A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers - NYTimes.

com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologra...

July 19, 2012

Desert Pitch
By PICO IYER

Where is our new-millennium Norman Mailer? Its startling, 50 years on, to look back at the By Dave Eggers work of Mailer in the 1960s from The 312 pp. McSweeneys Presidential Papers to The Armies of the Books. $25. 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. Mailers 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.
A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING

Dave Eggers comes from a much more sober, humbled, craft-loving time, and his latest novel is the opposite of a failure: its 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 Mailers 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
1 of 8 7/21/12 2:41 AM

A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologra...

books in 12 years, Eggers has also established his own publishing house, bristling with attitude and backward-looking invention. Hes started two magazines whose names (Timothy McSweeneys 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. Hes 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, hes almost underrated precisely because hes 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 cant 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. Its invigorating, in that context, to see how Dave Eggers, born in Boston to classic fifth-generation 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 Eggerss artistry (and vulnerability) to give Dengs 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 all-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.

2 of 8

7/21/12 2:41 AM

A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologra...

In both Zeitoun and What Is the What, Eggerss 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 were 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 Millers 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 hes come to try to redeem his fortune, and Americas. 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 writers 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 ridges ragged silhouette that its easy to overlook just how strong and well wrought the writing is.

3 of 8

7/21/12 2:41 AM

A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologra...

The vast empty spaces of the desert stand, of course, for the holographic projections that now determine Alans (and Americas) 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 penguin-shaped 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 hes taken for a ghost; hes run out of money to pay his daughters 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, hes 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 books opening, his neighbor Charlie, whos recently discovered transcendentalism and speaks (as Mailer might have) of grandeur and awe and holiness, walks into a lake to his death. In Alans America, even Walden Pond has become a cesspool. Eggerss command of this middle-management 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 DeLillos more openhearted and Midwestern nephew. Eggerss 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, Lets table it for now; he registers how door-to-door salesmen point out, A

4 of 8

7/21/12 2:41 AM

A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologra...

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, hes 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 whos 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 Eggerss 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. Its Eggerss 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 doesnt have a clue what the right thing might be. Like Mailer, in other words, Eggers has a vision, with the result that

5 of 8

7/21/12 2:41 AM

A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologra...

theres 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 blastresistant 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. Alans 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 old-fashioned, 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 hes so happily made. This may all sound a little too much like metaphor or romanticism but Eggerss 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 Couplands deeply wistful tales of Generation Xs search for belief and direction, at other times of the weightless suburban drifters of Haruki Murakamis world, all but longing (in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, say) for an earlier era of intensity and war. A sense of

6 of 8

7/21/12 2:41 AM

A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologra...

impermanence and possible disaster is always very close in Eggerss work here its 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 dont see enough in contemporary fiction, and gives voice and heft to Alans struggles in an information economy in which he has no information and theres 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 youre able to help them and usually you cant, 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 Alans situation, though, that even that modest hope seems far from guaranteed, mostly because Alan is such a non-virtual 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 Executioners 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 Americas, he might be asking us how we can bring the best parts of our past into a planetary future.
Pico Iyer is the author of 10 books, including The Global Soul and, most recently, The Man Within My Head.

7 of 8

7/21/12 2:41 AM

A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologra...

8 of 8

7/21/12 2:41 AM