Heroes of the Frontier, the newest novel by Dave Eggers, drops next Tuesday at a bookstore near you.  Eggers has been putting out some interesting, timely stuff over the last few years (from Hurricane Katrina to technology to contemporary disillusionment), so I’m curious to see how he handles a story of a mother and her two children living in the wilds of Alaska.

You can read an excerpt from the novel here thanks to the folks at Outside Online.  I’ve only skimmed the passage myself, as I’d kind of like to read things in the broader context, as they happened.  I did read a couple of paragraphs talking about the effects of “non-calendared living” on Paul and Ana, the two children in the story.  Makes you wonder how Eggers might subvert things before the novel’s end.  An excerpt from the excerpt:

In those long days at the Peterssen Mine, Paul and Ana made bows from bent sticks and rubber bands. They created and destroyed dams in the river, they piled rocks to make walls and rock castles. They read by candlelight. Josie taught Paul how to start a fire in the hearth. They napped some afternoons, and other afternoons they explored the buildings of the old mine, the midday sun coming through the porous roofs in white bolts, dozens of tiny spotlights illuminating dust and rust and tools not held for a hundred years.

There were a hundred uncomplicated hours in every day and they didn’t see a soul for weeks. Was it weeks? They no longer had a grasp of the calendar. During the day all was quiet but for the occasional scream of a bird, like a lunatic neighbor; at night, the air was alive with frogs and crickets and coyotes. Paul and Ana slept deeply and Josie hovered over them, like a cold night cloud over rows of hills warmed all day in the sun.

They were growing in beautiful ways, becoming independent, and forgetting all material concerns, were awake to the light and the land, caring more about the movement of the river than any buyable object or piece of school gossip. She was proud of them, of their purifying souls, the way they asked nothing of her now, they slept through the night, and relished the performing of chores, liked to wash their clothes—and they were immeasurably better now than they were in Ohio. They were stronger, smarter, more moral, ethical, logical, considerate, and brave. And this was, Josie realized, what she wanted most of all from her children: she wanted them to be brave. She knew they would be kind. Paul was born that way and he would make sure Ana was kind, but to be brave! Ana was inherently courageous, but Paul was learning this. He was no longer afraid of the dark, would plunge into any woods with or without a light. One day, on her way back from the woods, she caught the two of them on the hillside near the cabin, both barefoot, gently shushing through the shallow leaves with their bows, watching something invisible to her. She turned, scanned the forest, and finally saw it, a ten-point buck, walking through the birches, his back straight and proud. Her children were mirroring it on the other side of the hill, unheard by the deer. They had turned into something else entirely.

(image from amazon.com)