For every person I know who couldn't put down Dave Eggers's debut novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, there was another person who threw it across the room. Those who couldn't put the memoir down became "Us," the vast audience of McSweeney's consumers, 826 volunteers, and George Saunders enthusiasts. Those who threw it across the room became "Them," the unconverted, the indifferent, the snarky reviewers on Amazon.com. Taste accounts for some of this split, sure. But there is also a peculiar besieged quality to Eggers's work. His writing pivots on a feeling of boyish camaraderie, an Us vs. Them team spirit that is either charmingly inclusive or profoundly alienating.

The Other team in Eggers's writing most often takes the form of a nameless and faceless cloud of backbiters—early in Heartbreaking he writes, "I have plans for them, the nosy, the inquisitive, the pitying have developed elaborate fantasies for those who would see us as grotesque, pathetic, our situation gossip fodder"—but, curiously, more than a few times in Eggers's work, this Other team is made up specifically of violent black men.

In that first book, Eggers has a recurring paranoid fantasy that a black man in a green army jacket will randomly murder him. In his second book, the novel You Shall Know Our Velocity, menacing black Africans lurk outside the protagonists' car, and later, the two heroic adventurers worry, somewhat comically, that different black Africans will drag them from their vehicle and haul them around by their not-so-heroic penises.

And now, in Eggers's new novel, What Is the What, the main character is not only harassed by a group of black teenagers, but, in a major scene, he is robbed and beaten by a young black man in a baseball jacket. That the victimized protagonist this time is a real man, a black Sudanese refugee named Valentino Achak Deng, might seem to change everything, to turn Us versus Them on its head. But it does not.

The goal of What Is the What, you have to figure, is to get as many people as possible to learn Deng's story. And his story is incredible: Government proxies burned down his village; savage horsemen chased him into the forest; lions ate his friends; the air force dropped bombs on him; mothers shot at him; barbed wire stuck into his flesh; and petty American thieves tied him up, gagged him, and beat him. Bringing this story (and further awareness of global human crises) to the large readership Eggers enjoys is admirable—also admirable: The proceeds of the book go toward Deng's charitable foundation—but the way Eggers tells the story relies heavily on his trusted team mentality and this is troubling.

What Is the What's introduction explains that Deng told his story to Eggers over the course of many years, and Eggers created this novel from those stories. The compelling, composite narrative voice they've created lyrically renders Deng's experiences, but something about the tone makes Deng's profoundly Other experience sound strikingly American, in more ways than just his fear of black thugs.

Plus, in the book's moments of levity, Deng has very Eggers-and-Toph-like fun with his male buddies, giving people funny nicknames ("Commander Beltbuckle," "TV Boy," "Hawaii 5-0"), wrestling in the dirt, and forming all-star basketball, drama, and traveling teams, and later we see Deng have a very American teenager–style romance with his girlfriend, Tabitha.

This is undoubtedly a way to make Deng's harrowing story accessible to people who would otherwise treat it with indifference, and judging by the line of well-to-do white folks gathered around the Sudanese refugee information table at Deng's reading at Elliott Bay Book Company last week, it's working incredibly well.

But by telling Deng's story in the identifiable manner of Team America, Eggers strips him of some of his Otherness in a way that leaves us asking: Can we feel charitable only toward people whose stories seem like our own? And if so, are we more interested in helping other people, or in flattering ourselves?