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Summary
Summary
In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy's gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment- and a moving story of how we got here.
Author Notes
Dave Eggers was born on March 12th, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts. His family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois when he was a child. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, until his parents' deaths in 1991 and 1992. The loss left him responsible for his eight-year-old brother and later became the inspiration for his highly acclaimed memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Published in 2000, the memoir was nominated for a nonfiction Pulitzer the following year.
Eggers edits the popular "The Best American Nonrequired Reading" published annually. In 1998, he founded the independent publishing house, McSweeney's which publishes a variety of magazines and literary journals. Eggers has also opened several nonprofit writing centers for high school students across the United States.
Eggers has written several novels and his title, A Hologram for the King, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. His most recent work of fiction, entitled The Circle, was published in 2013. His recent nonfiction books are The Monk of Mokha (January 2018) and What Can a Citizen Do? (Illustrated by Shawn Harris)(September 2018).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Eggers's fourth novel, failed entrepreneur Alan Clay is recently divorced, deeply in debt, and struggling to pay for his daughter's next expensive semester. When his latest business venture lands him in a soon-to-be prosperous city in Saudi Arabia, he must work to win a communications contract from an elusive king. Clay expects to stay a few days, but finds the project without an end date. Stranded in a desert purgatory, Clay drinks too much, sleeps too little, writes long e-mails to his daughter, reflects on the missteps that have led him astray in life, and, in his bleaker moments, performs surgery himself on a suspicious growth on the back of his neck. For a businessman hoping to salvage his career, it is a shaky new beginning. Narrator Dion Graham-who has previously read other Eggers titles-turns in a standout performance. His reading is clear, crisp, well paced, and thoroughly entertaining. He fluidly switches between dozens of dialects and creates unique voices for a host of characters. Eggers fans will be delighted. A McSweeney's hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Alan Clay is in Saudi Arabia, hired by an American company to sell an IT system based on a revolutionary hologram that enables far-flung associates to instantly commune with the telepresence of their colleagues, to the nascent (in fact, barely begun) King Abdullah Economic City. As down and out as they come overleveraged, unable to pay his daughter's college tuition, and scarred by his long-over marriage Alan hopes all wrongs will be righted when his team lands the deal, and his fat commission will be enough to pay his many debts and start over. But days become weeks while the team waits in the ghostly desert for a meeting with the king, a moving target. Slowly revealing Alan's history as a salesman who encouraged his employers at Schwinn to manufacture overseas, and only too late realized his compliance in rendering his own irrelevance, Eggers effectively shows why Alan wanted to believe that this kind of thing, a city rising from dust, could happen. In a land of contradictions Alan repeatedly experiences exactly what guidebooks told him he wouldn't and in a time when we depend on the instant, laser-sharpness of computers to direct decisions, Alan's greatest glories are in the waiting and in the uncertainty of his own and humanity's gray spaces.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Where is our new-millennium Norman Mailer? It's startling, 50 years on, to look back at the work of Mailer in the 1960s - from "The Presidential Papers" to "The Armies of the Night" - and see such unabashed ambition, such reckless audacity and such a stubborn American readiness to try to save the Republic from itself and bring it back to its original promise. Mailer's very titles - "Advertisements for Myself," "An American Dream" - told us he was on a mission, committed to the transformation of country and self, and even as he gave himself over to unremittingly private (and epic) meditations on God, the Devil, cancer and plastics, he was also determined to remake the civic order. He ran for mayor of New York City, he tried his hand at directing movies and in 1955 he helped start an alternative weekly known as The Village Voice. Part of the exhilaration of Mailer was that he cared so ravenously even when he failed; he was shooting for the moon even when he shot himself in the foot. Dave Eggers comes from a much more sober, humbled, craft-loving time, and his latest novel is the opposite of a failure: it's a clear, supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped and sad. But for all the difference between their generations, you can feel in Eggers some of the hunger, the range and the unembarrassedly serious engagement with America and its ideals that gave Mailer's work such force. Eggers asserted his bravado - along with some tonic self-mockery - in the very title of his first book, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (a title of which Mailer would have been proud); he followed it up with a very different kind of book, a novel, "You Shall Know Our Velocity," about the impenitent determination of two young Americans to travel the world giving money away. Yet even as he has written seven substantial books in 12 years, Eggers has also established his own publishing house, bristling with attitude and backward-looking invention. He's started two magazines whose names (Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and The Believer) openly declare their interest in homemade whimsy and optimism - or, you could say, in the past and in the future. He's established nonprofit writing and tutorial centers across the country and, in his spare minutes, helped write two feature movies, "Where the Wild Things Are" and "Away We Go." Like Mailer, he's almost underrated precisely because he's so ubiquitous and dares us to mock him with his unapologetic ambitions. Yet where Mailer was consciously working in a deeply American grain, with his talk of revolution and transcendence, Eggers speaks for a new America that has to think globally and can't be sure where the country fits on the planetary screen. And where Mailer was bent on showing us how America could remake the world, Eggers, with ferocious energy and versatility, has been studying how the world is remaking America. Most of our great contemporary examinations of cultural sampling and bipolar belonging come from writers with immigrant backgrounds. It's invigorating, in that context, to see how Dave Eggers, born in Boston to classic fifthgeneration Irish stock (his mother was a McSweeney) and raised in Lake Forest, Ill., has devoted himself to chronicling the shifting melting pot, seeming to tell others' stories more than his own. In his fourth major book, "What Is the What," he gave us a nonfiction novel about Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese "Lost Boy" who survives wars at home and refugee camps abroad only to find that his problems are by no means behind him when finally he gets to Atlanta, and the Land of the Free. Some critics may have bristled at the notion of a young white American writing the story of a real-life African villager, but it took a writer of Eggers's artistry (and vulnerability) to give Deng's story its heartbreaking power. In his next (nonfictional) work, "Zeitoun," Eggers turned the story of Hurricane Katrina into a brilliantly structured and propulsive narrative whose ail-American protagonist just happened to be a Muslim house-painter brought up in the Syrian coastal town of Jableh, married to a former Southern Baptist from Baton Rouge and eager to construct a new life through hard work and tending to others. The American Dream, the author was reminding us, is coming to us now in Arabic. In both "Zeitoun" and "What Is the What," Eggers's heroically self-effacing prose revealed the people we blindly walk past on our city streets every day. "Zeitoun," in fact, began as part of a Voice of Witness series of oral histories through which Eggers is hoping to inform us of those faraway places whose destinies are ever more central to our own. Like Mailer, Eggers seems ready to take America by the scruff of its neck and ask us what we're going to do about injustice and a sense of community; but where some writers celebrate America as a home for second lives and triumphant reinvention, Eggers seems bracingly wary of happy endings, as if convinced that our real work is still ahead of us. IN "A Hologram for the King" - a kind of "Death of a Globalized Salesman," alight with all of Arthur Miller's compassion and humanism - Eggers at once pushes that project forward and, characteristically, gives us an entirely different and unexpected story. Alan Clay is a 54-year-old self-employed consultant (as everyday and malleable as his name) first introduced on the 10th floor of a glassy Hilton in Jeddah, where he's come to try to redeem his fortune, and America's. Day after day Alan is driven, usually late, to a large white tent in the desert - part of the King Abdullah Economic City, or KAEC (as in "cake") - where three young colleagues sit around with laptops waiting to show a holographic teleconferencing system to King Abdullah, on behalf of Reliant, an American company that is "the largest I.T. supplier in the world." Day after day, the king fails to arrive and the Americans lie around, fret about the absence of Wi-Fi and kill time in the emptiness. Desperate for something to happen, Alan lances a cyst on his neck with a crude knife - and later a needle - just to feel the blood flow. "Hologram" flashes past in an appropriately quick series of brief, displacing passages with plenty of space around them for us to feel the vacancy and nowhereness; if Mailer attached himself to Hemingway in honor of the older writer's unabashed competitiveness and machismo, Eggers here is drawn more to the best thing in Hemingway, his style of clean lines and sharp edges. Scene after scene is so clear and precise - "A plume of smoke unzipped the blue sky beyond the mountains," a "pair of headlights appeared as a blue sunrise beyond the ridge's ragged silhouette" - that it's easy to overlook just how strong and well wrought the writing is. The vast empty spaces of the desert stand, of course, for the holographic projections that now determine Alan's (and America's) destiny, while Saudi Arabia, a puritan kingdom where everyone seems to be boozing on the sly, is the perfect Other that constantly confounds and defeats its New World visitors. In the long, empty days Alan befriends a penguinshaped young Saudi who tools around in a 30-year-old Caprice and sports Oakley sunglasses above his handmade sandals (he once spent a year in Alabama); he meets lonely expats and looks in on an embassy debauch where a man in a spacesuit is "feigning weightlessness." Every detail perfectly advances a vision of American aspiration at a time of economic collapse and midlife crisis: just two floors below a gleaming condo in the desert that speaks for the virtual future that the Saudis (and Americans) are counting on is another room where 25 foreign laborers are squeezed into a tiny space, exchanging blows over a discarded cellphone. Yet even at home, we come to see, Alan has been living in a house for sale where he's taken for a "ghost"; he's run out of money to pay his daughter's college bills, and the only one who has ever fought for him is his "constantly cruel ex-wife." Over a long career working for Fuller Brush and Schwinn bicycles and a dozen others, he's somehow encouraged the outsourcing of manufacturing that has led to both him and his country becoming redundant. In Florida, he eats from vending machines, and in his home in suburban Boston he watches old Red Sox DVDs again and again. At the book's opening, his neighbor Charlie, who's recently discovered transcendentalism and speaks (as Mailer might have) of "grandeur and awe and holiness," walks into a lake to his death. In Alan's America, even Walden Pond has become a cesspool. EGGERS'S command of this middlemanagement landscape is so sure - and his interest in the battle between humanity and technology so insistent - that his book might almost be a DeLillo novel written for the iPhone Generation, though delivered by DeLillo's more openhearted and Midwestern nephew. Eggers's inhabiting of the terms and tics of a distinctly American consciousness is as remarkable as, in earlier books, his channeling of Sudanese and Syrian sensibilities. He knows how businessmen, faced with a terrible proposal, will say, "Let's table it for now"; he registers how door-to-door salesmen point out, "A stranger rings, a friend knocks"; he cites the wisdom of Jack Welch. To a world of glass and emptiness - "I feel like a pane of glass that needs to be shattered," Alan tells another consultant - he brings his rather old-fashioned interest in neighborhood values and service. And his Saudi Arabia sounds to me note-perfect, from the soldier seated in a beach chair next to a Humvee, soaking his feet in an inflatable pool, to the secret drag races in the desert. Nearly every action in the book carries a symbolic resonance: each time Alan is approached by a foreign woman, he becomes disengaged and, in fact, impotent, and when finally he does go into a local hospital for his cyst, he's worked on by a team made up of Chinese, English, German, Italian, Russian and mongrel Lebanese medical professionals. Yet underneath the global blueprint is a story human enough to draw blood. Anyone who's traveled will recognize the plaintiveness and vague menace of the Saudis who loom before Alan, or the likable Saudi Panza who tries to scroll to a Fleetwood Mac song on his iPod as Alan prepares to tell him another corny joke. The buddy movie is clearly a significant form for Eggers, but, like Hollywood, he has upgraded it: from the frat-boy do-goodism of "You Shall Know Our Velocity" to a vehicle that features-a young Muslim and an aging American, and asks what happens when velocity gives out. At first glance, a reader might wonder what a story about a flailing American businessman trying to win a contract over the Chinese in the Saudi desert has to do with Eggers's celebrated memoir about losing both of his parents within five weeks at the age of 21, and tending to his younger brother. But the strength of all his work comes from his sense of loss and pain, mixed with his decidedly American wish to try to bring his orphaned characters to a provisional shelter. It's Eggers's tragic sense - "Were scars the best evidence of living?" he writes here - that gives fiber and nuance to his desire for something better, and ensures that his hope for some kind of understanding never becomes merely sentimental. Alan speaks for something essential to Eggers - and poignant - in his constant oscillation between the wish to do the right thing and his awareness that he doesn't have a clue what the right thing might be. Like Mailer, in other words, Eggers has a vision, with the result that there's nothing random about the projects he takes on or the ways he pursues them; to the casual observer, he may seem all over the place, but underneath the wild diversity of his interests is a profoundly searching and meticulous craftsman who could hardly be more focused. "A Hologram for the King" is, among other things, an anguished investigation into how and where American self-confidence got lost and - in the central word another lonely expat uses for Alan - "defeated." At one point a fellow passenger on a plane mentions to Alan how even the Statue of Liberty is depicted moving forward, so committed is America to the future tense; four pages on, Alan recalls being told, at length, about how an all-important contract for blast-resistant glass in Freedom Tower, built on the ashes of the World Trade Center, has been given to a Chinese company, working (to compound the insult) from an American patent. In places, the book becomes almost a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands, knew struggle. Alan's father, a World War II veteran who still has shrapnel in his lower back, rages at his son for helping to take business abroad; the deeper sorrow is the suggestion that moral clarity and a sense of purpose also got outsourced in the process. As he mourns the decline of a time when men were more in touch with their animal selves and an outer wilderness could save us from a wilderness within, Alan reminisces about the hunting trips he took with his dad as a boy, thinks about the time he took his daughter to see one of the last launchings of the space shuttle at Cape Canaveral (and they met an oldfashioned, in fact Maileresque, American hero and explorer, an astronaut). When Alan is invited by a local friend to a Saudi mountain village, he tries to reach back to a world of John Wayne certainties and, cradling a gun, blows up the one human connection he's so happily made. This may all sound a little too much like metaphor - or romanticism - but Eggers's sense of loss is hard-earned and his feeling for his characters as affectingly real as his epigraph from Beckett ("It is not every day that we are needed"). At times, his book reminds one of Douglas Coupland's deeply wistful tales of Generation X's search for belief and direction, at other times of the weightless suburban drifters of Hamid Murakami's world, all but longing (in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," say) for an earlier era of intensity and war. A sense of impermanence and possible disaster is always very close in Eggers's work - here it's sometimes devouring - and that is what makes his good nature and hopefulness so rending, and so necessary. Every now and then he pulls back from his engagingly stumbling characters to suggest a larger order: "The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again." In the end, what makes "A Hologram for the King" is the conviction with which Eggers plunges into the kind of regular working American we don't see enough in contemporary fiction, and gives voice and heft to Alan's struggles in an information economy in which he has no information and there's not much of an economy. At one point, with nothing to do, Alan starts writing to his daughter to persuade her to forgive her mother, the ex-wife who has all but destroyed him. "People think you're able to help them and usually you can't," he writes. "And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint." Such is the fragility of Alan's situation, though, that even that modest hope seems far from guaranteed, mostly because Alan is such a nonvirtual man, the opposite of a hologram. Norman Mailer probably hated the fact that many of us consider his great, essential narrative to be his "nonfiction novel" about Gary Gilmore, "The Executioner's Song"; the whole long, tragic story is delivered with extraordinary documentary fidelity and restraint and yet only someone as obsessed as Mailer was with rebellion and possession could have invested the tale with such intensity. In much the same way, Eggers has developed an exceptional gift for opening up the lives of others so as to offer the story of globalism as it develops and, simultaneously, to unfold a much more archetypal tale of struggle and loneliness and drift. Public and private explorations come together, and as this groundbreaking writer grows wiser and deeper and more melancholy, evolving from telling his own stories to voicing America's, he might be asking us how we can bring the best parts of our past into a planetary future. A nostalgic lament, in part, for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands. Pico Iyer is the author of 10 books, including "The Global Soul" and, most recently, "The Man Within My Head."
Guardian Review
A Hologram for the King is a sober, sincere, old-school novel with big social themes and, at its centre, an emblematic American - a salesman. Less typically, it's set in Saudi Arabia and, being an Eggers book, comes with nifty postmodern stylings and a gently absurdist plot. Alan Clay started off as a door-to-door salesman and in the traditional way of such characters, is facing an existential-type crisis. He's divorced, he drinks too much, the recession has worn down his earnings to practically nothing and he won't be able to pay his daughter's college fees unless he can pull off one more big job, an IT pitch in Jeddah. Eggers is good at conveying the hallucinatory, weightless feeling of expatriate life in the Gulf states but, more generally, the weightlessness and emptiness, though deliberate, sometimes threaten to engulf the novel. Nevertheless, this is a clever, likable and very entertaining book that treads lightly on globalisation and its discontents, the downsizing and outsourcing of the American dream, and real people lost in an increasingly virtual world. - Theo Tait A Hologram for the King is a sober, sincere, old-school novel with big social themes and, at its centre, an emblematic American - a salesman. Less typically, it's set in Saudi Arabia and, being an Eggers book, comes with nifty postmodern stylings and a gently absurdist plot. - Theo Tait.
Kirkus Review
A middle-aged man scrapes for his identity in a Saudi Arabian city of the future. This book by McSweeney's founder Eggers (Zeitoun, 2009, etc.) inverts the premise of his fiction debut, 2002's You Shall Know Our Velocity. That novel was a globe-trotting tale about giving away money; this one features a hero stuck in one place and desperate to make a bundle. Alan Clay is a 50-something American salesperson for an information technology company angling for a contract to wire King Abdullah Economic City, a Saudi commerce hub. Alan and his team are initially anxious to deliver their presentation to the king--which features a remote speaker appearing via hologram--but they soon learn the country moves at a snail-like pace. So Alan drifts: He wanders the moonscape of the sparely constructed city, obsesses over a cyst on his back, bonds with his troubled driver, pursues fumbling relationships with two women, ponders his debts and recalls his shortcomings as a salesman, husband and father. This book is in part a commentary on America's eroding economic might (there are numerous asides about offshoring and cheap labor), but it's mostly a potent, well-drawn portrait of one man's discovery of where his personal and professional selves split and connect. Eggers has matured greatly as a novelist since Velocity: Where that novel was gassy and knotted, this one has crisp sentences and a solid structure. He masters the hurry-up-and-wait rhythm of Alan's visit, accelerating the prose when the King's arrival seems imminent, then slackening it again. If anything, the novel's flaws seem to be products of too much tightening: An incident involving a death back home feels clipped and some passages are reduced to fable-like simplicity. Even so, Eggers' fiction has evolved in the past decade. This book is firm proof that that social concerns can make for resonant storytelling.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I. Alan Clay woke up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was May 30, 2010. He had spent two days on planes to get there. In Nairobi he had met a woman. They sat next to each other while they waited for their flights. She was tall, curvy, with tiny gold earrings. She had ruddy skin and a lilting voice. Alan liked her more than many of the people in his life, people he saw every day. She said she lived in upstate New York. Not that far away from his home in suburban Boston. If he had courage he would have found a way to spend more time with her. But instead he got on his flight and he flew to Riyadh and then to Jeddah. A man picked him up at the airport and drove him to the Hilton. With a click, Alan entered his room at the Hilton at 1:12 a.m. He quickly prepared to go to bed. He needed to sleep. He had to travel an hour north at seven for an eight o'clock arrival at the King Abdullah Economic City. There 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. So he needed to feel rested. To feel prepared. But instead he had spent four hours in bed not sleeping. He thought of his daughter, Kit, who was in college, a very good and expensive college. He did not have the money to pay her tuition for the fall. He could not pay her tuition because he had made a series of foolish decisions in his life. He had not planned well. He had not had courage when he needed it. His decisions had been short sighted. The decisions of his peers had been short sighted. These decisions had been foolish and expedient. But he hadn't known at the time that his decisions were short sighted, foolish or expedient. He and his peers did not know they were making decisions that would leave them, leave Alan, as he now was -- virtually broke, nearly unemployed, the proprietor of a one-man consulting firm run out of his home office. He was divorced from Kit's mother, Ruby. They had now been apart longer than they had been together. Ruby was an unholy pain in the ass who now lived in California and contributed nothing financially to Kit's finances. College is your thing, she told him. Be a man about it, she said. Now Kit would not be in college in the fall. Alan had put his house on the market but it had not yet sold. Otherwise he was out of options. He owed money to many people, including $18k to a pair of bicycle designers who had built him a prototype for a new bicycle he thought he could manufacture in the Boston area. For this he was called an idiot. He owed money to Jim Wong, who had loaned him $45k to pay for materials and the first and last on a warehouse lease. He owed another $65k or so to a half-dozen friends and would-be partners. So he was broke. And when he realized he could not pay Kit's tuition, it was too late to apply for any other aid. Too late to transfer. Was it a tragedy that a healthy young woman like Kit would take a semester off of college? No, it was not a tragedy. The long, tortured history of the world would take no notice of a missed semester of college for a smart and capable young woman like Kit. She would survive. It was no tragedy. Nothing like tragedy. They said it was a tragedy what had happened to Charlie Fallon. Charlie Fallon froze to death in the lake near Alan's house. The lake next to Alan's house. Alan was thinking of Charlie Fallon while not sleeping in the room at the Jeddah Hilton. Alan had seen Charlie step into the lake that day. Alan was driving away, on his way to the quarry. It had not seemed normal that a man like Charlie Fallon would be stepping into the shimmering black lake in September, but neither was it extraordinary. Charlie Fallon had been sending Alan pages from books. He had been doing this for two years. Charlie had discovered the Transcendentalists late in life and felt a kinship with them. He had seen that Brook Farm was not far from where he and Alan lived, and he thought it meant something. He traced his Boston ancestry, hoping to find a connection, but found none. Still, he sent Alan pages, with passages highlighted. The workings of a privileged mind, Alan thought. Don't send me more of that shit, he told Charlie. But Charlie grinned and sent more. So when Alan saw Charlie stepping into the lake at noon on a Saturday he saw it as a logical extension of the man's new passion for the land. He was only ankle-deep when Alan passed him that day. II. When Alan woke in the Jeddah Hilton he was already late. It was 8:15. He had fallen asleep just after five. He was expected at the King Abdullah Economic City at eight. It was at least an hour away. After he showered and dressed and got a car to the site it would be ten. He would be two hours late on the first day of his assignment here. He was a fool. He was more a fool every year. He tried Cayley's cellphone. She answered, her husky voice. In another lifetime, a different spin of the wheel wherein he was younger and she older and both of them stupid enough to attempt it, he and Cayley would have been something terrible. --Hello Alan! It's beautiful here. Well, maybe not beautiful. But you're not here. He explained. He did not lie. He could no longer muster the energy, the creativity required. --Well, don't worry, she said, with a small laugh -- that voice of hers implied the possibility of, celebrated the existence of a fantastic life of abiding sensuality -- we're just setting up. But you'll have to get your own ride. Any of you know how Alan will get a ride out here? She seemed to be yelling to the rest of the team. The space sounded cavernous. He pictured a dark and hollow place, three young people holding candles, waiting for him and his lantern. --He can't rent a car, she said to them. And now to him: --Can you rent a car, Alan? --I'll figure it out, he said. He called the lobby. --Hello. Alan Clay here. What's your name? He asked names. A habit Joe Trivole instilled back in the Fuller Brush days. Ask names, repeat names. You remember people's names, they remember you. The clerk said his name was Edward. --Edward? --Yes sir. My name is Edward. Can I help you? --Where are you from, Edward? --Jakarta, Indonesia, sir. --Ah, Jakarta, Alan said. Then realized he had nothing to say about Jakarta. He knew nothing about Jakarta. --Edward, what do you think of me renting a car through the hotel? --Do you have an international driver's license? --No. --Then no, I don't think you should do this. Alan called the concierge. He explained he needed a driver to take him to the King Abdullah Economic City. --This will take a few minutes, the concierge said. His accent was not Saudi. There were apparently no Saudis working at this Saudi hotel. Alan had assumed as much. There were few Saudis working anywhere, he'd been told. They imported their labor in all sectors. We must find someone appropriate to drive you, the concierge said. --You can't just call a taxi? --Not exactly, sir. Alan's blood went hot, but this was a mess of his making. He thanked the man and hung up. He knew you couldn't just call a taxi in Jeddah or Riyadh -- or so said the guidebooks, all of which were overwrought when it came to elucidating the dangers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to foreign travelers. The State Department had Saudi on the highest alert. Kidnapping was not unlikely. Alan might be sold to al-Qaeda, ransomed, transported across borders. But Alan had never felt in danger anywhere, and his assignments had taken him to Juarez in the nineties, Guatemala in the eighties. * * * The phone rang. --We have a driver for you. When would you like him? --As soon as possible. --He'll be here in twelve minutes. Alan showered and shaved his mottled neck. He put on his undershirt, his white button-down, khakis, loafers, tan socks. Just dress like an American businessman, he'd been told. There were the cautionary tales of overzealous Westerners wearing thobes, headdresses. Trying to blend in, making an effort. This effort was not appreciated. While fixing the collar of his shirt, Alan felt the lump on his neck that he'd first discovered a month earlier. It was the size of a golf ball, protruding from his spine, feeling like cartilage. Some days he figured it was part of his spine, because what else could it be? It could be a tumor. There on his spine, a lump like that -- it had to be invasive and deadly. Lately he'd been cloudy of thought and clumsy of gait, and it made a perfect and terrible sense that there was something growing there, eating away at him, sapping him of vitality, squeezing away all acuity and purpose. He'd planned to see someone about it, but then had not. A doctor could not operate on something like that. Alan didn't want radiation, didn't want to go bald. No, the trick was to touch it occasionally, track attendant symptoms, touch it some more, then do nothing. In twelve minutes Alan was ready. He called Cayley. --I'm leaving the hotel now. --Good. We'll be all set up by the time you get here. The team could get there without him, the team could set up without him. And so why was he there at all? The reasons were specious but had gotten him here. The first was that he was older than the other members of the team, all of them children, really, none beyond thirty. Second, Alan had once known King Abdullah's nephew when they had been part of a plastics venture in the mid-nineties, and Eric Ingvall, the Reliant VP in New York, felt that this was a good enough connection that it would get the attention of the King. Probably not true, but Alan had chosen not to change their minds. Alan was happy for the work. He needed the work. The eighteen months or so before the call from Ingvall had been humbling. Filing a tax return for $22,350 in taxable income was an experience he hadn't expected to have at his age. He'd been home consulting for seven years, each year with dwindling revenue. No one was spending. Even five years ago business had been good; old friends threw him work, and he was useful to them. He'd connect them with vendors he knew, pull favors, cut deals, cut fat. He'd felt worthwhile. Now he was fifty-four years old and was as intriguing to corporate America as an airplane built from mud. He could not find work, could not sign clients. 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 called the concierge. --Is the car there? --I'm sorry, he will be late. --Is this the guy from Jakarta? --It is. --Edward. --Yes. --Hi again, Edward. How late will the car be? --Twenty more minutes. Can I send some food up to you? Alan went to the window and looked out. The Red Sea was calm, unremarkable from this height. A six-lane highway ran just alongside it. A trio of men in white fished at the pier. Alan looked at the balcony next to his. He could see his reflection in the glass. He looked like an average man. When shaved and dressed, he passed for legitimate. But something had darkened under his brow. His eyes had retreated and people were noticing. At his last high school reunion, a man, a former football player whom Alan had despised, said, Alan Clay, you've got a thousand-mile stare. What happened to you? A gust of wind came from the sea. In the distance, a container ship moved across the water. Here and there a few other boats, tiny as toys. There had been a man next to him on the flight from Boston to London. He was drinking gin and tonics and monologuing. --It was good for a while, right? he'd said. What was it, thirty years or so? Maybe twenty, twenty-two? But it was over, without a doubt it was, and now we had to be ready to join western Europe in an era of tourism and shopkeeping. Wasn't that the gist of what that man on the plane had said? Something like that. He wouldn't shut up, and the drinks kept coming. --We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving. The man, who was drunk and maybe unhinged, too, was, like Alan, born into manufacturing and somewhere later got lost in worlds tangential to the making of things. He was soaking himself in gin and tonics and was finished with it all. He was on his way to France, to retire near Nice, in a small house his father had built after WWII. That was that. Alan had humored the man, and they had compared some thoughts about China, Korea, about making clothes in Vietnam, the rise and fall of the garment industry in Haiti, the price of a good room in Hyderabad. Alan had spent a few decades with bikes, then bounced around between a dozen or so other stints, consulting, helping companies compete through ruthless efficiency, robots, lean manufacturing, that kind of thing. And yet year by year, there was less work for a guy like him. People were done manufacturing on American soil. How could he or anyone argue for spending five to ten times what it cost in Asia? And when Asian wages rose to untenable levels -- $5 an hour, say -- there was Africa. The Chinese were already making sneakers in Nigeria. Jack Welch said manufacturing should be on a perpetual barge, circling the globe for the cheapest conditions possible, and it seemed the world had taken him at his word. The man on the plane wailed in protest: It should matter where something was made! Excerpted from A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
