Within moments of bounding on stage, clutching a hiking day-pack as if he happened to be just passing through, the celebrated American author Dave Eggers is talking about his business ventures. These include a Brooklyn shop he opened in 2004 to sell essential superhero supplies: tights, boots and, naturally, capes.
”We have a full capery,” he says, dead-pan. “You get up and choose your cape, depending on whether you’d like to be a warm weather crime-fighter or if you fight crime in colder climates.”
The capes are wool or rayon, he explains in a disengaged monotone. And they are tailored, although today Eggers is wearing a flowery shirt, untucked.
The mostly young audience at the Hay literary festival gurgles with laughter, especially when he starts talking about the wind machine service. “There’s nothing worse than getting out there. You’ve got a job to do and then the cape is all bunched up.”
The 35-year-old Eggers, best known for his hugely successful 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, also has a pirate supply store in San Francisco that sells cannonballs, hooks and planks.
But it’s not all frippery: each store houses a drop-in tutoring centre for young people needing help with their studies.
At another time, Eggers was interested in taxidermy. Currently, his rather eccentric brand of entrepreneurialism includes plans to open a duty-free shop for time travellers in Los Angeles.
He tells us all this with a comedian’s sense of timing, although quite often he says things like “does this make any sense?” or, “I don’t know if that helps,” sounding plaintively apologetic for an inarticulacy not otherwise apparent.
Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, was perfectly accurate when she introduced him at the lectern as “a powerhouse of a human being”, asking everyone to welcome her “remarkable, seriously talented and overproductive” friend.
Eggers is, in addition to sourcing supplies for pirates and superheroes, a serious literary force. As well as his own writing, he publishes a highly regarded literary magazine, McSweeney’s.
He is part of that American tradition where being a successful author isn’t quite enough. You have to be a whole home entertainment system. Zadie Smith, for example, says she was surprised when invited to read at a McSweeney’s event to find herself sharing the stage with “a man dressed as Evel Knievel, a blues band and a man called Arthur Bradford, who writes short stories that he sings and who smashes up a guitar at the end”.
Since the huge success of his memoir, Eggers has taken his wide-ranging underground instincts overground, using his wealth and reputation to open not just surreal shops and tutoring centres, but help victims of Sudan’s civil war.
The book that started it all tells the true story of how Eggers, at 21, raised his eight-year-old brother after both his parents died of cancer within five weeks of each other. The account of how the two managed is painful and funny, yet delivered utterly without self-indulgence and full of insight into the nature of loss.
Eggers still seems a bit lost, squinting from the podium in the wind-wracked marquee. “Man, that is amazing,” he says in awe when a particularly violent gust seizes the canvas. But the eyes, shrewd and narrow beneath an electric shock of wavy dark hair, are those of someone in full control of the virtual circus he creates as he speaks: a ring of weird images that will include, by the end of the hour, the boxing promoter Don King, President Bush as a double amputee, bears that hate Jane Austen and a State Department official who “looked about 12”.
He twists between the side-splitting and the sobering, reading a letter he wrote to the head of Texaco pretending to be a dog, and then an account of atrocities committed in Sudan, a country he visited at some personal risk.
It is certainly a show, but not much of a tell. Despite flaying his soul in his memoir, and being lionised as a consequence, Eggers never mentions his most famous work and seems scornful of the media firestorms he has helped to fuel with his jokey shops and literary shenanigans.
But Eggers is no recluse. He has a liberated imagination that he uses for all sorts of japes, from getting into last year’s Republican National Convention to climbing Kilimanjaro. This is what makes him unsettling and funny; a vigorous source of fascination to America’s literary establishment and attractive to its younger Turks.
A woman says that, as an American living in Britain, she wants to say “an emphatic ‘thank you’” to him for being such a “positive representative” of her country. There is much clapping. “Oh boy, thanks,” says Eggers. He answers a few questions about Sudan. Then, suddenly, he disappears, clutching his day-pack, out of the side of the tent to continue his journey to wherever he was going that day. What have we learned about Dave Eggers? Not much, except, thanks to one questioner, that his own cape is plaid.
