Paperback of the week

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When Dave Eggers's superb fictionalised memoir appeared last year to general acclaim, the only hurdle readers had to surmount was the 45-page preface, crammed with alternative titles, a cod copyright notice, an inventory of costs incurred in writing the book, flow charts, a drawing of a stapler and a list of suggestions for enjoying the book, among which was: skip all this stuff. Thus throat-clearing became an aria.

The playfulness, which permeates the main text too, was what I call ironic, although if I was a social worker I'd call it "inappropriate". For Eggers's theme is heartbreak: death, bereavement and orphanage. Twenty-one when his parents died within five weeks of each other, he was left to bring up his eight-year-old brother in hip San Francisco in the mid 1990s, fearing all the time the possibility of other random deaths. His narration displayed the vitality of youth and the morbid fixation of Prospero on his way back to Milan.

But if Eggers did not know how to start his book, the paperback demonstrates he will not let it go either. A 48-page postscript, entitled Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, includes deleted passages, factual corrections, updates on his friends and news of how many readers bothered to call their unchanged phone numbers.

It also attacks, in a section printed in the tiniest type, critics who dubbed it ironic. There is, he insists, almost no irony between its covers, only "formal fun", hyperbole and humour.

This wonderful essay is worth £6.99 in itself, and I stand corrected.