Dave Eggers has been anointed the new new thing for his debut book. And certainly the attention is well deserved. But many of the glowing tributes miss the point of his “anti” memoir. In fact, it’s more like an “ultra” memoir, “almost confessional in its eagerness to put virtually every question of substance, memory, and motive plainly before the reader. And the habits that mark Eggers’s writing – the suspicion of all that purports to be authentic, the constant urge to peer behind the curtain – seem less like examples of “the latest postmodern hardware,” than characteristics of a certain generational vernacular, whose sources are widely recognized (six hours of television a day, advertising metastasized to every cranny of life, and the conventions of post-Watergate journalism, to name a few), but whose real purpose is just as widely misunderstood. – American Prospect