© 2012 Dave Eggers
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.
Summary
A Hologram for the King
Narrarated by: Dion Graham
eMusic Review 0
07.26.12
Twisting Eggers's international focus around the average, recession-era American businessman
2012 | Label: Recorded Books
Dave Eggers’s latest protagonist, A Hologram for the King‘s Alan Clay, is a hollow man. Not in the T. S. Elliott “this is the way the world ends” sense, but the in the globally emasculated, forever-middle-management sense. He’s Willy Loman without the rage. In his past fiction, Eggers has often had an international focus. Unsurprisingly, his latest work retains that focus — but twists it around the average, recession-era American businessman.
The down-on-his-luck businessman may be the trope of American fiction in the last 70 years, but in presenting Alan Clay as such, we’re more aware of his everyman qualities. A “ghost” to his family, he’s holed up in King Abdullah Economic City (also known as the Arabian desert), designing holographic communications software with a team of contractors. Ruminating on his place in the world, we see the hints of a drive behind Clay — a new technology in a new economic power may make him a wealthy, and potentially worthwhile person.
But truthfully, A Hologram for the King is all about emptiness. The vast tracts of the desert, the literal insubstantiality of connecting-via-hologram — not to mention the bland quality of Dion Graham’s narration all underline the degree to which Eggers’s Clay claws at relevance as the cohesive bonds of his life come apart.
