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.
A Hologram for the King
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A National Book Award Finalist, A Northern California Book Award Finalist
One of the New York Times Book Review's "Top Ten Books of 2012"
“Mr. Eggers uses a new, pared down, Hemingwayesque voice to recount his story... he demonstrates in Hologram that he is master of this more old-fashioned approach as much as he was a pioneering innovator with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius....[This] 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.... A comic but deeply affecting tale about one man’s travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"A spare but moving elegy for the American century.”—Publishers Weekly
"Eggers can do fiction as well as he likes.”—Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times
“A potent, well-drawn portrait of one man’s discovery of where his personal and professional selves split and connect.”—Kirkus Reviews
“An extraordinary work of timely and provocative themes...This novel reminds us that above all, Eggers is a writer of books, and a writer of the highest order….An outstanding achievement in Eggers's already impressive career, and an essential read.”—Carmela Ciuraru, The San Francisco Chronicle
“Eggers understands the pressures of American downward-mobility, and in the protagonist of his novel, Alan Clay, has created an Everyman, a post-modern Willy Loman….The novel operates on a grand and global scale, but it also is intimate.”—Elizabeth Taylor, The Chicago Tribune
“Fascinating...Although Godot may be Hologram's philosophical source, Eggers is no Beckettian minimalist. The novel is paradoxically suspenseful, but it's also rich in character and in Eggers's evocative writing about place…A Hologram for the King, as far from home as it might seem, is an acute slice of American life.”—Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times
"Dave Eggers is a prince among men when it comes to writing deeply felt, socially conscious books that meld reportage with fiction. While A Hologram for the King is fiction...it’s a strike against the current state of global economic injustice."
—Elissa Schappell,Vanity Fair
“Completely engrossing.”
—Daniel Roberts, Fortune
“A heartbreaking character study.”—Nick DiMartino, Shelf Awareness
“Deft and darkly comic…Beautifully enlivened by oddball encounters and oddball characters, by stranger-in-a-strange-land episodes.”—Steven Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Eggers’ spare prose is a pleasure, and A Hologram for the King proves to be a deft blend of surreal adventure, absurd comedy and pointed observations.”—Georgia Rowe, San Jose Mercury News
“As the kingless days pass, Alan ventures from the tent and hotel into the rich, unsettling realities of the Kingdom, and Eggers ventures deeper into Alan, as well as into the question that has seemingly guided Eggers’ work for years: What does it mean to be an American in a world that has places like the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, or post-Katrina New Orleans?”—Alan Scherstuhl, San Francisco Weekly
“[Hologram] has at its center a sort of moral vision quest... Alan’s plight is endearing in its universality, even while being singularly his.”—Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
"Eggers has given us a work of fiction that works as a perfect commentary on this American decade.”—Jason Diamond, Vol.1 Brooklyn
“The power of this thing sneaks up on you…While Alan cools his heels, he bonds with memorably drawn locals; has some adventures that illuminate the tragicomedy that is globalism; and gets us meditating on what appears to be the theme…: How can we all get over ourselves long enough to really, truly notice other people?” — Jeff Giles, Entertainment Weekly
“Eerie, suspenseful and tightly controlled… Exciting stuff.”—Cynthia Macdonald, The Globe and Mail
“Alan feels like Eggers’s most fully-realized character to date … A sad and beautiful story.”—John Freeman, The Boston Globe
“[A] supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped and sad ... With ferocious energy and versatility, [Eggers] has been studying how the world is remaking America ... 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.”—Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review
"Hits you with prose as stark and luminous as its Saudi Arabian setting…It should confirm Eggers's position among America's leading contemporary writers."—Independent
One of the New York Times Book Review's "Top Ten Books of 2012"
“Mr. Eggers uses a new, pared down, Hemingwayesque voice to recount his story... he demonstrates in Hologram that he is master of this more old-fashioned approach as much as he was a pioneering innovator with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius....[This] 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.... A comic but deeply affecting tale about one man’s travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"A spare but moving elegy for the American century.”—Publishers Weekly
"Eggers can do fiction as well as he likes.”—Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times
“A potent, well-drawn portrait of one man’s discovery of where his personal and professional selves split and connect.”—Kirkus Reviews
“An extraordinary work of timely and provocative themes...This novel reminds us that above all, Eggers is a writer of books, and a writer of the highest order….An outstanding achievement in Eggers's already impressive career, and an essential read.”—Carmela Ciuraru, The San Francisco Chronicle
“Eggers understands the pressures of American downward-mobility, and in the protagonist of his novel, Alan Clay, has created an Everyman, a post-modern Willy Loman….The novel operates on a grand and global scale, but it also is intimate.”—Elizabeth Taylor, The Chicago Tribune
“Fascinating...Although Godot may be Hologram's philosophical source, Eggers is no Beckettian minimalist. The novel is paradoxically suspenseful, but it's also rich in character and in Eggers's evocative writing about place…A Hologram for the King, as far from home as it might seem, is an acute slice of American life.”—Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times
"Dave Eggers is a prince among men when it comes to writing deeply felt, socially conscious books that meld reportage with fiction. While A Hologram for the King is fiction...it’s a strike against the current state of global economic injustice."
—Elissa Schappell,Vanity Fair
“Completely engrossing.”
—Daniel Roberts, Fortune
“A heartbreaking character study.”—Nick DiMartino, Shelf Awareness
“Deft and darkly comic…Beautifully enlivened by oddball encounters and oddball characters, by stranger-in-a-strange-land episodes.”—Steven Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Eggers’ spare prose is a pleasure, and A Hologram for the King proves to be a deft blend of surreal adventure, absurd comedy and pointed observations.”—Georgia Rowe, San Jose Mercury News
“As the kingless days pass, Alan ventures from the tent and hotel into the rich, unsettling realities of the Kingdom, and Eggers ventures deeper into Alan, as well as into the question that has seemingly guided Eggers’ work for years: What does it mean to be an American in a world that has places like the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, or post-Katrina New Orleans?”—Alan Scherstuhl, San Francisco Weekly
“[Hologram] has at its center a sort of moral vision quest... Alan’s plight is endearing in its universality, even while being singularly his.”—Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
"Eggers has given us a work of fiction that works as a perfect commentary on this American decade.”—Jason Diamond, Vol.1 Brooklyn
“The power of this thing sneaks up on you…While Alan cools his heels, he bonds with memorably drawn locals; has some adventures that illuminate the tragicomedy that is globalism; and gets us meditating on what appears to be the theme…: How can we all get over ourselves long enough to really, truly notice other people?” — Jeff Giles, Entertainment Weekly
“Eerie, suspenseful and tightly controlled… Exciting stuff.”—Cynthia Macdonald, The Globe and Mail
“Alan feels like Eggers’s most fully-realized character to date … A sad and beautiful story.”—John Freeman, The Boston Globe
“[A] supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped and sad ... With ferocious energy and versatility, [Eggers] has been studying how the world is remaking America ... 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.”—Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review
"Hits you with prose as stark and luminous as its Saudi Arabian setting…It should confirm Eggers's position among America's leading contemporary writers."—Independent
About the Author
Dave Eggers is the bestselling author of seven books including A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award; Zeitoun, winner of the American Book Award and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and What Is the What, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won France’s Prix Medici. In 2002, with Ninive Calegari he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities around the country have since opened sister 826 centers. Eggers lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.
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More About the Author
Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, including "Zeitoun," a nonfiction account a Syrian-American immigrant and his extraordinary experience during Hurricane Katrina and "What Is the What," a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in southern Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng and dedicated to building secondary schools in southern Sudan. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine ("The Believer"), and "Wholphin," a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston. In 2004, Eggers taught at the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and there, with Dr. Lola Vollen, he co-founded Voice of Witness, a series of books using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. A native of Chicago, Eggers graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
80 of 90 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
There's a very good reason that the world of business consulting is under-represented in literary fiction. If "interesting" is Tokyo, tales of "win-win" and "streamlined synergies" are London. But that didn't stop Dave Eggers from making his main character of his new novel, A Hologram for the King, exactly the kind of business bonehead whose natural habitat is the airport hotel bar.
Eggers' novel is like an Office Space on downers. It's better than you'd expect a story about business consulting or sales to be, but it still doesn't exactly "meet its fourth quarter projections."
Alan Clay, a former executive at Schwinn, who has failed trying to start his own bicycle business, is now working as a consultant to try to pay his debts and make ends meet. Alan parlays a (tenuous) relationship with King Abdullah of Saudia Arabia's nephew to convince an IT company to send him and a team of young go-getters to the Kingdom to pitch IT for King Abdullah's newest pet project -- a city rising from the desert called King Abdullah Economic City. (This is a real thing.)
But it soon becomes clear that business in Saudi Arabia isn't conducted as it is here in the U.S., and Alan has to wait several weeks for the King (lots of other reviewers have compared this aspect of the story to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, if that helps), passing the time by drinking by himself in his hotel room, having a tryst with a Danish woman, hunting wolves (what?!), and worrying about the lump on his neck he's sure is cancer.
Along the way, we get several little anecdotes about China taking over the world -- and how China's less-than-ethical business practices are pushing it past us stalwart Americans. Yes, doing business in Saudia Arabia is infinitely frustrating, but is it better or worse than the business environment in America, where a job you've been at for 30 years can be outsourced on a whim?
Eggers writes in the same sparse, unadorned prose he used in Zeitoun. In Zeitoun, the "Hemingway impression" worked really well to chronicle that emotionally charged issue without overt editorializing. The story stood for itself. With this novel, however, while the issue of outsourcing is equally urgent to many Americans (and the novel itself is a sort of allegory or parable or something else where the story isn't the whole story), it doesn't quite have the same emotional punch as racism and racial profiling. So the writing (and, hence, the story) just feels flat, and fairly uninteresting -- just like our protagonist Alan (who, even when he tries to do interesting things, doesn't even seem like he's that interested).
So, while I've loved everything else I've ever read of Eggers', this I wasn't completely a fan of -- but the uniqueness of the story (who would've thought to tell a story about a middle aged white guy trying to sell IT in Saudia Arabia?!) and the side anecdotes nearly save the novel, but not quite. Finally, it's worth noting that this is one of the more attractive hard cover novels I've ever owned -- it's worth buying, just as a collectors item.
Eggers' novel is like an Office Space on downers. It's better than you'd expect a story about business consulting or sales to be, but it still doesn't exactly "meet its fourth quarter projections."
Alan Clay, a former executive at Schwinn, who has failed trying to start his own bicycle business, is now working as a consultant to try to pay his debts and make ends meet. Alan parlays a (tenuous) relationship with King Abdullah of Saudia Arabia's nephew to convince an IT company to send him and a team of young go-getters to the Kingdom to pitch IT for King Abdullah's newest pet project -- a city rising from the desert called King Abdullah Economic City. (This is a real thing.)
But it soon becomes clear that business in Saudi Arabia isn't conducted as it is here in the U.S., and Alan has to wait several weeks for the King (lots of other reviewers have compared this aspect of the story to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, if that helps), passing the time by drinking by himself in his hotel room, having a tryst with a Danish woman, hunting wolves (what?!), and worrying about the lump on his neck he's sure is cancer.
Along the way, we get several little anecdotes about China taking over the world -- and how China's less-than-ethical business practices are pushing it past us stalwart Americans. Yes, doing business in Saudia Arabia is infinitely frustrating, but is it better or worse than the business environment in America, where a job you've been at for 30 years can be outsourced on a whim?
Eggers writes in the same sparse, unadorned prose he used in Zeitoun. In Zeitoun, the "Hemingway impression" worked really well to chronicle that emotionally charged issue without overt editorializing. The story stood for itself. With this novel, however, while the issue of outsourcing is equally urgent to many Americans (and the novel itself is a sort of allegory or parable or something else where the story isn't the whole story), it doesn't quite have the same emotional punch as racism and racial profiling. So the writing (and, hence, the story) just feels flat, and fairly uninteresting -- just like our protagonist Alan (who, even when he tries to do interesting things, doesn't even seem like he's that interested).
So, while I've loved everything else I've ever read of Eggers', this I wasn't completely a fan of -- but the uniqueness of the story (who would've thought to tell a story about a middle aged white guy trying to sell IT in Saudia Arabia?!) and the side anecdotes nearly save the novel, but not quite. Finally, it's worth noting that this is one of the more attractive hard cover novels I've ever owned -- it's worth buying, just as a collectors item.
84 of 103 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
It is 2010, and Alan Clay is waiting. Not for Godot, but for King Abdullah, in the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC), which is a developing Red Sea port in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He is a 54-year-old failed American businessman in serious debt, evading his creditors and anguishing over how he will pay for his daughter's next year in college. He also has an angry ex-wife and a worrying lump on his neck. This is his last hurrah, a chance to turn his life from sad and broke to flush and secure, if he and his young team from Reliant can pitch this hologram presentation to the King and win an IT contract.
Alan is a bit of a sad sack, arriving at his failures largely due to the outsourcing of American business manufacturing. He was once a confident, prosperous sales executive with Schwinn, until he made some bad decisions, such as trying to convert a Soviet-era factory in Budapest to a capitalistic model. Sometime after that catastrophe, he followed the trend of globalization, and was instrumental in shipping Schwinn's labor to China. That was the end of Schwinn's American prosperity.
"How did your suppliers become your competitors? That was a rhetorical question...Teach a man to fish. Now the Chinese know how to fish, and ninety-nine percent of all bicycles are being made there in one province."
Moreover, his father, now retired, had been a committed union man with Stride Rite, and treated Alan with contempt for his past misdeeds and his new job with Reliant.
"They're making actual things over there, and we're making websites and holograms...while sitting in chairs made in China, working on computers made in China, driving over bridges made in China. Does this sound sustainable to you, Alan?"
As Alan recalls various high points and assaults on his career and personal life--his tense years wedded to the high-strung Ruby; a sentimental trip to Cape Canaveral with his daughter, Kit, to watch the last shuttle; the affluent years with Schwin--he continues to wait, either in his lonely hotel with no alcohol, or set up with his team of three in a tent with anemic wi-fi and no air conditioning, in 110-degree heat.
Fortunately, Alan has forged a connection with a local, a young, enigmatic, chubby driver named Yousef, who is constantly looking under the hood of his car/taxi for explosives that may have been set by the husband of an ex-fiancé. Yousef is the comical straight man to the blundering Alan. As Alan shares his dreams and visions of selling his ideas to the King, Yousef tamps it down with some biting realities. Apparently, the King hasn't even been back to Jeddah in about 18 months.
Yousef gives Alan a tour of this unrepentant desert region, a vast place tremendous with possibilities, but appears to be in a stage of arrested development. A billboard advertises the development, and there's a road that cuts through nothing, then a pair of stone arches, and a dome hovering over all of it. He imagines the city rising from its ashes. Presently, it looks like anywhere and nowhere--it could be Los Angeles, or Orlando, as there is nothing to give it distinction, except for its looming neutrality and the few towering or squat, square buildings.
Alan attempts to make contact with the liaison, Karim al-Ahmad, at the building they call the "Black Box," and is given the royal runaround. Back to the stifling tent, he reminisces and deliberates some more. Is the lump on his neck malignant? Are they going to be served food? Is the King going to come soon? Days turn into weeks, and Alan has some interactive adventures. He meets a Danish beauty with an office in the Black Box and a secret stash of moonshine. He makes an appointment to have his lump evaluated and meets a serenely beautiful doctor. He even has an opportunity to prove himself an able marksman.
Eggars has pared down his prose since the exuberant narrative style in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Here it is streamlined--lean, economic, slyly impassive. I enjoyed what was unsaid as much as what was said--the spaces between sentences, the pregnant pauses to ponder, the measured rhythm, the quivering tension, the elegy of a man feeling his impending absence more than his indefinite presence.
There's a risk of the story being an agit-prop against the creeping ambush of globalization, a pithy cry about America's decline. Certainly that point is made, but not forcefully. Readers are already aware of the economic struggles, the backlash of end-stage capitalism and the pros and con arguments of outsourcing. Eggars is more interested in shaping a character we will identify and empathize with, and laugh at occasionally.
Clay is a maladjusted baby boomer from the age of entitlement, losing his footing in the new privileges and prohibitions of global finance. His wounds, both physical and emotional, are palpable. Alan Clay is a suffering everyman, in the throes of unsustainability. There are wisps of Willy Loman, Herzog, and other memorable literary figures, aging tragic-comic men who suffered from obsolescence.
It reads partly like a fabled allegory, but achingly real and plausible. Can the imminent foreclosure of a man's life be reversed? Will the King show up? I was touched, and considerably moved, by the story, characters, and themes. Don't expect a neatly wrapped up resolve. The droll and beguiling Eggars will hook you on page one, and won't let go, even when you reach the end.
Alan is a bit of a sad sack, arriving at his failures largely due to the outsourcing of American business manufacturing. He was once a confident, prosperous sales executive with Schwinn, until he made some bad decisions, such as trying to convert a Soviet-era factory in Budapest to a capitalistic model. Sometime after that catastrophe, he followed the trend of globalization, and was instrumental in shipping Schwinn's labor to China. That was the end of Schwinn's American prosperity.
"How did your suppliers become your competitors? That was a rhetorical question...Teach a man to fish. Now the Chinese know how to fish, and ninety-nine percent of all bicycles are being made there in one province."
Moreover, his father, now retired, had been a committed union man with Stride Rite, and treated Alan with contempt for his past misdeeds and his new job with Reliant.
"They're making actual things over there, and we're making websites and holograms...while sitting in chairs made in China, working on computers made in China, driving over bridges made in China. Does this sound sustainable to you, Alan?"
As Alan recalls various high points and assaults on his career and personal life--his tense years wedded to the high-strung Ruby; a sentimental trip to Cape Canaveral with his daughter, Kit, to watch the last shuttle; the affluent years with Schwin--he continues to wait, either in his lonely hotel with no alcohol, or set up with his team of three in a tent with anemic wi-fi and no air conditioning, in 110-degree heat.
Fortunately, Alan has forged a connection with a local, a young, enigmatic, chubby driver named Yousef, who is constantly looking under the hood of his car/taxi for explosives that may have been set by the husband of an ex-fiancé. Yousef is the comical straight man to the blundering Alan. As Alan shares his dreams and visions of selling his ideas to the King, Yousef tamps it down with some biting realities. Apparently, the King hasn't even been back to Jeddah in about 18 months.
Yousef gives Alan a tour of this unrepentant desert region, a vast place tremendous with possibilities, but appears to be in a stage of arrested development. A billboard advertises the development, and there's a road that cuts through nothing, then a pair of stone arches, and a dome hovering over all of it. He imagines the city rising from its ashes. Presently, it looks like anywhere and nowhere--it could be Los Angeles, or Orlando, as there is nothing to give it distinction, except for its looming neutrality and the few towering or squat, square buildings.
Alan attempts to make contact with the liaison, Karim al-Ahmad, at the building they call the "Black Box," and is given the royal runaround. Back to the stifling tent, he reminisces and deliberates some more. Is the lump on his neck malignant? Are they going to be served food? Is the King going to come soon? Days turn into weeks, and Alan has some interactive adventures. He meets a Danish beauty with an office in the Black Box and a secret stash of moonshine. He makes an appointment to have his lump evaluated and meets a serenely beautiful doctor. He even has an opportunity to prove himself an able marksman.
Eggars has pared down his prose since the exuberant narrative style in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Here it is streamlined--lean, economic, slyly impassive. I enjoyed what was unsaid as much as what was said--the spaces between sentences, the pregnant pauses to ponder, the measured rhythm, the quivering tension, the elegy of a man feeling his impending absence more than his indefinite presence.
There's a risk of the story being an agit-prop against the creeping ambush of globalization, a pithy cry about America's decline. Certainly that point is made, but not forcefully. Readers are already aware of the economic struggles, the backlash of end-stage capitalism and the pros and con arguments of outsourcing. Eggars is more interested in shaping a character we will identify and empathize with, and laugh at occasionally.
Clay is a maladjusted baby boomer from the age of entitlement, losing his footing in the new privileges and prohibitions of global finance. His wounds, both physical and emotional, are palpable. Alan Clay is a suffering everyman, in the throes of unsustainability. There are wisps of Willy Loman, Herzog, and other memorable literary figures, aging tragic-comic men who suffered from obsolescence.
It reads partly like a fabled allegory, but achingly real and plausible. Can the imminent foreclosure of a man's life be reversed? Will the King show up? I was touched, and considerably moved, by the story, characters, and themes. Don't expect a neatly wrapped up resolve. The droll and beguiling Eggars will hook you on page one, and won't let go, even when you reach the end.
147 of 183 people found the following review helpful
By zashibis
Format:Hardcover
About once a year I end up reading a book so resoundingly terrible, so utterly hackneyed and half-assed, so mysteriously lauded by a featherbrained coterie of newspaper review-writing hacks (here's looking at you Michiko Katukani!) but so wonderfully devoid of any artistry or insight, that I end up finishing it out of something like the morbid fascination that makes a person rubber-neck at an especially horrific car accident. Congratulations, Mr. Eggers: in 2012 that book was yours.
Let's start with an obvious, but very minor, point to get it out of the way. The "Saudi Arabia" that Eggers writes about is at least 80% a figment of his imagination, almost unrecognizable to those of us, like myself, who have worked in the Kingdom. The very broadest strokes are accurate enough--there is a place on the Red Sea called KAEC, just about all service-industry and construction jobs are done by a (frequently) maltreated class of semi-indentured Asians, people drink a foul-tasting white lightening called siddiqi (by Arabs, that is. Expats universally call it "sid"--one of Eggers telltale little missteps is having a Westerner use the Arabic instead of the expat slang)--but just about every subtler nuance of life in Saudi Arabia that it's possible to get wrong, Eggers gets completely wrong. For those interested, I may eventually list some of the many ways he gets KSA wrong in a footnote in the comment section of this review. For now, I just have to wonder why, when taking such obvious liberties and clearly knowing almost nothing about the culture, Eggers felt the need to set his novel in a real time and place at all. A much wiser generation of novelists (e.g. Naipaul in A Bend in the River or E. Waugh in Scoop) headed off this kind of criticism by setting their novels in countries left unnamed or given fictive names. Pretend places deserve pretend names.
However, I'm well aware this won't matter at all to the 99.9% of the reading public who haven't visited (and can never visit) Saudi Arabia. To them the setting will seem plausible enough in a familiar Hollywood-y Oriental fantasy way (a la the second Sex and the City movie). And, of course, there is such a thing as "artistic license" in a novel, so the cultural realities of the Saudi Arabia don't ultimately matter that much. We'll even let artistic license stretch far enough to accommodate the ridiculous and entirely fictitious "King Abdullah" Eggers gives us who spends the novel biddy-bopping about the Middle East (Now he's in Yemen! Now he's in Jordan!) and who takes a tech-savvy micro-manager's interest in who might or might not be the IT contractor at one of the dozens and dozens of projects around the kingdom bearing his name. (The real King Abdullah, of course, was extremely frail by 2010, the year the novel supposedly takes place, largely confined to his palaces and various hospitals, and would be no more likely to personally and publically intervene in a construction contract than he would be to dance a hornpipe while munching pork rinds and singing "Born This Way.")
No. Discounting the fake setting entirely, let's concentrate instead on Eggers's four unforgivable failures that should be blindingly apparent to any reasonably sophisticated reader who has never even set foot in the Middle East:
1)Style. For its reliance on simple declarative sentences and its striking lack of figurative language of any sort, some are calling this novel "Hemingway-esque." This is a terrible calumny on Papa Hemingway. The old master, it's true, used a pared-down style to tell his stories, but the sum was always larger than the parts--a slowly pieced mosaic that (more often than not) created a striking picture of his life and times. Eggers language, in contrast, is just dumbed-down and drab, utterly lifeless on the page. A single page of Updike or Roth--nay, a single paragraph--has more artistry than you will find in this entire book. At first I thought Eggers might be trying to be "meta" by writing prose that is as sterile and color-starved as the Saudi landscape, but Eggers is too much the boy scout for that. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius his mantra has been "Irony is bad!" so it seems highly improbable that he should intentionally be writing in a prose style that is deathly boring to mirror the dullness of life in Saudi Arabia. It is, as other reviewers have noted, a "fast read," but only because it is the sort of prose that requires no thought whatsoever.
2)Plot. Think about it for half a second. This book asks us to believe that a washed-up, superannuated bicycle company executive *with absolutely no expertise in IT* is being sent to a remote corner of the world as the point-man for a multi-million-dollar IT presentation. Eggers doesn't even pretend that this makes any sense at all. A modern novelist who gave half a sh*t--let's say a David Foster Wallace--would have researched holographic presentations and the Middle Eastern IT market and presented us with at least a semi-believable character who had some compelling reason to be in Saudi. Eggers can't be bothered. Literally, the only work-related thing Clay does during the entire novel is to make one apologetic complaint about the lack of Wi-Fi and food in the tent where the other members of his team are slated, nonsensically, to give their presentation. That's it. For this valuable service he is supposed to earn a six-figure commission. (Sign me up!)
Along the way Clay meets a young Arab driver named Yousef who instantaneously becomes his BFF (or, even more implausibly, Clay starts thinking of him "like a son" by about their third meeting) and who continues to call him even after Clay does something (I'll avoid the clear spoiler) that most people would have a great deal of difficulty forgiving of someone they'd known intimately all their lives. Likewise, Clay has two women (one Danish, one mixed-blood Arab) throw themselves at him after acquaintanceships measured in minutes, as though he were Ryan Gosling, and hadn't previously been described by Eggers as an awkward, balding, dumpy, schlub with an ugly growth on his back . With the desperate European sexpot it's merely ridiculous; with the Arab woman we've firmly entered Harlequin Romance territory, where millennium-old cultural taboos are brushed away as easily and as thoughtlessly as cobwebs...and where a long-haired woman snorkeling topless is somehow supposed to be less conspicuous (and less identifiable as a woman) than she would be in an ordinary swimsuit. (How does that work, exactly?)
3)Characterization. The evidence has become overwhelming. Eggers can't do it. When he's describing real people (as in his memoir or his various stabs at non-fiction) he does adequately. But made-up people? Nope. Just awful. The central character, Clay, is believable in no respect, a gasping fish-out-of-water who has none of the self-confidence or worldliness you'd expect of a lifelong sales executive. Instead, he comes across as a seventeen-year-old naďf away from home for the first time in his life. But at least Clay is a "developed" character with a back-story, however improbable. The same cannot be said of any of the other characters in the novel. Clay's three American coworkers, for instance, aren't even one-dimensional--they're just three random names that Eggers tosses out occasionally. He can't even be bothered to figure out what their respective roles in the presentation for the king are supposed to be or a plausible reason why they would passively sit around a tent doing absolutely nothing day after day after day. Almost all the Arabs in the novel all have walk-on parts--so forgettable that I just finished the novel but I've already forgotten their names. The exception is Yousef, who Eggers seems to have thrown in just so that he can't be accused of being completely anti-Arab. But Yousef is even less believable than Clay--no Saudi who had a) fluent English or b) a rich father--let alone both--would ever, in a million years, be an ordinary chauffeur, one of the least respected jobs in Saudi Arabia, generally performed by Pakistanis earning a pittance. He really exists only as crude plot device to get Clay out of Jeddah for a few days so he can demonstrate his haplessness and insecurity in a different setting.
4)Theme. An anemic, warmed-over Death of a Salesman, missing only the final coup de grace. Enough said? So very many authors have done the late-middle-age middle-manager crisis of conscience so very much better than this: Updike, Roth, Bellow, Ford for starters . Even Ian McEwan's Solar a few years ago--one of McEwan's weaker novels--is a masterpiece compared to this. Likewise, Begley's About Schmidt. So, if you're going to go down this path yet again you'd better have something fresh to say. Eggers doesn't. Likewise, several positive reviews make a big deal that novel is a "parable" about outsourcing. But, what, exactly does Eggers have to say about outsourcing that will be news to anybody at all? What fresh or original insight does he offer into America's self-induced industrial decline? Nothing and none.
Too, in choosing to make the demise of Schwinn bicycles emblematic of America's decline in manufacturing Eggers has had to simplify the company's story to the point of absurdity. In reality, Schwinn's failure was much more one of marketing and not anticipating the shift toward specialized bikes (i.e. racing bikes, mountain bikes, dirt bikes) than it was in moving assembly overseas. Read more ›
Let's start with an obvious, but very minor, point to get it out of the way. The "Saudi Arabia" that Eggers writes about is at least 80% a figment of his imagination, almost unrecognizable to those of us, like myself, who have worked in the Kingdom. The very broadest strokes are accurate enough--there is a place on the Red Sea called KAEC, just about all service-industry and construction jobs are done by a (frequently) maltreated class of semi-indentured Asians, people drink a foul-tasting white lightening called siddiqi (by Arabs, that is. Expats universally call it "sid"--one of Eggers telltale little missteps is having a Westerner use the Arabic instead of the expat slang)--but just about every subtler nuance of life in Saudi Arabia that it's possible to get wrong, Eggers gets completely wrong. For those interested, I may eventually list some of the many ways he gets KSA wrong in a footnote in the comment section of this review. For now, I just have to wonder why, when taking such obvious liberties and clearly knowing almost nothing about the culture, Eggers felt the need to set his novel in a real time and place at all. A much wiser generation of novelists (e.g. Naipaul in A Bend in the River or E. Waugh in Scoop) headed off this kind of criticism by setting their novels in countries left unnamed or given fictive names. Pretend places deserve pretend names.
However, I'm well aware this won't matter at all to the 99.9% of the reading public who haven't visited (and can never visit) Saudi Arabia. To them the setting will seem plausible enough in a familiar Hollywood-y Oriental fantasy way (a la the second Sex and the City movie). And, of course, there is such a thing as "artistic license" in a novel, so the cultural realities of the Saudi Arabia don't ultimately matter that much. We'll even let artistic license stretch far enough to accommodate the ridiculous and entirely fictitious "King Abdullah" Eggers gives us who spends the novel biddy-bopping about the Middle East (Now he's in Yemen! Now he's in Jordan!) and who takes a tech-savvy micro-manager's interest in who might or might not be the IT contractor at one of the dozens and dozens of projects around the kingdom bearing his name. (The real King Abdullah, of course, was extremely frail by 2010, the year the novel supposedly takes place, largely confined to his palaces and various hospitals, and would be no more likely to personally and publically intervene in a construction contract than he would be to dance a hornpipe while munching pork rinds and singing "Born This Way.")
No. Discounting the fake setting entirely, let's concentrate instead on Eggers's four unforgivable failures that should be blindingly apparent to any reasonably sophisticated reader who has never even set foot in the Middle East:
1)Style. For its reliance on simple declarative sentences and its striking lack of figurative language of any sort, some are calling this novel "Hemingway-esque." This is a terrible calumny on Papa Hemingway. The old master, it's true, used a pared-down style to tell his stories, but the sum was always larger than the parts--a slowly pieced mosaic that (more often than not) created a striking picture of his life and times. Eggers language, in contrast, is just dumbed-down and drab, utterly lifeless on the page. A single page of Updike or Roth--nay, a single paragraph--has more artistry than you will find in this entire book. At first I thought Eggers might be trying to be "meta" by writing prose that is as sterile and color-starved as the Saudi landscape, but Eggers is too much the boy scout for that. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius his mantra has been "Irony is bad!" so it seems highly improbable that he should intentionally be writing in a prose style that is deathly boring to mirror the dullness of life in Saudi Arabia. It is, as other reviewers have noted, a "fast read," but only because it is the sort of prose that requires no thought whatsoever.
2)Plot. Think about it for half a second. This book asks us to believe that a washed-up, superannuated bicycle company executive *with absolutely no expertise in IT* is being sent to a remote corner of the world as the point-man for a multi-million-dollar IT presentation. Eggers doesn't even pretend that this makes any sense at all. A modern novelist who gave half a sh*t--let's say a David Foster Wallace--would have researched holographic presentations and the Middle Eastern IT market and presented us with at least a semi-believable character who had some compelling reason to be in Saudi. Eggers can't be bothered. Literally, the only work-related thing Clay does during the entire novel is to make one apologetic complaint about the lack of Wi-Fi and food in the tent where the other members of his team are slated, nonsensically, to give their presentation. That's it. For this valuable service he is supposed to earn a six-figure commission. (Sign me up!)
Along the way Clay meets a young Arab driver named Yousef who instantaneously becomes his BFF (or, even more implausibly, Clay starts thinking of him "like a son" by about their third meeting) and who continues to call him even after Clay does something (I'll avoid the clear spoiler) that most people would have a great deal of difficulty forgiving of someone they'd known intimately all their lives. Likewise, Clay has two women (one Danish, one mixed-blood Arab) throw themselves at him after acquaintanceships measured in minutes, as though he were Ryan Gosling, and hadn't previously been described by Eggers as an awkward, balding, dumpy, schlub with an ugly growth on his back . With the desperate European sexpot it's merely ridiculous; with the Arab woman we've firmly entered Harlequin Romance territory, where millennium-old cultural taboos are brushed away as easily and as thoughtlessly as cobwebs...and where a long-haired woman snorkeling topless is somehow supposed to be less conspicuous (and less identifiable as a woman) than she would be in an ordinary swimsuit. (How does that work, exactly?)
3)Characterization. The evidence has become overwhelming. Eggers can't do it. When he's describing real people (as in his memoir or his various stabs at non-fiction) he does adequately. But made-up people? Nope. Just awful. The central character, Clay, is believable in no respect, a gasping fish-out-of-water who has none of the self-confidence or worldliness you'd expect of a lifelong sales executive. Instead, he comes across as a seventeen-year-old naďf away from home for the first time in his life. But at least Clay is a "developed" character with a back-story, however improbable. The same cannot be said of any of the other characters in the novel. Clay's three American coworkers, for instance, aren't even one-dimensional--they're just three random names that Eggers tosses out occasionally. He can't even be bothered to figure out what their respective roles in the presentation for the king are supposed to be or a plausible reason why they would passively sit around a tent doing absolutely nothing day after day after day. Almost all the Arabs in the novel all have walk-on parts--so forgettable that I just finished the novel but I've already forgotten their names. The exception is Yousef, who Eggers seems to have thrown in just so that he can't be accused of being completely anti-Arab. But Yousef is even less believable than Clay--no Saudi who had a) fluent English or b) a rich father--let alone both--would ever, in a million years, be an ordinary chauffeur, one of the least respected jobs in Saudi Arabia, generally performed by Pakistanis earning a pittance. He really exists only as crude plot device to get Clay out of Jeddah for a few days so he can demonstrate his haplessness and insecurity in a different setting.
4)Theme. An anemic, warmed-over Death of a Salesman, missing only the final coup de grace. Enough said? So very many authors have done the late-middle-age middle-manager crisis of conscience so very much better than this: Updike, Roth, Bellow, Ford for starters . Even Ian McEwan's Solar a few years ago--one of McEwan's weaker novels--is a masterpiece compared to this. Likewise, Begley's About Schmidt. So, if you're going to go down this path yet again you'd better have something fresh to say. Eggers doesn't. Likewise, several positive reviews make a big deal that novel is a "parable" about outsourcing. But, what, exactly does Eggers have to say about outsourcing that will be news to anybody at all? What fresh or original insight does he offer into America's self-induced industrial decline? Nothing and none.
Too, in choosing to make the demise of Schwinn bicycles emblematic of America's decline in manufacturing Eggers has had to simplify the company's story to the point of absurdity. In reality, Schwinn's failure was much more one of marketing and not anticipating the shift toward specialized bikes (i.e. racing bikes, mountain bikes, dirt bikes) than it was in moving assembly overseas. Read more ›
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Time wasted
This book much like Alan's wait in Saudi Arabia to make the presentation to the King was a complete waste of time. Read more
Published 6 hours ago by piper
5.0 out of 5 stars
KING ABDULLAH AND THE BLACK BOX
This is the story of Alan Clay who travels to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in May, 2010. He is the proprietor of a failing one-man consulting firm run from his home in the US, but now,... Read more
Published 3 days ago by Mothram
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Pleasure To Read
A different kind of book for Dave Eggers, nevertheless delightful, as always, I love his writing. I enjoyed learning about the Saudi culture through the story.
Published 5 days ago by Ellyn
5.0 out of 5 stars
Move Over Willy Loman ... Hello Alan Clay!
Move over Willy Loman ... hello Alan Clay! David Eggars' newest novel, A Hologram for a King has got Death of a Salesman written all over it. Read more
Published 12 days ago by Jono Walker
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is life
For some of us, this is life: "she had pulled dead stuff from within him...and still she wanted to be here"
Published 16 days ago by akamenth
2.0 out of 5 stars
A well-written non-story
Who am I to contradict the esteemed panel (whoever they are) who select finalists for the National Book Award (whatever that is)? Read more
Published 18 days ago by Paul A. Mastin
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who am I
The book's foundation is a reflection of present day business practices of outsourcing gone to the extreme. Read more
Published 19 days ago by Ellen
3.0 out of 5 stars
OK, but obvious
The lectures about the failure of US manufacturing and rise of China were awkward and not organic. Writing is good. Not as good as other Eggers books.
Published 22 days ago by ekmb
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect Depiction
Dave Eggers sensitivity and reception and narration of the spirit of our times is impeccable! The mundane, the ordinary, the inexplicable state of affairs of the plot and the... Read more
Published 24 days ago by Naz
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Outsourcing of the American Dream
Eggers' latest book is a novel preoccupied with our age. Wealth is shifting from the Old World to BRICS but the tale isn't about GDP figures. Read more
Published 25 days ago by Simone Oltolina
