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A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING

by Dave Eggers ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2012

Even so, Eggers’ fiction has evolved in the past decade. This book is firm proof that social concerns can make for resonant...

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 snaillike 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 fablelike simplicity.

Pub Date: June 19, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-936365-74-6

Page Count: 328

Publisher: McSweeney’s

Review Posted Online: June 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012

LITERARY FICTION

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by Dave Eggers

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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by Sally Rooney

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Review: A Hologram for the King, By Dave Eggers

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Dave Eggers' new novel hits you with prose as stark and as luminous as its Saudi Arabian setting. A Hologram For the King tells of Alan Clay, who travels to King Abdullah Economic City to sell an IT system. As he waits to deliver his pitch, Alan encounters Saudis and expats in scenarios which make him look at himself and wonder: "Who was this man?"

Readers might ask similar questions about Eggers. Since his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he's enjoyed success as a publisher and magazine editor, and founded literacy initiatives for children. His last book, 2009's Zeitoun, a non-fiction account of a Muslim man's traumatic experiences in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, demonstrated Eggers' gift for telling real people's stories in unobtrusive prose. A sense that he's never quite marked distinctive literary territory persists, but while his seventh book exhibits his versatility again, it should confirm Eggers' position among America's leading contemporary writers.

It comes to us in an attractive hardback edition which would delight its former manufacturing executive protagonist Alan, who – like both the country he hails from and the country he visits – is full of contradictions. He laments the overseas outsourcing of American manufacturing even though, in his managerial heyday, he opened factories in communist Hungary and busted union power in Chicago. "We don't have unions here," explains Alan's young Saudi guide, Yousef. "We have Filipinos." Alan's alertness to the Kingdom's hypocrisy fluctuates: he's curious about veiled women and jump-suited labourers, but when he's allowed to "pilot a gleaming white yacht through the pristine canals", he fantasises about buying a second home. Alan can't afford one of KAEC's pink condos, however, because he's struggling to raise his daughter's college fees, owes thousands to investors, and feels "superfluous to the forward progress of the world".

He's desperate to sell his hologram technology but weeks drift by with no sign of King Abdullah. One night, drunk on an illegal liquor named "siddiqi", Alan takes a steak knife to a cyst on his neck. Prohibition means Western visitors are "forced into the role of teenagers hiding their vices and proclivities from a shadowy army of parents". At an embassy party, Alan discovers a bacchanalian "bootlegger's paradise". He witnesses the more profound consequences of such strict laws when he meets a young musician who surreptitiously plays guitar. Saudi offers little to educated subjects like Zahra, a middle-aged doctor who snorkels topless so that observers might mistake her for a man.

Alan is convinced that his experiences pale by comparison to his Irish ancestors' arrival in the US and his macho father's heroics in the Second World War. The King's embryonic city appeals to Alan's longing to be present "at the beginning of something", to enact part of the pioneering that's enshrined in American mythology. But his inconsistencies limit the reader's sympathy: Alan is incapable of imagining any alternative socio-economic system to the one that's ruining him, and he lacks interests. Boredom is "at once exasperating and alluring", so why doesn't he read a book? Does Eggers believe that to have his character do so would be unrealistic?

Beneath Alan's unimaginativeness, one senses the author's self-conscious compulsion to remind his readers of their minority status, to honour a reality, at once grinding and abstract, that prevails beyond the page. This patriotic novel confronts America's industrial decline, but its pertinence also threatens to prevent it from becoming more than a symptom of the stagnancy that it describes.

Alan's yearning for action and approval lead him into recklessness which jeopardises his burgeoning friendship with Yousef. There's potential for a fulfilling relationship with Zahra, whose affection for Alan borders on inexplicable, but, although he kisses her while they're swimming underwater, he rejects her later. This might be rooted in a despicable line that he quotes from his ex-wife: "I don't want to have sex that someone wouldn't watch."

Perhaps he shares her lack of self-respect, but his ex's words echo Alan's response to news of the 2010 Gulf Coast oil leak: "Just end it, please. Everyone's watching." Even the most personal anxieties of the man who's pedalling an illusion are reflected in the wider world. Alan disappoints friends, hurts women and is a lousy businessman, but to his daughter he remains whole. "I'm the eye in the sky … I can see where you started and where you're going and it looks perfectly fine from up here," he writes to her. His siddiqi-soaked letters might be implausibly eloquent but they show a wise, sensitive parent.

It's fitting that a novel which eschews easy solutions borrows its epigraph from Samuel Beckett: "It is not every day that we are needed." Beckett, like Alan, knew about waiting for somebody who might never arrive. Unlike Eggers and his protagonist, he was uninitiated in the consolations of fatherhood.

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A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers. That name was the reason why I picked up this book. In 2017, I read another novel of his titled "The Circle," which I rated a 4 out of 5 stars. I found The Circle to be a powerful book, mainly because it was a sort of social commentary on the immense power tech companies today wield. It was also creepy and scary too. In summary, I expected great things from A Hologram For The King.

The novel follows Alan, an American salesman who is sent to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to close a deal, a deal that his future likely depends on. The 300 pages of the novel span from his arrival and culminate in his meeting with the King. In between, in a series of flashbacks, Alan reflects on his impending financial doom and his relationship with his divorced wife and daughter. Alan also meets a few characters with whom he spends considerable time. These interactions shed more light on the sort of person Alan is.

My Thoughts

This book is different from The Circle. Although, I can say that I'm getting what Dave Eggers's theme is. But before I get into that, A Hologram For The King is character-driven. I have to say I don't find Alan fascinating. He is just an average white American man. What pushes the book is the meeting he is supposed to have with the King. I'll admit that kept me interested in the book. Also, it is well written, and I did not struggle at all to read it.

The book shares its sensuality with The Circle. I think Dave Eggers is that sort of writer. It is not an erotic novel, but Dave Egger's characters( from the two books I have read so far) have sexual encounters, and those are described in the book.

Now, Dave Eggers' theme seems to be stories wrapped among social commentaries. However, it is not as overt and universal here as in The Circle. Here, in A Hologram For The King, several hints are dropped throughout the book, but it becomes evident in the end.

The theme here is world trade, specifically how it relates to the United States.

At the end of the day, I rated A Hologram For The King a 3 out of 5 stars. It is a light and easy read. I do not know what sort of reader might be interested in it, but if it sounds like your cup of tea, go for it. In my opinion, The Circle would be a great fit if you ever want to read anything by Dave Eggers. Both books have movie adaptations (Netflix and Prime Video), both starring Tom Hanks, so you can also check out that instead of spending hours on this (It has a slightly better ending... barely).

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Joe Average, Just Waiting for Salvation

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By Michiko Kakutani

• June 13, 2012

The hero of Dave Eggers’s absorbing new novel “A Hologram for the King” is a penny-ante Job named Alan Clay, who finds himself in an absurd situation. Alan is deeply in debt, unable to pay his daughter’s college tuition and plagued by a scary golf-ball-size lump on the back of his neck. He’s betting everything on a last-ditch chance at a big payday, hoping he can sell the Saudi king, Abdullah, on a lucrative technology contract — a contract that depends on Alan’s going to a remote real estate development in Saudi Arabia and making an elaborate holographic presentation to the king, who may or may not even show up.

“Hologram” is studded with allusions to a rich array of literary classics, but Mr. Eggers uses a new, pared down, Hemingwayesque voice to recount his story, a voice that stands in sharp contrast to the baroque, hyperventilated one he employed in his dazzling 2000 debut book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” Gone are the self-conscious commentary and postmodern pyrotechnics of “Genius.” Gone too are the less effective exercises in mimicry and pastiche featured in his 2002 novel “You Shall Know Our Velocity.”

Perhaps the remarkable act of ventriloquism that Mr. Eggers performed in his 2006 book “ What Is the What : The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng,” based on the real life story of a Sudanese refugee, awakened him to the possibilities of a simpler, more straight-ahead brand of storytelling. In any case, he demonstrates in “Hologram” that he is master of this more old-fashioned approach as much as he was a pioneering innovator with “Genius.” In Mr. Eggers’s telling, the 54-year-old Alan is not just another hapless loser undergoing a midlife crisis. Rather, his sad-funny-dreamlike story unfolds to become an allegory about the frustrations of middle-class America, about the woes unemployed workers and sidelined entrepreneurs have experienced in a newly globalized world in which jobs are being outsourced abroad. We learn that Alan’s father was the foreman at a Stride Rite shoe factory in Massachusetts, which in 1992 “ditched the unions and moved production to Kentucky” and then, five years later, to Thailand and China. Alan, for his part, sold bicycles, “and did fine, extremely well for a while there, until he and others decided to have other people, 10,000 miles away, build the things they sold, and soon left himself with nothing to sell.”

On Alan’s way to Saudi Arabia a fellow passenger complains that America has “become a nation of indoor cats,” a “nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers.” An American architect, who has designed a couple of the tallest buildings in the world, tells Alan he has been working for 10 years in Dubai, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and China, where “the dreaming’s being done” now. And Alan himself thinks back on the trip he and his daughter, Kit, took to Cape Canaveral to watch one of the last shuttle flights, and how so many of the NASA employees they met were soon going to be out of work.

A summary of such moments may make “Hologram” sound like a schematic lesson on American decline, but it’s not. Thanks to Mr. Eggers’s uncommon ability to access his characters’ emotions and channel their every mood, we are instantly immersed in Alan’s story, rooting for him somehow to win an audience with the king and turn his life around. He holes up in his Jidda hotel room, scrolling through the personal photos on his laptop, “the vast grid of his life in thumbnails,” and like Saul Bellow’s Herzog, writes letters he never sends. Vacillating between despair and hope, anxiety and optimism, he relives his failed marriage, his failed business endeavors, his fantasies of making the big score with the king and his fears that such hopes are nothing but a naïve delusion.

When a European woman named Hanne comes on to him, Alan finds himself wishing he could go home. All he wants to do is drink by himself and watch old Red Sox DVDs. “After the divorce he’d been angry for years,” Mr. Eggers writes, “but at the same time he was alive. He’d laughed, he’d dated, he’d enjoyed the things he was expected to enjoy. But now he was something else.”

It doesn’t take long for Alan to discover the incongruities of life in the kingdom, where the wretched excesses made possible by oil money coexist with ancient mores regarding women, where a craving for the modern conveniences of life coexists with a deep suspicion of the West. In a society where, he is told, adultery is a crime that can be punished by death, Alan finds himself invited to a decadent private party featuring scantily clad women and lots of pills and booze.

Some of Alan’s adventures take on a decidedly Kafkaesque flavor. He goes on a long trip with his driver Yousef to Yousef’s father’s house, which resembles a castle in a remote village. Alan’s grappling with the bureaucracy in King Abdullah Economic City, the urban-planning development where he and his team are to make their holographic presentation to the king, is even more surreal. The development is supposed to become one of the kingdom’s showplaces, a futuristic oasis of modernist architecture and relatively modern social mores, on the shores of the Red Sea. In Mr. Eggers’s fictional riff on a real place, what Alan initially glimpses, however, is not the next Dubai or Abu Dhabi, but a collection of three modest buildings: a pastel-pink condominium, a two-story welcome center surrounded by fountains, and a glass office building.

If Alan and his team can make a persuasive presentation, the king might award the company they represent an information technology contract for the entire city. But the Wi-Fi and the air-conditioning in the tent where they have set up their equipment are erratic, and day after day they go on waiting for the king, who fails to arrive. One worker tells Alan that the king “hasn’t been here in a while” — a while being at least 18 months. Another day a newspaper reports that the king is in Yemen, which means he is not coming to King Abdullah Economic City. Later there are reports that the king is in Riyadh or traveling to Bahrain.

The analogies to Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” seem completely intentional. The novel’s epigraph is even taken from Vladimir’s famous speech in that play, in which he says: “Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.”

Mr. Eggers wisely does not strain to try to turn Alan’s story into an existential parable of the human condition like “Godot.” Instead, he has achieved something that is more modest and equally satisfying: the writing of a comic but deeply affecting tale about one man’s travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times.

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING

By Dave Eggers

312 pages. McSweeney’s Books. $25.

Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

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• A Hologram For the King Summary

by Dave Eggers

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Polly Barbour

Alan Clay has the makings of being a very successful businessman - at least, if he can overcome his own doubts about his potential. It doesn't help that he has recently gone through a contentious divorce that has left him pretty much penniless, or that he cannot support his daughter Kit anymore. It also doesn't help that in his former job, as director of outsourcing management in China for the bicycle manufacturer Schwinn, his decisions led to multiple people at the company losing their jobs, and ultimately the company faced financial ruin. Neither of these situations instills Alan with the confidence he needs to sell a holographic telecommunication system to the Saudi government. Alan only has the opportunity because he happened to meet the King of Saudi Arabia's nephew, and now, as a salesman for American tech company Reyland, he has the commercial opportunity of a lifetime. The sale is disguised as a presentation to the King.

Alan does not make a very auspicious start. He has terrible jet lag and oversleeps on his first day in the country, and consequently misses his shuttle bus to the King's Metropolis of Economy and Trade where his presentation is to take place. He hires a driver and they reach the Metropolis, but are told that neither the King nor his contact, Karim Al-Ahmed , are there. His team have been stationed in a tent outside where there is no internet connection. Not the start he was hoping for.

Finding himself constantly put off and marginalized, Alan sneaks inside the building one day and pleads his case to a Danish executive named Hanna . She can't help him get in front of the King, but she offers both sympathy and alcohol, both of which are greatly appreciated. He gets drunk on Hanna's alcohol that evening, and decides to incise a lump he noticed on his back. The following morning he wakes up bloody because of it and goes to the hospital. He makes an immediate personal connection with his doctor, Zahra . She biopsies the lump and tells him to come back in a few days.

Alan has a panic attack in the hotel and mistakes it for a heart attack, calling both his driver, Youssef , and the doctor. Zahra is already in the hotel when Youssef arrives and he observes that they are close. After she leaves he accuses Alan of hitting on her, which of course he denies. Youssef is angry because Alan's advances could endanger Zahra. Youssef is in a similar position himself because he is attracted to a woman whose husband has threatened him. He fears for his life and plans on getting out of town for awhile. With nothing happening professionally for Alan, he decides to tag along, but before leaving sneaks back into the Metropolis building. This time Karim Al-Ahmed is actually there. Alan tells him how frustrated he is; his team's tent has no air conditioning, there's no internet connection and someone is stealing their food. Karim promises to address the grievances but can't give him a firm date for his presentation to the King.

The lump that Zahra biopsied is malignant and must be removed; however, there is better news on the professional front, when Alan returns after the weekend he finds that all his grievances have been addressed, and that the King will see him that day. His presentation goes well. He leaves the Metropolis building happy.

He is scheduled for a lumpectomy surgery with an unfamiliar doctor, but part-way through Zahra takes over. Alan is delighted. After his surgery the two become closer, exchanging personal and intimate emails and shortly afterwards, meeting in person. They share details of their families and it turns out the Zahra understands Alan's situation perfectly because it is so similar to her own. Recently divorced, she also has children whom she worries have suffered because of her broken marriage. They drive to Zahra's beach house, and end up having sex.

Alan doesn't get the contract with the King but ends up staying in Saudi Arabia, working in real estate, and building a life with Zahra, his soul mate.

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A Hologram For the King Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for A Hologram For the King is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for A Hologram For the King

A Hologram For the King study guide contains a biography of Dave Eggers, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About A Hologram For the King
• Character List