is blurry; author photos do not matter to him. In the

blurry picture, there are two dogs and a bird, as if he were

saying: “Don’t look at me, look at these two dogs, and this odd

bird on my shoulder.” The bio states that Eggers has no pets.

“Think about it: there are three animals in the photo, none of

them mine.” One tends to look at the author photo for a very long

time to figure out what is going on. Now everyone knows what he

looks like. He is shrewd, this Eggers.

His first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is out from his own

house, McSweeney’s. There is no author photo. There is no dust

jacket. There is a natural gray cardboard cover, with the first

paragraph of the book printed on it in capital letters. The front-cover

endpaper picks up the text. One is tempted to make comparisons to

early Surrealist experiments