Reading Dave Eggers is like having a no-holds-barred friend who can shoot the breeze and speak eloquently, have a serious breakdown when he's drunk and in Senegal; and all the meanwhile convey a self-aware yet no less convincing depth unrivaled in fellow authors of his age. His second and most recent book, You Shall Know Our Velocity, also released under the title of Sacrament, is a promising testament to his burgeoning success. Categorically it's a "travelogue." The conventional summary is the narrator Will-with a voice similar to Eggers himself- inherits a ridiculous sum of money for a light bulb publicity stunt. The tragic death of one of his two best friends ravages him emotionally. His cockamamie solution is a huge allegory for what, in essence, could also describe Eggers' writing itself. He and his still living best friend Hand decide to travel around the world distributing $32,000 to random people who need it, directly into their hands. The trip has to be a week, the destinations obscure and far-away, mostly exotic sounding places in West Africa and Eastern Europe. The idea is ridiculous (the cost of the tickets, asinine), and yet at the same time beautifully philanthropic and a huge metaphor for life itself. Their mode of choice is to ask for directions even when they know where they're going, and in return, cold hard cash is thrust into the hands of the confused recipient.

Not only is Eggers' voice fresh, young and filled with wit and self-deprecation, but his various messages are just as worthy of praise. We search for these moments that are real, to communicate on some level beyond the forced interactions of everyday life. And along the novel's journey Eggers' stuns with these scenes, chased through the streets of Marrakesh, alone in the quiet darkness on top of a mountain. It's here that we realize how lost we are all the time in our life, how all we want is order and a place and meaning. The brilliance of Eggers' writing is that in the end there's not one point, not one emotion you're made to feel. He bounces between sounding like a charming pundit, talking back to people in his head and sounding like a wandering lost soul, like a child who breaks down hysterically on the streets of Senegal. And in the midst he embraces you with your own loneliness, your own lost place. He dares to be constantly mobile, to travel the world-the literal enactment of our velocity, with constant movement that obscures the truth.

In real life Eggers is fairly young; yet his only other book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize-not a bad feat for a book flooded with Frisbee metaphors and an entire section devoted to The Real World. But this novel seems more mature; he toys with the reader's trust as some of the editions have a middle section that unmasks the narrator as a liar, stricken with a grief entirely different from the aforesaid tragedy. He asks us to choose fiction over fact, to care whether we know it's a bunch of lies although we've invested our own reality into his characters and their pilgrimage. We too seek out order and meaning in the novel itself, and accordingly, as unconventional as always, Eggers leads us to an ending that answers nothing and maybe everything.

His writing provides an arching view of our ponderies; he leads us to a cliff on the edge of human truth, the sky marked by beauty and meaning and then he leaves us stranded. Upon inspection we realize that the appearance isn't at all what it seems, traveling the world doesn't get us anywhere we haven't already been. All we're left with is naked experience, confounded by all our human errors and desires, and like a bunch of smog and pollution they're what made the sunsets so beautiful to begin with. When we forget that we're all just a bunch of kids stumbling through life, when we forget how to actually live, that's when the real dejection sets in.