Heroes of the Frontier, a novel by Dave Eggers

Heroes of the Frontier, by Dave Eggers, is deeply philosophical, deeply felt, and deeply funny. The novel centers on a woman who escapes to Alaska with her two children and makes her way across the state in a beat-up rented recreational vehicle they call the Chateau. If you’ve ever gone camping, you’ll adore all the details of life in this wreck on wheels.

Eggers is one of those graceful fluid writers whose prose is so effortless it masks its skill. His characters – the fantastically flawed and appealing Josie and her two children – are wonderfully drawn. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever been as enthralled by any children in adult fiction as I was with Paul and Ana. The delights of the family’s travels throughout Alaska, their near misses/calamities, kept me up reading. Many parts – mostly because of his turns of phrase – are laugh-out-loud funny.

What Eggers is ruminating on in this novel, though, goes beyond the story of a woman on the run from a bad relationship and on the road with her family. It’s a kind of spiritual coming-of-age tale, a meditation on the grandeur of Alaska, and an investigation of environmental catastrophe. Forest fires are sweeping up from the south, roaring through the country’s late-summer forests, threatening this last frontier of pristine territory. Many readers will be aware of the current threat of opening the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling that the Trump administration is currently pushing. But the novel was written earlier and doesn’t reference it. Eggers, in giving Josie a way to reawaken to herself and give her children precious freedom and responsibility, is saying something about how crucial true wilderness is for humankind and what’s at stake if we lose touch with our wild spaces.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay