Beware geeks bearing gifts

Dave Eggers's second book, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is full of faults, but the verve and energy of his prose make up for its deficiencies, says Blake Morrison
You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers

You Shall Know Our Velocity
by Dave Eggers
350pp, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

Without intending to, Dave Eggers has written a timely book. It tells the story of two Americans who embark on a week-long "global flurry" to make the world a better place. Their largesse takes the form of foisting money on people, not showering them with bombs. But their naivety, vagueness about geography and hubristic dream of liberating non-westerners from poverty and oppression can be read as a satire on current US foreign policy. "You shall know our velocity" isn't yet a Bushite war slogan, but it could be.

The book is fiction, but the narrative voice is at times indistinguishable from Eggers's own, as heard in his wonderful non-fiction memoir of three years ago. Of course, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was much more than a memoir. At its heart lay the strange but true story of how the 21-year-old Eggers, having lost both his parents to cancer, became prime carer to his eight-year-old brother, Toph. But the endless notes, acknowledgments, corrections, clarifications, apologies, addenda and "rules and suggestions for enjoyment" (an extra 50 pages of them appended to the paperback edition) were also a hilarious critique of the confessional form - as well as a serious interrogation of the problems authors face when they write about "real" people and events.

The risk Eggers ran was of sabotaging his own story - of dissipating the emotional authenticity of the content with the tricksiness of the form. But he got away with it. The book was a triumph. JD Salinger met Laurence Sterne and, improbably, they became best friends.

The new book is more Don Quixote than Tristram Shandy, but Will, the narrator - young, artless and (it gradually emerges) death-haunted - feels familiar. The $80,000 burning a hole in his pocket has come from an ad agency, his reward for posing on a ladder screwing in lightbulbs and becoming a nationwide icon; the picture is dutifully reproduced on page 42. (Half a dozen other authenticating illustrations appear in the novel, which helps to explain why it doesn't seem like a novel.) Now Will wants to get rid of his dosh, every cent of it, less from charity than for "clarity", his vision of life having been blurred by the loss of one of his two best friends. His other best friend, Hand, joins the disbursement mission. They have a second agenda, not incompatible with the first, which is to travel round the world in a week.

They plan a route. Visas, time zones and plane connections conspire against it. They plan another route. Greenland will be the first stop, Cairo the last. They get to the airport and fly to Dakar. "Where's Dakar?" asks Hand, who fancies himself as the cleverer of the two, the autodidact, the king of arcane knowledge. Will looks it up in his atlas. "Senegal."

The project looks doomed from the start. Will has never been further than Nevada before. And the dopiest backpacker would be more travel-wise than Hand. They arrive at airports, check into hotels, get taken to bars and brothels, fear for their lives, rent cars, goof around, wander off track, miss the planes they need to catch to complete their itinerary. The world tour shrinks to a random sampling of Senegal, Morocco, Estonia and Latvia. Each new landscape reminds them of an American landscape. Every city is a handful of souls in a late-night bar. They never make it to the pyramid at Cheops.

Getting rid of money also proves more difficult than expected. Randomness is part of the point (the book has its resemblances to Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man), but the characters they meet are somehow insufficiently deserving. Where are all the poor and nice people? Why is everyone so grasping? They find themselves holding on to their money and hiding it in their shoes.

Wild schemes are hatched - to tape envelopes stuffed with cash to donkeys, for their owners to find. In Marrakech, they lust after a keychain: the portly shop-owner suggests three dollars, they shake their heads and begin to haggle, and finally shake hands on a price of $120. This inversion of commercial logic is deeply satisfying to them - almost like an artwork. In time they loosen up and hand out life-changing sums to all and sundry - basket-ball-playing kids, hitchhikers, prostitutes, shepherds. But the morality of it is more complex than they'd anticipated.

The voice of reason in You Shall Know Our Velocity is Will's mother, who tells him, down the telephone, how "subjective" and "condescending" his mission is. Will defends himself. Giving gives him a buzz. Better to part with money than endure "the slow suffocation of accumulation". But even he begins to worry about implanting false hope - that the rural poor in the places he and Hand visit will come to believe that "if one waits by the side of the road long enough, Americans in airtight rental cars and wearing pants that swish will hand out wads of cash".

On their way to Riga, they bury money behind a tree, then leave a treasure map inside the rim of a tyre. Crazy. But the craziness is part of the point. And if we're exasperated with the protagonists, that's fine by Eggers, who doesn't pretend that they're admirable or sane. In fact, the real story of the book is its back-story: the death of Jack, Will's best friend, in a car accident, and (not unrelated) the beating-up of Will by unknown men, in a town called Oconomowoc, near Milwaukee, an attack provoked by Hand and resulting in the ugly, messed-up face that Will has to take with him on his travels. It's the trauma of those two events that Will is trying to escape.

The manic desperation of the trip is an expression of his inner turmoil, his fear of being alone with his thoughts. "My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats," he tells us early on. More and more, the action happens inside his skull. As well as the words he says aloud (indicated by quotation marks) there are the words that he only imagines speaking, which are argumentative or admonishing (and prefaced by dashes). He has flashbacks, panic attacks, waking nightmares. Life has lost its reason and purpose. The global flurry is an attempt to locate them again, to become connected, to care and feel cared for.

Though it has elements of a buddy story, You Shall Know Our Velocity is, like Eggers's first book, a novel about grieving and searching for meaning. It suffers by comparison, meandering to less purpose, running out of steam too early, and is in general a victim of second-book syndrome. But Will can be endearing, just as Eggers was: gauche, funny, feckless, smart, vulnerable and quietly tortured. There are beautiful small details of observation, too - Hand's habit of speaking broken English when conversing with foreigners ("They treat you not well?"), for instance, or Jack's mum coming out of the hospital "with her hands clasped over her head". Even when the story drags, the prose is high on energy.

Should Eggers stick to playing himself in future, rather than inventing someone else to tell his stories? Maybe. He has had enough of Will, at any rate, killing him off in a ferry accident - not at the end but in the opening sentences, which appear in large type on the front cover. (Eggers's last book had a blurb for a title; this one has a first paragraph for a dustjacket.) Will's story comes from the far side of the grave, Pincher Martin-style. It's not a very original device, and this isn't a very good novel. But Eggers's talents make it worth the trip.

· Blake Morrison's Things My Mother Never Told Me is published by Chatto

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