James Wood in How Fiction Work (FSG 2008) writes in his introduction: "If this book has a larger argument, it is that fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities."
That simple observation has been rattling through my winter-bent mind for several weeks and I think it's apt for thinking about Eggers' autobiography.
Wood's ends the book this way: "Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what must be called lifeness; life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind - lifeness - is the origin. It teaches everyone else; it schools its own truants; it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist. It is nothing like as naive as opportunists charge; almost all the great twentieth century realist novelsalso reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice.(247)
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