“Velocity” is narrated by a twentysomething from Milwaukee named Will who just lost a close friend in a highway accident. Will persuades a buddy he calls Hand to fly around the world with him in one week in a Beat-poet, road-movie spree, making connections with strangers and giving away $32,000 that has fallen into Will’s lap and has been oppressing him. Will, like the Eggers of “Heartbreaking Work,” careers between rage and wonder: “Last year was the strangest year I’d ever been involved in, it was the most brutal and bizarre–I’d lost Jack and been given more money than I’d ever seen in one place, and I’d been fainting more, falling more. I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes.” As for Hand, he’s charming, and speaks to foreigners in broken English. When the attendant at a currency-exchange booth in Marrakech busts Will’s chops, Hand shouts, “You are bad man! We have flight! Flight to Russia!… We come back to get you, bad man! You will see Americans again!”
Will and Hand’s rapport is so engaging, and it’s so good to hear Eggers’ voice, that “Velocity” cruises along nicely for quite a while. But soon, for every funny-weird philanthropic adventure (the guys insist on paying $120 for a $3 key chain and try to tape money to donkeys) there are tens of pages of deadening, familiar stuff about getting dragged by cabbies to prostitutes and discos. Toward the end, fortunately, Eggers digs into Will’s pain and anger over his late friend’s death, and–well, you don’t need me to tell you that Eggers is good on pain. In its final pages, “Velocity” achieves a kind of anguished, profane poetry. It’s not heartbreaking. It’s not staggering. But if Eggers is a question, the answer is still yes.
