Finding his voice

The Parade, Dave Eggers’s eighth novel, is a slim, strange book, another unpredictable chapter in the career of this hard-to-pin-down author. Like his friend and sometime collaborator Jonathan Safran Foer, there’s the sense with Eggers that, after launching himself so spectacularly onto the literary scene with his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this is an author who hasn’t quite worked out what sort of grown-up writer he wants to be. His novels feel trapped in the no-man’s-land between avant-garde experimentation and straightforward realism, and while they often contain passages of strikingly stylish prose, there’s the impression that they don’t quite hang together as a body of work, that he’s still a novelist in search of an identity.

The Parade owes a great deal to J.M. Coetzee’s masterpiece Waiting for the Barbarians. Like Coetzee, Eggers has fashioned an unnamed country, presumably (although, tellingly, not explicitly) in Africa, where the protagonist’s physical and metaphorical journey functions as a commentary on the idea of progress.