"I can do it any way you want," Dave Eggers tells a reality TV producer in his debut, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. "I can do it funny, or maudlin, or just straight, uninflected anything. You tell me. I can do it sad, or inspirational, or angry. It's all there, all these things at once, so it's up to you you choose, you pick." In his relatively short career, Eggers has proved that he is indeed strikingly versatile, moving not just from funny to sad and back again, but from the wildest extremes of exhibitionism to total self-effacement, from navel-gazing to globalised humanitarian concern, from memoir to novel to oral history to children's books. In his spare time, he has also been an influential literary impresario, founding McSweeney's magazine and publishing house, and a successful child literacy campaigner.
His first book is still probably his most remarkable. AHWOSG, as he called it, tells the story of his parents' deaths, within weeks of each other, and of how he raised his much younger brother while living a Generation X-er's life in San Francisco. It is exhaustingly self-conscious, mannered and cute the opening 40 pages of "rules and suggestions for enjoyment of this book" have not aged well but it is also funny, far-sighted and fairly devastating. Most importantly, it loosed the Eggers voice on the world. It's a voice that, a few years back, was suddenly everywhere in American fiction and journalism: whimsical, digressive, grandiose but ironic about it, experimental in a lighthearted way, with B-movie rhetoric but sincere feelings, and sophisticated discourse punctuated by chatty interjections "oh" and "kind of" and "here's the thing". It's comparable to David Foster Wallace's voice, but more approachable: easier to follow, easier to imitate. And thanks partly to Eggers' publishing concerns, it spread like wildfire.
Then the author himself changed track. In 2006 he wrote What is the What, a non-fiction novel about one of the "lost boys of Sudan", children orphaned or separated from their parents during Sudan's civil war. Zeitoun followed in 2009 the story of a Syrian-American who canoed around New Orleans rescuing victims after Hurricane Katrina, and was rewarded by being held without charge for 23 days on terrorism charges. Both these books, though bearing witness to truly amazing and significant experiences, were arguably straitjacketed as writing by their second-handedness and their good intentions. Those who questioned Eggers' portrayal of Abdulrahman Zeitoun as a hero of almost Biblical virtue can claim some vindication; he has since been convicted for assaulting his wife, and faces charges of conspiracy to murder her and two others.
Now comes A Hologram for the King. His first real novel since 2002's hectic and mostly unloved You Shall Know Our Velocity! is a sober, sincere, old-school novel with big social themes and, at its centre, an emblematic American a salesman, no less, like Arthur Miller's Willy Loman or Sinclair Lewis's Babbit. Less typically, it's set in Saudi Arabia, and, being an Eggers book, it comes with nifty postmodern stylings, a clever central conceit and a gently absurdist plot.
Alan Clay is a consultant. He started off as a door-to-door salesman and worked his way up through Schwinn bikes, the Chicago manufacturer. In the traditional way of such characters, he's facing an existential-type crisis. He's divorced, he drinks too much, and the recession has worn down his earnings to practically nothing. He's "virtually broke, nearly unemployed", and he won't be able to pay his daughter's college fees unless he can pull off one more big job. Reliant, a huge conglomerate, has sent him to Jeddah to pitch for the IT infrastructure contract for King Abdullah Economic City ("KAEC"), a massive new development in the middle of nowhere. Alan and his colleagues hope to impress the king by showing him a cutting-edge holographic teleconferencing system, which can make a colleague in London appear in 3D in a tent in Saudi Arabia.
Alan's crisis is conspicuously symbolic. At Schwinn, he was one of the executives who pushed for the bicycles to be manufactured away from Chicago, in order to get away from the unions, and then to outsource the whole process to Asia. The firm later went bankrupt, and Alan "left himself with nothing to sell": "More efficient without the unions, cut them out. More efficient without American workers, period, cut them out. Why didn't I see it coming? More efficient without me, too I became unnecessary. I made myself irrelevant." He's a man who used to sell things to people. Now he's selling an illusion to a chimera: Alan and his team wait in the stiflingly hot "presentation tent" in the desert to pitch to King Abdullah who, Godot-like, refuses to show. Alan used to be sunny and optimistic, in the American way. Now something has "darkened under his brow". When an old classmate sees him, he says: "Alan Clay, you've got a thousand-mile stare. What happened to you?" At a party, he meets a US architect who builds huge towers in China and the Gulf, and hasn't worked in America for years. "The dreaming's being done elsewhere for now," he says.
If this sounds a little diagrammatic, it is. In order to point up the issues at stake, Alan's father is a former factory foreman, a union man who despises his son's career. And, just to make sure the themes are quite clear, Alan meets a drunken businessman on the plane who spells it all out, wailing that "it should matter where something was made!" and inveighing against Jack Welch's barge (the former CEO of General Electric said that, ideally, you'd put your manufacturing plant on a barge so that it could be moved around the world as wages and currencies fluctuate).
The saving grace is that Eggers' subject is so timely and important, and the way he dramatises it so apt and amusing. "We've become a nation of indoor cats," says the man on the plane, a "nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers". America, he thinks, is doomed to be consigned, like western Europe, to "an era of tourism and shopkeeping".
Setting the story in KAEC was a stroke of genius. It's an Ozymandias-like folly, a desert mirage. In 2010, when the novel is set, it consists of three buildings: a "welcome center", an office building and a show home "a pastel-pink condominium". "Streetlights were placed every twenty feet or so, but otherwise there was nothing at all, the whole thing like a recently abandoned development on the moon."
Eggers is good at conveying the hallucinatory, weightless feeling of expatriate life in the Gulf states: the featureless hotels that "could have been in Arizona, in Orlando, anywhere"; the wild parties in closed-off diplomatic compounds; the huge structures thrown up by oil wealth in the middle of nowhere. Alan passes the days waiting for the king, filling his empty hours by sitting on the shore of the Red Sea with his socks off, or writing long, plaintive letters to his daughter. Eggers' style is mostly subdued and plainly descriptive, with large blank spaces between short paragraphs increasing the sense of emptiness.
Though Eggers deserves credit for presenting a nuanced and sympathetic view of the kingdom, the novel's Saudi Arabians are not always successful. Alan gets a sidekick, a driver called Yousef who is penguin-shaped and quirky and says things like: "I'm a little freaked out", or "It sounds like a soap opera, I know So he forbids her to marry me, blah blah, and she goes and marries another guy." The explanation for this is that he has spent a year studying in Alabama, and that he is one of many westernised Saudis chafing against the regime. I don't think this justifies imagining him along such entirely Eggers-like lines; it shows a reluctance to consider the world outside the writer's own terms of reference.
More generally, the weightlessness and emptiness, though deliberate, sometimes threaten to engulf the novel especially since Eggers is temperamentally anything but a minimalist. He tends to follow the human interest, and then to drop it because the overall scheme demands that pretty much nothing happens. Nevertheless, this is a clever, likeable and very entertaining novel. A Hologram for the King treads lightly and elegantly, considering its weighty subject matter: globalisation and its discontents, the downsizing and outsourcing of the American dream, real people lost in an increasingly virtual world.
