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Summary
Summary
In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King , Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy's gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment -- and a moving story of how we got here.
Author Notes
Dave Eggers was born on March 12th, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts. His family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois when he was a child. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, until his parents' deaths in 1991 and 1992. The loss left him responsible for his eight-year-old brother and later became the inspiration for his highly acclaimed memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Published in 2000, the memoir was nominated for a nonfiction Pulitzer the following year.
Eggers edits the popular "The Best American Nonrequired Reading" published annually. In 1998, he founded the independent publishing house, McSweeney's which publishes a variety of magazines and literary journals. Eggers has also opened several nonprofit writing centers for high school students across the United States.
Eggers has written several novels and his title, A Hologram for the King, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. His most recent work of fiction, entitled The Circle, was published in 2013. His recent nonfiction books are The Monk of Mokha (January 2018) and What Can a Citizen Do? (Illustrated by Shawn Harris)(September 2018).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Eggers's fourth novel, failed entrepreneur Alan Clay is recently divorced, deeply in debt, and struggling to pay for his daughter's next expensive semester. When his latest business venture lands him in a soon-to-be prosperous city in Saudi Arabia, he must work to win a communications contract from an elusive king. Clay expects to stay a few days, but finds the project without an end date. Stranded in a desert purgatory, Clay drinks too much, sleeps too little, writes long e-mails to his daughter, reflects on the missteps that have led him astray in life, and, in his bleaker moments, performs surgery himself on a suspicious growth on the back of his neck. For a businessman hoping to salvage his career, it is a shaky new beginning. Narrator Dion Graham-who has previously read other Eggers titles-turns in a standout performance. His reading is clear, crisp, well paced, and thoroughly entertaining. He fluidly switches between dozens of dialects and creates unique voices for a host of characters. Eggers fans will be delighted. A McSweeney's hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A middle-aged man scrapes for his identity in a Saudi Arabian city of the future. This book by McSweeney's founder Eggers (Zeitoun, 2009, etc.) inverts the premise of his fiction debut, 2002's You Shall Know Our Velocity. That novel was a globe-trotting tale about giving away money; this one features a hero stuck in one place and desperate to make a bundle. Alan Clay is a 50-something American salesperson for an information technology company angling for a contract to wire King Abdullah Economic City, a Saudi commerce hub. Alan and his team are initially anxious to deliver their presentation to the king--which features a remote speaker appearing via hologram--but they soon learn the country moves at a snail-like pace. So Alan drifts: He wanders the moonscape of the sparely constructed city, obsesses over a cyst on his back, bonds with his troubled driver, pursues fumbling relationships with two women, ponders his debts and recalls his shortcomings as a salesman, husband and father. This book is in part a commentary on America's eroding economic might (there are numerous asides about offshoring and cheap labor), but it's mostly a potent, well-drawn portrait of one man's discovery of where his personal and professional selves split and connect. Eggers has matured greatly as a novelist since Velocity: Where that novel was gassy and knotted, this one has crisp sentences and a solid structure. He masters the hurry-up-and-wait rhythm of Alan's visit, accelerating the prose when the King's arrival seems imminent, then slackening it again. If anything, the novel's flaws seem to be products of too much tightening: An incident involving a death back home feels clipped and some passages are reduced to fable-like simplicity. Even so, Eggers' fiction has evolved in the past decade. This book is firm proof that that social concerns can make for resonant storytelling.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Alan Clay is in Saudi Arabia, hired by an American company to sell an IT system based on a revolutionary hologram that enables far-flung associates to instantly commune with the telepresence of their colleagues, to the nascent (in fact, barely begun) King Abdullah Economic City. As down and out as they come overleveraged, unable to pay his daughter's college tuition, and scarred by his long-over marriage Alan hopes all wrongs will be righted when his team lands the deal, and his fat commission will be enough to pay his many debts and start over. But days become weeks while the team waits in the ghostly desert for a meeting with the king, a moving target. Slowly revealing Alan's history as a salesman who encouraged his employers at Schwinn to manufacture overseas, and only too late realized his compliance in rendering his own irrelevance, Eggers effectively shows why Alan wanted to believe that this kind of thing, a city rising from dust, could happen. In a land of contradictions Alan repeatedly experiences exactly what guidebooks told him he wouldn't and in a time when we depend on the instant, laser-sharpness of computers to direct decisions, Alan's greatest glories are in the waiting and in the uncertainty of his own and humanity's gray spaces.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Where is our new-millennium Norman Mailer? It's startling, 50 years on, to look back at the work of Mailer in the 1960s - from "The Presidential Papers" to "The Armies of the Night" - and see such unabashed ambition, such reckless audacity and such a stubborn American readiness to try to save the Republic from itself and bring it back to its original promise. Mailer's very titles - "Advertisements for Myself," "An American Dream" - told us he was on a mission, committed to the transformation of country and self, and even as he gave himself over to unremittingly private (and epic) meditations on God, the Devil, cancer and plastics, he was also determined to remake the civic order. He ran for mayor of New York City, he tried his hand at directing movies and in 1955 he helped start an alternative weekly known as The Village Voice. Part of the exhilaration of Mailer was that he cared so ravenously even when he failed; he was shooting for the moon even when he shot himself in the foot. Dave Eggers comes from a much more sober, humbled, craft-loving time, and his latest novel is the opposite of a failure: it's a clear, supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped and sad. But for all the difference between their generations, you can feel in Eggers some of the hunger, the range and the unembarrassedly serious engagement with America and its ideals that gave Mailer's work such force. Eggers asserted his bravado - along with some tonic self-mockery - in the very title of his first book, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (a title of which Mailer would have been proud); he followed it up with a very different kind of book, a novel, "You Shall Know Our Velocity," about the impenitent determination of two young Americans to travel the world giving money away. Yet even as he has written seven substantial books in 12 years, Eggers has also established his own publishing house, bristling with attitude and backward-looking invention. He's started two magazines whose names (Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and The Believer) openly declare their interest in homemade whimsy and optimism - or, you could say, in the past and in the future. He's established nonprofit writing and tutorial centers across the country and, in his spare minutes, helped write two feature movies, "Where the Wild Things Are" and "Away We Go." Like Mailer, he's almost underrated precisely because he's so ubiquitous and dares us to mock him with his unapologetic ambitions. Yet where Mailer was consciously working in a deeply American grain, with his talk of revolution and transcendence, Eggers speaks for a new America that has to think globally and can't be sure where the country fits on the planetary screen. And where Mailer was bent on showing us how America could remake the world, Eggers, with ferocious energy and versatility, has been studying how the world is remaking America. Most of our great contemporary examinations of cultural sampling and bipolar belonging come from writers with immigrant backgrounds. It's invigorating, in that context, to see how Dave Eggers, born in Boston to classic fifthgeneration Irish stock (his mother was a McSweeney) and raised in Lake Forest, Ill., has devoted himself to chronicling the shifting melting pot, seeming to tell others' stories more than his own. In his fourth major book, "What Is the What," he gave us a nonfiction novel about Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese "Lost Boy" who survives wars at home and refugee camps abroad only to find that his problems are by no means behind him when finally he gets to Atlanta, and the Land of the Free. Some critics may have bristled at the notion of a young white American writing the story of a real-life African villager, but it took a writer of Eggers's artistry (and vulnerability) to give Deng's story its heartbreaking power. In his next (nonfictional) work, "Zeitoun," Eggers turned the story of Hurricane Katrina into a brilliantly structured and propulsive narrative whose ail-American protagonist just happened to be a Muslim house-painter brought up in the Syrian coastal town of Jableh, married to a former Southern Baptist from Baton Rouge and eager to construct a new life through hard work and tending to others. The American Dream, the author was reminding us, is coming to us now in Arabic. In both "Zeitoun" and "What Is the What," Eggers's heroically self-effacing prose revealed the people we blindly walk past on our city streets every day. "Zeitoun," in fact, began as part of a Voice of Witness series of oral histories through which Eggers is hoping to inform us of those faraway places whose destinies are ever more central to our own. Like Mailer, Eggers seems ready to take America by the scruff of its neck and ask us what we're going to do about injustice and a sense of community; but where some writers celebrate America as a home for second lives and triumphant reinvention, Eggers seems bracingly wary of happy endings, as if convinced that our real work is still ahead of us. IN "A Hologram for the King" - a kind of "Death of a Globalized Salesman," alight with all of Arthur Miller's compassion and humanism - Eggers at once pushes that project forward and, characteristically, gives us an entirely different and unexpected story. Alan Clay is a 54-year-old self-employed consultant (as everyday and malleable as his name) first introduced on the 10th floor of a glassy Hilton in Jeddah, where he's come to try to redeem his fortune, and America's. Day after day Alan is driven, usually late, to a large white tent in the desert - part of the King Abdullah Economic City, or KAEC (as in "cake") - where three young colleagues sit around with laptops waiting to show a holographic teleconferencing system to King Abdullah, on behalf of Reliant, an American company that is "the largest I.T. supplier in the world." Day after day, the king fails to arrive and the Americans lie around, fret about the absence of Wi-Fi and kill time in the emptiness. Desperate for something to happen, Alan lances a cyst on his neck with a crude knife - and later a needle - just to feel the blood flow. "Hologram" flashes past in an appropriately quick series of brief, displacing passages with plenty of space around them for us to feel the vacancy and nowhereness; if Mailer attached himself to Hemingway in honor of the older writer's unabashed competitiveness and machismo, Eggers here is drawn more to the best thing in Hemingway, his style of clean lines and sharp edges. Scene after scene is so clear and precise - "A plume of smoke unzipped the blue sky beyond the mountains," a "pair of headlights appeared as a blue sunrise beyond the ridge's ragged silhouette" - that it's easy to overlook just how strong and well wrought the writing is. The vast empty spaces of the desert stand, of course, for the holographic projections that now determine Alan's (and America's) destiny, while Saudi Arabia, a puritan kingdom where everyone seems to be boozing on the sly, is the perfect Other that constantly confounds and defeats its New World visitors. In the long, empty days Alan befriends a penguinshaped young Saudi who tools around in a 30-year-old Caprice and sports Oakley sunglasses above his handmade sandals (he once spent a year in Alabama); he meets lonely expats and looks in on an embassy debauch where a man in a spacesuit is "feigning weightlessness." Every detail perfectly advances a vision of American aspiration at a time of economic collapse and midlife crisis: just two floors below a gleaming condo in the desert that speaks for the virtual future that the Saudis (and Americans) are counting on is another room where 25 foreign laborers are squeezed into a tiny space, exchanging blows over a discarded cellphone. Yet even at home, we come to see, Alan has been living in a house for sale where he's taken for a "ghost"; he's run out of money to pay his daughter's college bills, and the only one who has ever fought for him is his "constantly cruel ex-wife." Over a long career working for Fuller Brush and Schwinn bicycles and a dozen others, he's somehow encouraged the outsourcing of manufacturing that has led to both him and his country becoming redundant. In Florida, he eats from vending machines, and in his home in suburban Boston he watches old Red Sox DVDs again and again. At the book's opening, his neighbor Charlie, who's recently discovered transcendentalism and speaks (as Mailer might have) of "grandeur and awe and holiness," walks into a lake to his death. In Alan's America, even Walden Pond has become a cesspool. EGGERS'S command of this middlemanagement landscape is so sure - and his interest in the battle between humanity and technology so insistent - that his book might almost be a DeLillo novel written for the iPhone Generation, though delivered by DeLillo's more openhearted and Midwestern nephew. Eggers's inhabiting of the terms and tics of a distinctly American consciousness is as remarkable as, in earlier books, his channeling of Sudanese and Syrian sensibilities. He knows how businessmen, faced with a terrible proposal, will say, "Let's table it for now"; he registers how door-to-door salesmen point out, "A stranger rings, a friend knocks"; he cites the wisdom of Jack Welch. To a world of glass and emptiness - "I feel like a pane of glass that needs to be shattered," Alan tells another consultant - he brings his rather old-fashioned interest in neighborhood values and service. And his Saudi Arabia sounds to me note-perfect, from the soldier seated in a beach chair next to a Humvee, soaking his feet in an inflatable pool, to the secret drag races in the desert. Nearly every action in the book carries a symbolic resonance: each time Alan is approached by a foreign woman, he becomes disengaged and, in fact, impotent, and when finally he does go into a local hospital for his cyst, he's worked on by a team made up of Chinese, English, German, Italian, Russian and mongrel Lebanese medical professionals. Yet underneath the global blueprint is a story human enough to draw blood. Anyone who's traveled will recognize the plaintiveness and vague menace of the Saudis who loom before Alan, or the likable Saudi Panza who tries to scroll to a Fleetwood Mac song on his iPod as Alan prepares to tell him another corny joke. The buddy movie is clearly a significant form for Eggers, but, like Hollywood, he has upgraded it: from the frat-boy do-goodism of "You Shall Know Our Velocity" to a vehicle that features-a young Muslim and an aging American, and asks what happens when velocity gives out. At first glance, a reader might wonder what a story about a flailing American businessman trying to win a contract over the Chinese in the Saudi desert has to do with Eggers's celebrated memoir about losing both of his parents within five weeks at the age of 21, and tending to his younger brother. But the strength of all his work comes from his sense of loss and pain, mixed with his decidedly American wish to try to bring his orphaned characters to a provisional shelter. It's Eggers's tragic sense - "Were scars the best evidence of living?" he writes here - that gives fiber and nuance to his desire for something better, and ensures that his hope for some kind of understanding never becomes merely sentimental. Alan speaks for something essential to Eggers - and poignant - in his constant oscillation between the wish to do the right thing and his awareness that he doesn't have a clue what the right thing might be. Like Mailer, in other words, Eggers has a vision, with the result that there's nothing random about the projects he takes on or the ways he pursues them; to the casual observer, he may seem all over the place, but underneath the wild diversity of his interests is a profoundly searching and meticulous craftsman who could hardly be more focused. "A Hologram for the King" is, among other things, an anguished investigation into how and where American self-confidence got lost and - in the central word another lonely expat uses for Alan - "defeated." At one point a fellow passenger on a plane mentions to Alan how even the Statue of Liberty is depicted moving forward, so committed is America to the future tense; four pages on, Alan recalls being told, at length, about how an all-important contract for blast-resistant glass in Freedom Tower, built on the ashes of the World Trade Center, has been given to a Chinese company, working (to compound the insult) from an American patent. In places, the book becomes almost a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands, knew struggle. Alan's father, a World War II veteran who still has shrapnel in his lower back, rages at his son for helping to take business abroad; the deeper sorrow is the suggestion that moral clarity and a sense of purpose also got outsourced in the process. As he mourns the decline of a time when men were more in touch with their animal selves and an outer wilderness could save us from a wilderness within, Alan reminisces about the hunting trips he took with his dad as a boy, thinks about the time he took his daughter to see one of the last launchings of the space shuttle at Cape Canaveral (and they met an oldfashioned, in fact Maileresque, American hero and explorer, an astronaut). When Alan is invited by a local friend to a Saudi mountain village, he tries to reach back to a world of John Wayne certainties and, cradling a gun, blows up the one human connection he's so happily made. This may all sound a little too much like metaphor - or romanticism - but Eggers's sense of loss is hard-earned and his feeling for his characters as affectingly real as his epigraph from Beckett ("It is not every day that we are needed"). At times, his book reminds one of Douglas Coupland's deeply wistful tales of Generation X's search for belief and direction, at other times of the weightless suburban drifters of Hamid Murakami's world, all but longing (in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," say) for an earlier era of intensity and war. A sense of impermanence and possible disaster is always very close in Eggers's work - here it's sometimes devouring - and that is what makes his good nature and hopefulness so rending, and so necessary. Every now and then he pulls back from his engagingly stumbling characters to suggest a larger order: "The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again." In the end, what makes "A Hologram for the King" is the conviction with which Eggers plunges into the kind of regular working American we don't see enough in contemporary fiction, and gives voice and heft to Alan's struggles in an information economy in which he has no information and there's not much of an economy. At one point, with nothing to do, Alan starts writing to his daughter to persuade her to forgive her mother, the ex-wife who has all but destroyed him. "People think you're able to help them and usually you can't," he writes. "And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint." Such is the fragility of Alan's situation, though, that even that modest hope seems far from guaranteed, mostly because Alan is such a nonvirtual man, the opposite of a hologram. Norman Mailer probably hated the fact that many of us consider his great, essential narrative to be his "nonfiction novel" about Gary Gilmore, "The Executioner's Song"; the whole long, tragic story is delivered with extraordinary documentary fidelity and restraint and yet only someone as obsessed as Mailer was with rebellion and possession could have invested the tale with such intensity. In much the same way, Eggers has developed an exceptional gift for opening up the lives of others so as to offer the story of globalism as it develops and, simultaneously, to unfold a much more archetypal tale of struggle and loneliness and drift. Public and private explorations come together, and as this groundbreaking writer grows wiser and deeper and more melancholy, evolving from telling his own stories to voicing America's, he might be asking us how we can bring the best parts of our past into a planetary future. A nostalgic lament, in part, for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands. Pico Iyer is the author of 10 books, including "The Global Soul" and, most recently, "The Man Within My Head."