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Summary
Summary
From Dave Eggers, best-selling author of The Circle , a tightly controlled, emotionally searching novel. Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? is the formally daring, brilliantly executed story of one man struggling to make sense of his country, seeking answers the only way he knows how.
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In a barracks on an abandoned military base, miles from the nearest road, Thomas watches as the man he has brought wakes up. Kev, a NASA astronaut, doesn't recognize his captor, though Thomas remembers him. Kev cries for help. He pulls at his chain. But the ocean is close by, and nobody can hear him over the waves and wind. Thomas apologizes. He didn't want to have to resort to this. But they really needed to have a conversation, and Kev didn't answer his messages. And now, if Kev can just stop yelling, Thomas has a few questions.
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Read by MacLeod Andrews with Mark Deakins, Michelle Gonzalez, John H. Mayer, Kate McGregor-Stewart, Rebecca Lowman, Bruce Turk, and Marc Cashman.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Composed entirely of dialogue, the latest from Eggers (The Circle) is more tedious deposition than gripping drama. The novel is set on an abandoned military base along the Pacific coast where Thomas, a troubled man, is interrogating a diverse group of chained captives. Frustrated by his lack of purpose and in search of answers about injustices large and small, Thomas kidnaps Kev, a driven astronaut who represents "the one fulfilled promise" he's ever known. This first interview inspires Thomas to seek out further captives: an ex-congressman, a policeman, a disgraced schoolteacher, his own mother, and others. Depending on the prisoner, Thomas is respectful or abusive, solicitous or prosecutorial, but he never wavers in his view of himself as a "moral" and "principled man." He is outraged at the abuses, shortsightedness, and skewed priorities of the government and its institutions, yet yearns for that government to provide him with some defining role or plan: "Don't we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?" As for the captives, they generally respond to their unhinged interrogator with sententious or stilted speechifying: "Thomas, you want to attribute your behavior to a set of external factors." There are flashes of sardonic humor and revelations about the triggering event behind the kidnappings, but by then readers will feel as if they themselves have been detained far too long. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
If Eggers' last novel, The Circle (2013), was a symphony, this one's a jazz session a brief, single helping of strangeness that flaunts his panache for stylistic experimentation. The book is pure dialogue, with zero description or exposition. A disturbed young man named Thomas kidnaps an astronaut and chains him to a post in an abandoned military base on the California coast. Thomas begins a series of interrogations; pines for the days of the Apollo space program, when people had something to believe in; and feels abandoned by a country he no longer understands. We just spent five trillion dollars on useless wars. That could have gone to the moon. Or Mars, Thomas laments. To say much more about the plot would ruin the book's improvised feel, but eventually helicopters, a retired congressman, and a dog are involved as Thomas demands answers from a universe governed by chaos. The writing is compelling and the characterization astute, though the minimalist story doesn't quite seem sure of what it wants to say.--Morgan, Adam Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
POLITICAL NOVELS ARE full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings. Writers may craft their world however they like, so they need not deal with the complexities of reality if it inconveniences their narrative. Ayn Rand's philosophy can work in "Atlas Shrugged," for example, because it's a fantasyland of her creation. A better approach can be found in "The Brothers Karamazov," in which Dostoyevsky makes his ideological opponents his most articulate characters. Great writers force themselves to confront the challenges the world can throw against what they believe. The poet Tom Sleigh explains this as "the difference between exploring a political emotion, say, rather than a political conviction." Whereas a political emotion is concerned with the lived experience of how politics impact people's lives, a political conviction is primarily didactic - it "weaves no web, traps no chaotically buzzing flies - it's hygienic, and easily put aside when the moment of outrage or conversational animus has passed." Sadly, few "chaotically buzzing flies" are trapped in Dave Eggers's latest, highly political novel, "Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?" The title comes from Zechariah, one of the minor prophets of the Old Testament, and Eggers tries to take on the prophet's task of diagnosing his society's ills. Told entirely in dialogue between Thomas, a troubled young man, and a series of people he has kidnapped and chained to posts in a decommissioned military base, this novel doesn't have much in the way of plot. One character in each chapter is always chained to a post, after all, so not much can happen. The book does, however, cover a wide variety of subjects - everything from government finances to police brutality to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Something has gone terribly wrong, Thomas believes, and he intends to find out why by forcing his captives to participate in conversations about American policy, about his personal life and about how the two are related. In theory, this premise could make for an interesting book. Thomas starts not with a political figure but with Kev, an astronaut whose hopes have been dashed by cutbacks in the space program. As Thomas later complains: "We just spent five trillion dollars on useless wars. That could have gone to the moon. Or Mars. Or the Shuttle. Or something that would inspire us in some goddamned way." The contrast between a society unified by heroes like astronauts and a society fractured in the wake of poorly planned wars is certainly worth exploring, as is the way that fracturing affects the lives of individuals. In some ways Thomas is an ideological cousin to Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, who believes that freedom is a burden and that most people would prefer an authority telling them what to do. Disillusioned with America and ill-equipped to deal with freedom, Thomas wishes someone would harness his energies and provide him the sort of direction in life he can't provide for himself. And where the Inquisitor believes the church could fulfill that role, Thomas turns to the next best thing - the federal government. "Why not find a place for us?" he asks a former congressman. "You should have sent us all somewhere and given us a task." But Eggers is ultimately less interested in the exploration of ideas than he is in their delivery. With the exception of a tense exchange between Thomas and a former teacher who he believes sexually abused him, most of the conversations are incredibly one-sided. A police officer's rebuttal to a rant about the police is nothing more than the interjection of the word "No" at five separate points. Even if you agree with Eggers's argument, this quickly gets tedious. It's not a conversation so much as a kind of rhetorical shadowboxing. TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, the opinions Eggers inserts into the mouths of Thomas and his captives tend to be vaguely articulated, lacking in substance or simply wrong. The discussion of veterans is particularly noxious (or perhaps just particularly noxious to me, since I am a veteran myself). Among the uncontested views put forth are the notions that veterans "can't be left to mix with the rest of society," and that "there are soldiers like the ones you fought with, who come back with these terrible ideas and murdering skills, and there's no place for any of us. We've been out in the wilderness and tasted raw meat, and now we can't sit at the table using utensils. There's got to be someplace for us.... You set this land aside for people like us, and I bet you'd reduce crime in this country by half." Eggers has a Vietnam veteran sympathize with this viewpoint, at one point telling Thomas: "There are a hundred thousand others like you in the desert right now, and it's no wonder they're killing civilians and raping women soldiers and shooting themselves in the leg. I don't mean to besmirch the character of these young men and women ... but my point is that they should be kept safe and kept out of the way of dangerous things." I guess this is supposed to be provocative, but it mainly comes off as ignorant. The last Department of Justice report on veterans and crime showed not an epidemic of violence but underrepresentation of veterans in the nation's jails. And while Iraq had and continues to have plenty of civilian casualties, this is less the result of misconduct among service members - American troops have committed far fewer acts of violence against the civilian population in Iraq than they did against civilian populations during, say, World War II - and more to do with the sectarian violence that started in the aftermath of our hastily conceived war. As for military sexual assault, many survivors emphasize the need to change the structure of the military justice system, which is not organized to deal with sexual assault. Blaming the folly of young men for all our military-related problems is convenient and provides a comforting sense of superiority to those stupid soldiers who need to be kept away from dangerous things, but it doesn't help us understand what actually happened in the past decade and how we might change policy for the better. The issues Eggers approaches may be serious, but their treatment is not. And so it goes with the opinions expressed on SWAT teams, religion and many of the other topics of conversation for Thomas and his interlocutors. This book is political only in the degraded way that cable news is political - it's uninterested in the nuances of policy because it's already certain of which side it's on. In that way, it's a fitting document of our current level of political discourse. If I want certainty these days, there are plenty of pundits willing to sell it to me. I turn to literature, though, because when done right it provides something much more honest. 'We've been out in the wilderness ... now we can't sit at the table using utensils.' PHIL KLAY is the author of "Redeployment," a collection of short stories about the Iraq war.
Library Journal Review
Thomas is mad as hell. Life isn't going according to his grand plan, his government has made some bad decisions, and the folks he needs to talk with won't respond. Thomas has never hurt anyone-in fact, he considers himself a principled man-but he's so angry and his head hurts, and he just wants someone to share his umbrage. Using a trick he picked up from a TV cop show, Thomas begins his search for the truth by chloroforming and kidnapping Kevin, a NASA astronaut and former instructor. His destination is Fort Ord, an abandoned army base in California, and an ideal location for holding prisoners. Interviewing his captives about war, police brutality, and pedophilia, Thomas reveals the layers of his troubled soul. Like the biblical prophets of the title, he hopes to elicit repentance from those who have committed grave wrongs. VERDICT A quick read, part psychological thriller, part political screed, this novel poses important questions but offers frustratingly few answers. Eggers was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award (What Is the What) and the National Book Award (A Hologram for the King). Though this slight novel falls short in comparison, fans will still be asking about it. [See -Prepub Alert, 4/14/14.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
