If you’ve ever tried to read a play, then you know what a frustrating experience that can be. Great dialogue may propel the drama, but much of the pleasure of theater comes from the performances, the stage direction, the dramatic pauses. As brilliant as many of Harold Pinter’s plays are, they are much less powerful in book form than on the stage, where those long, chilling pauses are as important as the words that surround them.

This may explain why you see so few novels written entirely in dialogue. There have been a handful --- Philip Roth’s DECEPTION is one of the better examples --- but most authors haven’t dared to try. And who can blame them? Novelists have many narrative tools available to them, so why rely on only one? The reason, I suppose, is the because-it’s-there challenge. Write a riveting novel that employs only dialogue, and you have an extraordinary achievement. But if you fail, your work comes off as a stunt. A writer would have to be brave and supremely confident to risk this kind of failure.

No one can accuse Dave Eggers of literary cowardice. He is one of the few American authors who writes popular works about big themes, from the plight of Sudanese refugees (WHAT IS THE WHAT) to the relationship between American business and Saudi Arabia (A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING). If anyone among today’s crop of young writers was going to attempt a swing-for-the-bleachers whiff at a dialogue-only novel, it was going to be Dave Eggers. His new book, YOUR FATHERS, WHERE ARE THEY? AND THE PROPHETS, DO THEY LIVE FOREVER?, is that attempt.

"Individual passages show glimmers of the thoughtfulness and energy for which Eggers is justly celebrated. But how’s this for irony: The novel would have been better if its author had been less ambitious."

The novel’s protagonist is a disturbed, thirty-something named Thomas. He is furious at America for many reasons. To address the issues that vex him, he chloroforms seven people from his life, takes them to an abandoned military base in California, and chains them to a post so he can question them.

The first person he captures is a former high-school classmate named Kev. Kev works for NASA and dreamed of flying on the Shuttle, only to have the agency scupper the project a year after his arrival. How can America do this to someone who aimed high and did everything that was asked of him? Thomas wonders. He recalls a Vietnamese-American classmate named Don Banh who admired Kev and wanted to join NASA, too, but died young. The issues raised by this interrogation prompt Thomas to abduct the other prisoners, including a former Congressman who, like Max Cleland, is a retired soldier who lost limbs in Vietnam. Thomas blames the wheelchair-bound vet for being part of a system that promised Kev the chance to do something great and then “moved the finish line.”

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the catalyst for Thomas’s obsession is Don’s murder. We learn the circumstances of the death and its aftermath through subsequent conversations, including one with Thomas’s mother and one with a cop who uses antiquated terms like Amerasian and was a party to the event that led to Don’s death.

YOUR FATHERS, WHERE ARE THEY? touches upon many weighty topics, including the American space program, war, pederasty and racism. That, alas, is part of the problem with the book. Too much is going on, and because of the stripped-down narrative technique, Eggers never fully develops any of the themes he introduces. He succumbs to the temptation to have characters speak details that exposition would have covered, such as, “I made a plan, executed it, and I brought an astronaut to an abandoned military base one hundred and ten miles away from where I abducted you.” At times, the dialogue is stilted. It’s unlikely that a 62-year-old lower-class woman, chained and terrified, would have the wherewithal to say to her son, “You and every other child comes into the world with their personality baked in.” Perhaps Eggers’s intent was to create a stylized atmosphere as in the best plays of David Mamet, but the effect doesn’t quite work.

Still, how many American writers who want to sell books would dare to write a 200-page jeremiad based on the question: Where has playing by the rules ever got us? Not many. Eggers deserves credit for trying. Individual passages show glimmers of the thoughtfulness and energy for which Eggers is justly celebrated. But how’s this for irony: The novel would have been better if its author had been less ambitious.