Dave Eggers tackles a lot of big themes in A Hologram for the King. Perhaps the biggest is that the main character and his plight stand in for America as both enter a low-Testosterone phase.
Alan Clay waits. That’s about all he does. He waits. He waits for a member of the royal family so that he can show him a new technology that allows people to communicate in person through holographic techniques and the royal will, hopefully, invest in Alan’s company. He waits with his team members. He waits for bandwidth to conduct the all-important demo of the technology. He waits in his hotel room before he waits outside of it. He waits in a tent. He even waits in a huge concrete vault of a space that is waiting for the building that is supposed to rise on top of it.
Alan desperately needs the royal investment. His life has kind of capsized. The usual stuff. Divorce, struggle relating to his daughter, looming tuition bills, loss of ambition, difficulties with sex, empty nest, tyrant of a boss, bad relationship with his dad. He’s a victim of the post-2007 collapse of the global economy. America is a victim too. China is eating its lunch. Alan had a good business. He was into bikes. Then he discovered outsourcing and ruined it. His Dad worked in the real economy. Shades of Bud Fox in the movie Wall Street.
Economic recession permeates the novel. We get glimpses of the surreality of Saudi life, where everything is illegal but available. Oddly, we get no glimpse of oil. Just sand. Lots of sand, unfinished buildings, indeed an unfinished city. But no glimpse of what Americans associate with the Kingdom. Petroleum. We see what petrodollars can do. Not the petrol itself.
Thoughts of Godot are inevitable. Alan and his team wait. Absurdity surrounds. Like the sand. Alan has a relationship with a woman who works in a nearby building. She’s almost robotic in her motions, an ex-pat, a western woman, surviving in Saudi culture. Alan is checked out in the hospital (a self-inflicted problem involving a knife and a lump in his neck) by a female Saudi doctor. He hangs out with his driver (his only meaningful relationship) and his family and almost shoots a shepherd boy, clearly an allegory for America’s military ambitions in the Middle East. Alan’s driver is the most interesting character in the novel. Too bad he sort of leaves the stage after the shepherd boy almost bites it.
Alan is in his mid-50s. Thoughts of low-T, like Godot, are also inevitable. He needs a pill. America’s global reign is ending. America needs a pill. Both come off as kind of pathetic.
The ending is difficult. Not sure it works. He “gets” the Saudi doctor but a survivalist tale of Alan as a boy with his dad is told that doesn’t seem to fit. But overall, the novel tightly and successfully weaves difficult to capture economic themes, almost impossible to make interesting. The emptiness of the Saudi desert is the emptying of Alan’s life and achievement. Digital technology is, with China, ascendant. Outsourcing and consulting are villains, even if unintended consequences of the global economy. The ex-pats and the Saudis warily move around each other cloaked in sterile cloth of cultural differences.
Eggers seems to have a recent fascination with Middle Eastern themes. His last book, Zeitoun, a non-fiction work, tells the story of a Syrian American man and his Heinz 57 American wife caught between the Katrina disaster in New Orleans and post-9/11 paranoia about Muslims and Islam. I admire Eggers for pounding this sand. Few American authors display such courage.
A Hologram for the King is a fast read. Like the landscape he describes, Eggers give us lots of empty space and breathing room. Human kindness taken with mutual understanding is the only pill, in the end, that cures what seems to ail Alan. No cure seemed evident for America.
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