Book World: In Dave Eggers’s ‘Hologram for the King,’ American dream is deferred
Most of the action of the novel concerns Alan’s search for connection. He writes abortive letter after letter to his beloved daughter Kit, whose college tuition he can no longer afford to pay. He enjoys wisecracking with an on-call driver named Yousef, attends a bacchanal at the Danish Embassy, worries about a lump on his neck — is it cancer? — as the cause of persistent clumsiness, and tentatively embarks on relationships with two women. As time goes by, he recognizes that the entire country of Saudi Arabia “seemed to operate on two levels, the official and the actual.” Consequently, there are episodes that suggest not just the absurd but also the vaguely Kafkaesque, as when Alan stumbles into a hidden world on the third floor of an unfinished apartment building. Instances of drunken, even insane behavior, and the threat of murderous violence also punctuate the novel, interrupting its light comedy. Could we be heading for a shocking denouement a la Paul Bowles or Patricia Highsmith? Mostly, though, time passes; nothing happens.
The reader soon adjusts to the leisurely, almost desultory pace of the story, to the relative austerity of the prose. Sometimes Eggers offers neat capsule vignettes: “At the exit they drove past a desert-colored Humvee, a machine gun mounted on top. A Saudi soldier was sitting next to it, in a beach chair, his feet soaking in an inflatable pool.” At other times Eggers grows sententious, perhaps deliberately in Alan’s letters to Kit, but apparently without irony in several vaguely philosophical passages:
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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.”
“Nature tells man that she will kill him anywhere. In flat land, she will kill him with tornadoes. Live near a coast and she will send tsunamis to erase centuries of work. Earthquakes mock all engineering, all notions of permanence. Nature wants to kill, kill, kill, laugh at our work, wipe itself clean.”
Throughout “A Hologram for the King,” the narrative deftly counterpoints the present and Alan’s hopes for the future against his memories of the past. Alan recalls a friend who committed suicide, remembers the techniques of door-to-door salesmanship that he learned at Fuller Brush (although he neglects to mention the free samples, which in the summer I worked for the company were the main come-ons), and he calls up sometimes-painful memories of his youthful courtship of Ruby, followed by self-pitying outbursts about their unhappy later years: “She had done him great harm, repeatedly — she’d torn him open, thrown all kinds of terrible ruinous stuff inside him, and then had sewn him back up.”
Thematically, then, this is a novel about well-intentioned bumbling, about impotence and failure and self-delusion, on both the personal and national level. It is also a novel by Dave Eggers, whose name is synonymous with almost everything hip and cool on today’s literary scene. Is it an accident that the book’s jacketless embossed cover almost appears to proclaim: “A Hologram for the King Dave Eggers”? The acknowledgments — acknowledgments for a novel, mind you — list dozens and dozens of people who read, advised, edited, proofed and helped produce the book. The cynical might wonder whether this is a work of art or a corporate product.
But put aside such unworthy thoughts, and what do we actually have here? A diverting, well-written novel about a middle-aged American dreamer, joined to a critique of how the American dream has been subverted by outsourcing our know-how and manufacturing to third-world nations. That last is certainly a distinctly contemporary touch. However, as for Alan himself: We’ve seen him and his brothers before, in William Dean Howells’s “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” in Theodore Dreiser’s “The Financier” and Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt,” in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and John Updike’s Rabbit novels. In literature, if not in life, middle-aged businessmen seldom find happiness.
Dirda reviews books each Thursday in Style and conducts a book discussion for The Post at wapo.st/reading-room.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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