David Eggers: You Shall Know Our Velocity

By JOHN MCCRYSTAL

Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover.

You Shall Know Our Velocity is one which not only allows but even invites you to do so, as it begins telling its story right there, on the front cover: "Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River in East-Central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met."

The note Eggers strikes there is the note he carries through the book.

Will is twenty-something and damaged. His best friend, Jack, has been killed in a motor accident, and if this is not trauma enough, when Will goes to the little town of Oconomowoc to clear out Jack's storage unit, he is attacked and beaten without mercy or explanation by three strangers. He has been left scarred, physically and emotionally.

Almost as bad, he has had a stroke of good fortune, too. A photo of him standing on a ladder and changing a lightbulb has been picked up by a lightbulb manufacturer as its logo, and his royalties from the deal are in the tens of thousands. But what to do with all this cash when you're empty, angst-ridden, desolate and directionless?

Will decides to dispose of the money. He and his friend Justin (known by his childhood nickname, Hand) will travel the world, randomly giving sums of money to strangers they meet, until it runs out. They have a week to do it, before Will is due to meet his mom in Mexico for a wedding.

This is the story of their whistlestop tour of Africa and Eastern Europe, their screwball and shifting set of criteria for disbursing the money - taping it to a donkey where the donkey's owner will find it, burying a sum and giving a treasure map to a child - their adventures among people whose languages they don't speak, and Will's struggle to come to terms with what has happened to Jack.

I liked the complex responses of the characters to their situations. Their motives are at least as mysterious to themselves as they are to us; their reaction to the need of others and their emotional response to playing God, giving or withholding without clear or systematic grounds, is a nice metaphor for fortune, which has taken Jack even as it delivers wealth and opportunity.

If you enjoyed Eggers' precocious autobiography, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, you will love this.

* Hamish Hamilton, $34.95