What Is the What writes: "Over the course of many years, Dave and I have collaborated to tell my story... I told [him] what I knew and what I could remember, and from that material he created this work of art." The book is typical of Eggers' style: blending non-fictional and fictional elements into a non-fiction novel or memoir. By classifying the book a novel, Eggers says, he freed himself to re-create conversations, streamline complex relationships, add relevant detail and manipulate time and space in helpful ways—all while maintaining the essential truthfulness of the storytelling. However, not all critics were impressed. Lee Siegel sees
In the Light of What We Know when the true pleasure of a work of fiction is its gravitational pull upon us?” In a 4,000-word review for "The New Yorker", the critic James Wood described Rahman as “a deep and subtle storyteller,” and praised the novel as “astonishingly achieved…Isn’t this kind of thinking—worldly and personal, abstract and concrete, essayistic and dramatic—exactly what the novel is for? How it justifies itself as a form?…"In the Light of What We Know" is what Salman Rushdie once called an ‘everything novel.’ It is wide-armed, hospitable, disputatious, worldly, cerebral. Ideas and provocations abound on every page.” Australian literary critic Louise Adler