What we do to the real, and how we shape it — buff it, bevel it, add enough dusting of verisimilitude as a finishing coat or maybe a tidy ending — has been at the forefront of Dave Eggers’ practice as a writer since his Pulitzer-nominated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which brazenly and bravely reminded the reader that there was an author making choices for the reader. Eggers has subsequently retreated further and further into the background of his pages. At the same time, he’s no less concerned with ideas of veracity.
His last book, What Is The What, the story of a Sudanese civil war refugee, Valentino Achak Deng, was billed as fiction, despite it being the result of years of interviews between Deng and him. It was called a novel because Eggers compressed storylines, and recreated hearsay events. That’s also what most long-form journalists do but never cop to any more than they have to. For some reason, Eggers’ relentless honesty has sometimes been viewed as trickery.
Zeitoun is the story of a Muslim-American family living in New Orleans and surviving a myriad of Katrina disasters, from natural to governmental. It’s labelled non-fiction, though no commentary, asides or arguments appear in Eggers’ writing. It’s just the story of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun, and it’s more than enough of a damning indictment of an administration currently cashing in its get-out-of-jail-free cards. There’s no need for rhetoric as Eggers has somehow developed the textual equivalent of Errol Morris’ Interrotron.
The book begins in the hours just before the hurricane hits and, with brisk economy, Eggers takes us through the lives of the Zeitouns — Abdulrahman’s emigration from Syria, how he met Kathy and how they became contractors and landlords. Kathy and the children flee to a relative’s home in Baton Rouge while Abdulrahman stays behind. Alone as the flood-waters rise, he finds himself part of an ersatz rescue group of boaters transporting those trapped in homes. In a move of logic particular to the US circa 2005, which folded FEMA into Homeland Security, Abdulrahman is arrested as a “looter.” From there he’s thrown into a bureaucratic acid trip, shuttled from a makeshift jail to a real one with others, including volunteers and city workers, doing “Katrina time” with no charges laid and no contact with the outside world for weeks.
While much outrage has been focused on the lack of federal response to the flood, the Zeitouns’ story puts front and centre the nightmare response the government actually came up with. By turning a humanitarian disaster into a military operation with National Guard troops frazzled from Afghanistan and Iraq, war was brought home. Yes, there are faxes in which the government literally warns that terrorists would be likely to operate during a hurricane.
One hopes that with Zeitoun, any debate about the ways in which Eggers chooses to tell stories is put to rest. Let’s just be glad that they’re being told.