you shall know our velocity by dave eggers

Each new landscape reminds them of an American landscape. The world tour shrinks to a random sampling of Senegal, Morocco, Estonia and Latvia.

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. And the dopiest backpacker would be more travel-wise than Hand. Will has never been further than Nevada before. 'Where's Dakar?' asks Hand, who fancies himself as the cleverer of the two, the autodidact, the king of arcane knowledge. They get to the airport and fly to Dakar. Greenland will be the first stop, Cairo the last.

Visas, time zones and plane connections conspire against it.

They have a second agenda, not incompatible with the first, which is to travel round the world in a week. His other best friend, Hand, joins the disbursement mission. (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. 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. The new book is more Don Quixote than Tristram Shandy, but Will, the narrator - young, artless and (it gradually emerges) death-haunted - feels familiar. JD Salinger met Laurence Sterne and, improbably, they became best friends. 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 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. 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. Of course, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was much more than a memoir. 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.

You shall know our velocity by dave eggers