Breathtaking! Actually, less satisfying if you breathe ...

The cover is irresistible. The red theatrical curtain rising (or perhaps falling) on a Technicolor sunset. The overblown title that must be self-referentially self-deprecating, or maybe not. And finally, irrelevantly, the little words, "Based on a True Story."

The truth of the story is beside the point, as the author points out in his endearing sequence of prefaces, acknowledgements, apologies, metaphor-indexes, helpful diagrams, and other procrastinations that precede the book. "PRETEND IT'S FICTION," he finally says, and this is good advice. The story of a young man losing both of his parents and suddenly having to raise his pre-teen brother is much better as a novel than as memoir. To his credit, Eggers has made a novel of it.

The book begins in deceptive calm -- a brilliant first chapter about the parents' slow, fragmentary, meaningless dying that captures the impossibility of ever seeing one's parents clearly. After the memorials, we adjourn to San Francisco and Eggers slams on the gas. The rest of the book is a high-strung inner monologue. It makes sense as the voice of a hero who is a knot of fatalistic anxiety, but also an energetic dreamer who can found an anti-magazine magazine and ranks apartments according to how far you can slide across the floor in your stocking feet. He remains a child even as he becomes a parent, and much of the delight of the book lies in this contradiction.

Of course, as a memoir, or faux-memoir, the narrative never breaks out from between the hero's ears. Others slip out of character to play self-referential postmodernist games, but Eggers, flail as he might, is always the same, a study in the directionless drive that many of us feel at that age.

One problem with telling your own life story is that it's very difficult to describe how you have changed, while it's easy to describe the changes in others. The tragic quality of this book is that the hero never really grows up, moves on. We simply ride his mind in the fast lane, like a clattering junk car that barely holds together but is still happiest at 90 mph, until we finally hit the end of the road.

For all its contradictions, a hilarious and touching book by a gifted, high-speed writer.