Let us imagine that this novel — about a divorced, middle-aged business consultant trying to save himself from bankruptcy by landing an Internet technology contract with Saudi Arabia — had been written by someone not named Dave Eggers. Most readers, I suspect, would judge it a pleasant evening’s entertainment, easy and enjoyable to read, somewhat familiar in theme. Certainly 54-year-old Alan Clay seems yet another in a long line of defeated, messed-up American losers, hoping against hope for a bailout or even for some kind of redemption.
In years past, Alan was married to Ruby, an abrasive if good-looking activist who wants, in her loud, unpleasant way, to save the world. (Her ideal mate, Alan later decides, would have been Aristotle Onassis or George Soros.) Back then he worked as an executive at Schwinn, the long-classic bicycle manufacturer. But Alan was part of the team that decided it would be cheaper to build bikes in China instead of the United States. Unfortunately, once the Chinese learned how to produce a solid product, they undercut the American price point and put Schwinn out of business.
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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(McSweeney's Books) - ”A Hologram for the King” by Dave Eggers.
(McSweeney's Books) - Award-winning author and publisher Dave Eggers
Since then, Alan has lurched from one misjudged business venture to another, gotten divorced, and is now facing utter ruin:
“He had moved from Schwinn to Huffy to Frontier Manufacturing Partners to Alan Clay Consulting to sitting at home watching DVDs of the Red Sox winning the Series in ’04 and ’07. The game when they hit four consecutive home runs against the Yankees. April 22, 2007. He’d watched those four and a half minutes a hundred times and each viewing brought him something like joy. A sense of rightness, of order. It was a victory that could never be taken away.”
Alan yearns for such a victory himself, recalling with bitter nostalgia a time when he was “selling actual objects to actual people.” Alas, the America of foundries and factories, of mills and looms, seems to have vanished. Even when trying to establish his own premium, Made-in-America bicycle company, Alan finds himself dismissed as a relict of the past. “Some of the bank people were so young they’d never seen a business proposal suggesting manufacturing things in the state of Massachusetts. They thought they’d unearthed some ancient shaman, full of clues to a forgotten world.”
But now, Alan is here, in Saudi Arabia with three young techies from Reliant Corp., convinced that he’s found the answer to his financial woes. In King Abdullah Economic City — a bustling town of the future, still largely in the planning stage — “he and his team would set up a holographic teleconference system and would wait to present it to King Abdullah himself. If Abdullah was impressed, he would award the IT contract for the entire city to Reliant, and Alan’s commission, in the mid-six figures, would fix everything that ailed him.”
The epigraph to “A Hologram for the King” comes from Samuel Beckett: “It is not every day we are needed.” And so, like the tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” Alan and his rather colorless team wait and wait and wait for the king’s visit. They sprawl under a plastic tent next to one of the three completed buildings of King Abdullah Economic City and wait. They are, in effect, caught up in a Saudi version of Beckett’s theater of the absurd.
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