I have read and loved the hell out of A Heartbreaking Work, and the essayist is just as full of willful misunderstanding of that one as all the others. My reading was that Eggers was damn well aware of his own drama-queeniness and the operatic OTTness of his experiences as co-orphan quasi-parent to Toph.
He spent the entire book wrestling with just how down-to-the-marrow shitty, universe-wrecking the death of one's parents is; how terrifying it is to be responsible for a child when you're not quite done being one yourself; how scary it is to be hit with tidal waves of parental love and delight years before you're ready; how going through all that does make you feel decades older than your peers - and how, if you're a college-educated member of the snarky ironic hipster generation, you can't help rolling your eyes and gagging at your own operatic suffering even as you're succumbing to it, but what the hell other language can you use to describe it? And there you go, being ridiculous again. You can't get away from and can't bear the earnestness and the sap, and you can't find the language to convey any of it without becoming even more ridiculous to yourself. All the snippets the essayist picked to mock were, IIRC, more severely sneering toward himself than anyone else.
Not to mention that all but a small portion of the memoir takes place in San Francisco -- however, it does start in Brooklyn, and heaven forfend any post-post-postmodern literary essayist should miss a chance to piss all over Eggers and McSweeney's.
But really, this bit of praise tells me all I need to know about what sort of literature the essayist truly values:
Moreover, Lethem doesn’t pull punches. On the second page of The Fortress of Solitude, a kitten is accidentally killed while the protagonist’s mother smokes cigarettes.
Oooh! How daring and raw and ripe with unhealed trauma and rooted in gritty Brooklyn reality! I love Lethem to bits too, but those two sentences caused me to practically auto-deoculate with the @@ing.