A Hologram for the King by
Dave Eggers (4/5)
It sometimes seems as if Dave Eggers has made a career our of
running away from his first book, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Where Heartbreaking
was a meta-memoir centered on a self-aware and self-conscious Gen-Xer, his
subsequent books have mostly looked outward.
Eggers has made a concerted effort for his work to engage with the world
around him and to avoid any of the navel gazing that pervaded his memoir. While I thoroughly enjoyed Heartbreaking, I’m glad that Eggers’s
concerns have turned towards the world at large. One element that seems to appear again and
again in Eggers’s writing is the impact and role of globalization on people’s
lives. This was certainly true in Zeitoun and What is the What whose protagonists found their to
The main character of Hologram,
Alan Clay, is abusiness consultant who formerly worked for Schwinn bicycles
before he was let go and they moved business overseas. Through happenstance he now finds himself
working for an I.T. company that plans on presenting a new hologram system to
the King of Saudi Arabia. We spend the
entire novel with Clay who can be something of a sad sack. Ever since leaving Schwinn, he has been a man
adrift, attempting to start the manufacturing of a bicycle he has designed but
unable to acquire the requisite funds.
He’s low on cash and struggles to pay for his daughter’s tuition,
meaning she may be forced to take a semester or two off from college. Clay wouldn’t necessarily be a fun guy to
hang around, a detriment that Eggers attempts to sidestep by approaching the
character with both empathy and a dark sense of humor.
Clay is both a victim and perpetrator of his own miserable
situation. His company began looking for
ways to cut costs, which at first meant moving manufacturing to less union
friendly states within the U.S. ,
but later it meant outsourcing jobs to China . This didn’t affect Clay at first, since he’s
a part of management, not labor. But, as
has been the case with globalization over the last couple of decades,
outsourcing crept upwards, eating away not only those who toil in factories but
also those who toil while wearing business suits. While Schwinn was looking towards China for cheap
labor, it turned out that the Chinese also had just as capable salesmen and
managers, thank you very much. In a
somewhat roundabout way, Clay had become responsible for outsourcing his own
job.
All of this results in Clay making the trek to Saudi Arabia in
order to present a new telecommunications hologram system to King Abdullah and
hoping to wrangle his meeting with the King into something more long term. Except Clay himself is mostly useless. He doesn’t have expertise in computers, and
it is suggested that his value lies only in his connection to a relative of the
King’s he knew in college. Clay and his
team of young computer techs spend much of their time sitting in an un-air-conditioned
tent without the requisite wi-fi needed to set up their presentation, problems
that Clay is too ineffectual to resolve.
Even here he seems to have carried with him his own obsolescence.
The obvious literary influence here is “Waiting for Godot,”
and like the characters from Beckett’s play, Clay is continually looking towoards
a future event that may never come. The
presentation with the King is continually postponed, and the presentation does
not guarantee that the King will grant them the contract or lead to any further
business in the country. And yet Clay
continues to chase this meeting all the way to the end of the novel. Eggers seems to be trying to answer the
question, if the world of globalized capitalism has so decimated the middle
class in America, then why do the victims continue to prop up this system? The answer seems to be that a businessman’s
present is always mortgaged on a possible future where he has made that one great
pitch and secured that one sacred deal.
In addition to other such literary influences—Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman and Franz Kafka’s
The Castle—Eggers also borrows from
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Much like the titular Gatsby, Clay finds
himself searching for the American dream.
Where Gatsby had to find the American dream through illegal means, Clay searches
for the American dream outside of America . One particular scene in Hologram owes a heavy debt to the description of Gatsby’s opulent
parties. Clay is invited to a gathering
of foreign expats working in Saudi
Arabia and when he arrives discovers a horde
of middle age men and women imbibing more than they can handle and generally acting
like teenagers. At one point during the
bootleg bacchanalia, a man decides to done an astronaut costume as a joke. As he floats around the gather, he comes to
represent an emptied out past, a mockery of what America was once capable of
accomplishing. One worker admits that he
hasn’t built any major projects in the United States in some time. As their own nations collapse under the
pressure of global forces, this gathering of Westerners seems only capable of
regressing towards childhood.
Of course, even these displaced workers have it easy
compared to the labor necessary to build the massive complexes that they are
designing and pitching. At one point
Clay stumbles across a roomful of indigent laborers in a half-built
condominium. The men are living in
squalor and are less than pleased about Clay’s intrusion. (I couldn’t help but think of the moment in The Trial where K. discovers the two agents
who served him being whipped by a superior in one of the rooms where he
works.) And Clay’s father was once a
union-protected manufacturer. Naturally,
Clay would be responsible for outsourcing these kinds of jobs before losing his
own.
Hologram at times
trades in a kind of pessimism that’s absent from most of Eggers’s output, but
Eggers doesn’t view globalization as a monolithic wrong. As you might guess from someone who has
written about the possibility of helping others, he sees real possibilities in
our ever shrinking world. Clay strikes
up an unusual friendship with his driver, a Saudi Arabian that spent some time
in the States while attending university.
He also has a growth removed by an international collection of doctors,
one of which is a female Saudi doctor.
There’s definite nuance in Eggers’s depiction of the lived experience of
those experiencing global economic upheavals, for those willing to look,
anyway.
While not everything works in the novel—Clay seems too
pathetic to strike up a relationship with two separate women—it still manages
to evoke a sense of immediacy as it engages with our ever-changing world. Hologram
isn’t Eggers’s best book, but it points to how literature—a term that conjures
up dust-gathering tomes on a shelf—can get in the ring and duke it out with
other genres desperately trying to explain our world. The novel is capable of representing
economics with far greater detail than a sloppily written New York Times op-ed
or better expresses the lived experience of those affected by godlike forces of
the market than an academic paper. If
nothing else, Eggers’s work, as a whole, tells us that the written page and
lived reality are constantly entwined.
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