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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/books/dave-eggerss-new-novel-a-hologram-for-the-king.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

Joe Average, Just Waiting for Salvation

The hero of Dave Eggers’s absorbing new novel “A Hologram for the King” is a penny-ante Job named Alan Clay, who finds himself in an absurd situation. Alan is deeply in debt, unable to pay his daughter’s college tuition and plagued by a scary golf-ball-size lump on the back of his neck. He’s betting everything on a last-ditch chance at a big payday, hoping he can sell the Saudi king, Abdullah, on a lucrative technology contract — a contract that depends on Alan’s going to a remote real estate development in Saudi Arabia and making an elaborate holographic presentation to the king, who may or may not even show up.

“Hologram” is studded with allusions to a rich array of literary classics, but Mr. Eggers uses a new, pared down, Hemingwayesque voice to recount his story, a voice that stands in sharp contrast to the baroque, hyperventilated one he employed in his dazzling 2000 debut book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” Gone are the self-conscious commentary and postmodern pyrotechnics of “Genius.” Gone too are the less effective exercises in mimicry and pastiche featured in his 2002 novel “You Shall Know Our Velocity.”

Perhaps the remarkable act of ventriloquism that Mr. Eggers performed in his 2006 book “What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng,” based on the real life story of a Sudanese refugee, awakened him to the possibilities of a simpler, more straight-ahead brand of storytelling. In any case, he demonstrates in “Hologram” that he is master of this more old-fashioned approach as much as he was a pioneering innovator with “Genius.” In Mr. Eggers’s telling, the 54-year-old Alan is not just another hapless loser undergoing a midlife crisis. Rather, his sad-funny-dreamlike story unfolds to become an allegory about the frustrations of middle-class America, about the woes unemployed workers and sidelined entrepreneurs have experienced in a newly globalized world in which jobs are being outsourced abroad. We learn that Alan’s father was the foreman at a Stride Rite shoe factory in Massachusetts, which in 1992 “ditched the unions and moved production to Kentucky” and then, five years later, to Thailand and China. Alan, for his part, sold bicycles, “and did fine, extremely well for a while there, until he and others decided to have other people, 10,000 miles away, build the things they sold, and soon left himself with nothing to sell.”

On Alan’s way to Saudi Arabia a fellow passenger complains that America has “become a nation of indoor cats,” a “nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers.” An American architect, who has designed a couple of the tallest buildings in the world, tells Alan he has been working for 10 years in Dubai, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and China, where “the dreaming’s being done” now. And Alan himself thinks back on the trip he and his daughter, Kit, took to Cape Canaveral to watch one of the last shuttle flights, and how so many of the NASA employees they met were soon going to be out of work.

A summary of such moments may make “Hologram” sound like a schematic lesson on American decline, but it’s not. Thanks to Mr. Eggers’s uncommon ability to access his characters’ emotions and channel their every mood, we are instantly immersed in Alan’s story, rooting for him somehow to win an audience with the king and turn his life around. He holes up in his Jidda hotel room, scrolling through the personal photos on his laptop, “the vast grid of his life in thumbnails,” and like Saul Bellow’s Herzog, writes letters he never sends. Vacillating between despair and hope, anxiety and optimism, he relives his failed marriage, his failed business endeavors, his fantasies of making the big score with the king and his fears that such hopes are nothing but a naïve delusion.

When a European woman named Hanne comes on to him, Alan finds himself wishing he could go home. All he wants to do is drink by himself and watch old Red Sox DVDs. “After the divorce he’d been angry for years,” Mr. Eggers writes, “but at the same time he was alive. He’d laughed, he’d dated, he’d enjoyed the things he was expected to enjoy. But now he was something else.”

It doesn’t take long for Alan to discover the incongruities of life in the kingdom, where the wretched excesses made possible by oil money coexist with ancient mores regarding women, where a craving for the modern conveniences of life coexists with a deep suspicion of the West. In a society where, he is told, adultery is a crime that can be punished by death, Alan finds himself invited to a decadent private party featuring scantily clad women and lots of pills and booze.

Some of Alan’s adventures take on a decidedly Kafkaesque flavor. He goes on a long trip with his driver Yousef to Yousef’s father’s house, which resembles a castle in a remote village. Alan’s grappling with the bureaucracy in King Abdullah Economic City, the urban-planning development where he and his team are to make their holographic presentation to the king, is even more surreal. The development is supposed to become one of the kingdom’s showplaces, a futuristic oasis of modernist architecture and relatively modern social mores, on the shores of the Red Sea. In Mr. Eggers’s fictional riff on a real place, what Alan initially glimpses, however, is not the next Dubai or Abu Dhabi, but a collection of three modest buildings: a pastel-pink condominium, a two-story welcome center surrounded by fountains, and a glass office building.

If Alan and his team can make a persuasive presentation, the king might award the company they represent an information technology contract for the entire city. But the Wi-Fi and the air-conditioning in the tent where they have set up their equipment are erratic, and day after day they go on waiting for the king, who fails to arrive. One worker tells Alan that the king “hasn’t been here in a while” — a while being at least 18 months. Another day a newspaper reports that the king is in Yemen, which means he is not coming to King Abdullah Economic City. Later there are reports that the king is in Riyadh or traveling to Bahrain.

The analogies to Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” seem completely intentional. The novel’s epigraph is even taken from Vladimir’s famous speech in that play, in which he says: “Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.”

Mr. Eggers wisely does not strain to try to turn Alan’s story into an existential parable of the human condition like “Godot.” Instead, he has achieved something that is more modest and equally satisfying: the writing of a comic but deeply affecting tale about one man’s travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times.


Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
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