The Parade: A Novel

By David Eggers

2019

194 pages / 3 hours and 43 minutes

Fiction

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Dave Eggers seems to be able to do pretty much everything that has to do with books. He has championed good writing as the editor and publisher of McSweeney’s. And of course, he himself writes. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since he became famous with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he has written great nonfiction like Zeitoun, a Kafkaesque account of what befalls an Arab man in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He has written great barely-fiction, like What Is the What about a refugee from the Sudanese Civil War who lands in America. He has also written straight fiction like A Hologram for the King and The Circle, an overblown but nonetheless disturbing account about how the masters of social media intend to take over your life.

Eggers is one of those few writers who, when he writes a new book, I will almost certainly read it. While I don’t like all of his books equally well, I pretty much always find them interesting. He falls into that category that I would label as moral writer. He cares about big issues and how they affect ordinary or marginalized people. His books don’t seem preachy or uptight to me but they almost always appeal to our moral sensibilities in one way or another.

His latest offering, The Parade, is a very short book – 179 very small pages with very big print. The Parade will certainly remind people of Kafka in some respects, yet it’s also utterly original and carries Eggers’s moral earnestness with it.

So here we are in an unnamed country with two unnamed employees who have 12 days to build a road from the rural south to the urban north after a seemingly unending civil war in this unnamed country. For security purposes the men do not even reveal their names to each other. So they are reduced to calling each other by number. At the end of their work, of course, there will be the parade.

The dialogue in the book mostly consists of brief exchanges, and the characters lack distinctive voices. By now you’re probably getting a feel for what it is like to read this book. You might call it parable-like or allegorical, but in the short time it took me to read it, I found my unease rising with every page. Maybe it’s like a Grimm fairytale where you don’t know whether you’re going to like the ending or not, and violence is always hanging around the edges ready to break onto the page.

As with many books of this type, the ending is everything so I will say nothing about the conclusion other than ... well, nevermind.

Though the characters have only numbers for names, we will not be allowed to forget that they are people making choices in a dangerous and violent world. Even in this enigmatic little novel, Eggers’s concern for the world in which we live shines through.