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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.
- Sales Rank: #1699875 in Books
- Published on: 2015-06-23
- Formats: Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x .50" w x 5.25" l,
- Running time: 8 Hours
- Binding: MP3 CD
Review
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
A New York Times Book Review Best Book
A New Zealand Listener Best Book
A New York Times Notable Book
A Globe and Mail Best Book
A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Fiction Book
An Indigo Best Book
An Amazon.ca Best Book
An Amazon.com Best Book
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Finalist 2012 – National Book Award
LONGLISTED 2014 – International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
"A comic but deeply affecting tale about one man's travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"An extraordinary work of timely and provocative themes, including the decline of American manufacturing, the sufferings of the middle class and the collapse of the global economy.... A writer of the highest order.... A Hologram for the King is an outstanding achievement in Eggers's already impressive career, and an essential read."
—San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Dave Eggers is the bestselling author of seven books, including "A Hologram for the King", a finalist for the National Book Award; "Zeitoun", winner of the American Book Award and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and" What Is the What", which was a finalist for the National Book Critics" "Circle Award and won France s "Prix Medici". That book, about Valentino" "Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which operates a secondary school in South Sudan run by Mr. Deng. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine, "The Believer: ", a" "quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries, " Wholphin", and an" "oral history series, Voice of Witness. In 2002, with Ninive Calegari he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Eggers is also the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. A native of Chicago, Eggers now lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.""
Dion Graham, from HBO's The Wire, is a multiple Audie Award-winning narrator and critically acclaimed actor. His performances have been praised as thoughtful and compelling, vivid, and full of life.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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!
Most helpful customer reviews
134 of 154 people found the following review helpful.
Waiting for Abdullah
By Gregory Zimmerman
There's a very good reason that the world of business consulting is under-represented in literary fiction. If "interesting" is Tokyo, tales of "win-win" and "streamlined synergies" are London. But that didn't stop Dave Eggers from making his main character of his new novel, A Hologram for the King, exactly the kind of business bonehead whose natural habitat is the airport hotel bar.
Eggers' novel is like an Office Space on downers. It's better than you'd expect a story about business consulting or sales to be, but it still doesn't exactly "meet its fourth quarter projections."
Alan Clay, a former executive at Schwinn, who has failed trying to start his own bicycle business, is now working as a consultant to try to pay his debts and make ends meet. Alan parlays a (tenuous) relationship with King Abdullah of Saudia Arabia's nephew to convince an IT company to send him and a team of young go-getters to the Kingdom to pitch IT for King Abdullah's newest pet project -- a city rising from the desert called King Abdullah Economic City. (This is a real thing.)
But it soon becomes clear that business in Saudi Arabia isn't conducted as it is here in the U.S., and Alan has to wait several weeks for the King (lots of other reviewers have compared this aspect of the story to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, if that helps), passing the time by drinking by himself in his hotel room, having a tryst with a Danish woman, hunting wolves (what?!), and worrying about the lump on his neck he's sure is cancer.
Along the way, we get several little anecdotes about China taking over the world -- and how China's less-than-ethical business practices are pushing it past us stalwart Americans. Yes, doing business in Saudia Arabia is infinitely frustrating, but is it better or worse than the business environment in America, where a job you've been at for 30 years can be outsourced on a whim?
Eggers writes in the same sparse, unadorned prose he used in Zeitoun. In Zeitoun, the "Hemingway impression" worked really well to chronicle that emotionally charged issue without overt editorializing. The story stood for itself. With this novel, however, while the issue of outsourcing is equally urgent to many Americans (and the novel itself is a sort of allegory or parable or something else where the story isn't the whole story), it doesn't quite have the same emotional punch as racism and racial profiling. So the writing (and, hence, the story) just feels flat, and fairly uninteresting -- just like our protagonist Alan (who, even when he tries to do interesting things, doesn't even seem like he's that interested).
So, while I've loved everything else I've ever read of Eggers', this I wasn't completely a fan of -- but the uniqueness of the story (who would've thought to tell a story about a middle aged white guy trying to sell IT in Saudia Arabia?!) and the side anecdotes nearly save the novel, but not quite. Finally, it's worth noting that this is one of the more attractive hard cover novels I've ever owned -- it's worth buying, just as a collectors item.
31 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
A Hologram in Waiting
By Richard Harborough
Dave Eggers' newest novel, 'A Hologram for the King' is a strange journey into Saudi Arabia after the financial crisis of the late 2000's.
The novel concerns a man, Alan, who has just lost money in a poor investment, lost his wife in divorce, and is worried about his daughter's future, sure that he cannot pay for her tuition (and that a lump on his neck is actually cancer eating away at his spinal cord). His only hope is to take a job with Reliant, who hope to secure a position with King Abdullah's Economic City, the King's dream that may or may not come to fruition. Everyone in Saudi Arabia doesn't think so. And so, Alan and his team from Reliant are set up in a tent with no WiFi, which is crucial to their presentation, without food, broken air conditioning, and nobody to pitch to. The King hasn't arrived, and is consistently out the country.
It is true that the situation is very much like the one in Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot.' Waiting for this person who they were told existed, and who would be there soon, but the person does not arrive. It is an existential exercise. However, 'Hologram' is not just 'Godot'. it is an examination of the failure of one man, in both his personal relationships and professional life. It is a novel for our times, a man who is depending on this one last hope, but the hope is all but fleeting.
This novel was very interesting, both stylistically and thematically. While not Eggers' best, or the novel of the generation, it is an enjoyable experience, and one that explores what it is to be human with both hilarity and drama. Recommended.
391 of 492 people found the following review helpful.
The Worst Book of 2012
By zashibis
About once a year I end up reading a book so resoundingly terrible, so utterly hackneyed and half-assed, so mysteriously lauded by a featherbrained coterie of newspaper review-writing hacks (here's looking at you Michiko Katukani!) but so wonderfully devoid of any artistry or insight, that I end up finishing it out of something like the morbid fascination that makes a person rubber-neck at an especially horrific car accident. Congratulations, Mr. Eggers: in 2012 that book was yours.
Let's start with an obvious, but very minor, point to get it out of the way. The "Saudi Arabia" that Eggers writes about is at least 80% a figment of his imagination, almost unrecognizable to those of us, like myself, who have worked in the Kingdom. The very broadest strokes are accurate enough--there is a place on the Red Sea called KAEC, just about all service-industry and construction jobs are done by a (frequently) maltreated class of semi-indentured Asians, people drink a foul-tasting white lightening called siddiqi (by Arabs, that is. Expats universally call it "sid"--one of Eggers telltale little missteps is having a Westerner use the Arabic instead of the expat slang)--but just about every subtler nuance of life in Saudi Arabia that it's possible to get wrong, Eggers gets completely wrong. For those interested, I may eventually list some of the many ways he gets KSA wrong in a footnote in the comment section of this review. For now, I just have to wonder why, when taking such obvious liberties and clearly knowing almost nothing about the culture, Eggers felt the need to set his novel in a real time and place at all. A much wiser generation of novelists (e.g. Naipaul in A Bend in the River or E. Waugh in Scoop) headed off this kind of criticism by setting their novels in countries left unnamed or given fictive names. Pretend places deserve pretend names.
However, I'm well aware this won't matter at all to the 99.9% of the reading public who haven't visited (and can never visit) Saudi Arabia. To them the setting will seem plausible enough in a familiar Hollywood-y Oriental fantasy way (a la the second Sex and the City movie). And, of course, there is such a thing as "artistic license" in a novel, so the cultural realities of the Saudi Arabia don't ultimately matter that much. We'll even let artistic license stretch far enough to accommodate the ridiculous and entirely fictitious "King Abdullah" Eggers gives us who spends the novel biddy-bopping about the Middle East (Now he's in Yemen! Now he's in Jordan!) and who takes a tech-savvy micro-manager's interest in who might or might not be the IT contractor at one of the dozens and dozens of projects around the kingdom bearing his name. (The real King Abdullah, of course, was extremely frail by 2010, the year the novel supposedly takes place, largely confined to his palaces and various hospitals, and would be no more likely to personally and publically intervene in a construction contract than he would be to dance a hornpipe while munching pork rinds and singing "Born This Way.")
No. Discounting the fake setting entirely, let's concentrate instead on Eggers's four unforgivable failures that should be blindingly apparent to any reasonably sophisticated reader who has never even set foot in the Middle East:
1)Style. For its reliance on simple declarative sentences and its striking lack of figurative language of any sort, some are calling this novel "Hemingway-esque." This is a terrible calumny on Papa Hemingway. The old master, it's true, used a pared-down style to tell his stories, but the sum was always larger than the parts--a slowly pieced mosaic that (more often than not) created a striking picture of his life and times. Eggers language, in contrast, is just dumbed-down and drab, utterly lifeless on the page. A single page of Updike or Roth--nay, a single paragraph--has more artistry than you will find in this entire book. At first I thought Eggers might be trying to be "meta" by writing prose that is as sterile and color-starved as the Saudi landscape, but Eggers is too much the boy scout for that. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius his mantra has been "Irony is bad!" so it seems highly improbable that he should intentionally be writing in a prose style that is deathly boring to mirror the dullness of life in Saudi Arabia. It is, as other reviewers have noted, a "fast read," but only because it is the sort of prose that requires no thought whatsoever.
2)Plot. Think about it for half a second. This book asks us to believe that a washed-up, superannuated bicycle company executive *with absolutely no expertise in IT* is being sent to a remote corner of the world as the point-man for a multi-million-dollar IT presentation. Eggers doesn't even pretend that this makes any sense at all. A modern novelist who gave half a sh*t--let's say a David Foster Wallace--would have researched holographic presentations and the Middle Eastern IT market and presented us with at least a semi-believable character who had some compelling reason to be in Saudi. Eggers can't be bothered. Literally, the only work-related thing Clay does during the entire novel is to make one apologetic complaint about the lack of Wi-Fi and food in the tent where the other members of his team are slated, nonsensically, to give their presentation. That's it. For this valuable service he is supposed to earn a six-figure commission. (Sign me up!)
Along the way Clay meets a young Arab driver named Yousef who instantaneously becomes his BFF (or, even more implausibly, Clay starts thinking of him "like a son" by about their third meeting) and who continues to call him even after Clay does something (I'll avoid the clear spoiler) that most people would have a great deal of difficulty forgiving of someone they'd known intimately all their lives. Likewise, Clay has two women (one Danish, one mixed-blood Arab) throw themselves at him after acquaintanceships measured in minutes, as though he were Ryan Gosling, and hadn't previously been described by Eggers as an awkward, balding, dumpy, schlub with an ugly growth on his back . With the desperate European sexpot it's merely ridiculous; with the Arab woman we've firmly entered Harlequin Romance territory, where millennium-old cultural taboos are brushed away as easily and as thoughtlessly as cobwebs...and where a long-haired woman snorkeling topless is somehow supposed to be less conspicuous (and less identifiable as a woman) than she would be in an ordinary swimsuit. (How does that work, exactly?)
3)Characterization. The evidence has become overwhelming. Eggers can't do it. When he's describing real people (as in his memoir or his various stabs at non-fiction) he does adequately. But made-up people? Nope. Just awful. The central character, Clay, is believable in no respect, a gasping fish-out-of-water who has none of the self-confidence or worldliness you'd expect of a lifelong sales executive. Instead, he comes across as a seventeen-year-old naïf away from home for the first time in his life. But at least Clay is a "developed" character with a back-story, however improbable. The same cannot be said of any of the other characters in the novel. Clay's three American coworkers, for instance, aren't even one-dimensional--they're just three random names that Eggers tosses out occasionally. He can't even be bothered to figure out what their respective roles in the presentation for the king are supposed to be or a plausible reason why they would passively sit around a tent doing absolutely nothing day after day after day. Almost all the Arabs in the novel all have walk-on parts--so forgettable that I just finished the novel but I've already forgotten their names. The exception is Yousef, who Eggers seems to have thrown in just so that he can't be accused of being completely anti-Arab. But Yousef is even less believable than Clay--no Saudi who had a) fluent English or b) a rich father--let alone both--would ever, in a million years, be an ordinary chauffeur, one of the least respected jobs in Saudi Arabia, generally performed by Pakistanis earning a pittance. He really exists only as crude plot device to get Clay out of Jeddah for a few days so he can demonstrate his haplessness and insecurity in a different setting.
4)Theme. An anemic, warmed-over Death of a Salesman, missing only the final coup de grace. Enough said? So very many authors have done the late-middle-age middle-manager crisis of conscience so very much better than this: Updike, Roth, Bellow, Ford for starters . Even Ian McEwan's Solar a few years ago--one of McEwan's weaker novels--is a masterpiece compared to this. Likewise, Begley's About Schmidt. So, if you're going to go down this path yet again you'd better have something fresh to say. Eggers doesn't. Likewise, several positive reviews make a big deal that novel is a "parable" about outsourcing. But, what, exactly does Eggers have to say about outsourcing that will be news to anybody at all? What fresh or original insight does he offer into America's self-induced industrial decline? Nothing and none.
Too, in choosing to make the demise of Schwinn bicycles emblematic of America's decline in manufacturing Eggers has had to simplify the company's story to the point of absurdity. In reality, Schwinn's failure was much more one of marketing and not anticipating the shift toward specialized bikes (i.e. racing bikes, mountain bikes, dirt bikes) than it was in moving assembly overseas. Sad-sack Clay has hopeless pipedreams of starting his own high-end custom bicycle company, and is depicted as a ridiculous figure; however, the reality is that several American companies, like Specialized Bicycle Components and Moots, do precisely that. Therefore, besides being boringly banal ("We've given our jobs to China!") Eggers has succeeded in being entirely one-sided as well. The novel amounts to nothing more than a 300-page pity party.
This shallow piece of sophomoric flimflam bears exactly the same relation to literature as Fruity Pebbles bears to fruit. If AHFTK were merely a trashy novel, it wouldn't be worth complaining about. Trashy novels have their place, and their devotees, if they're at all self-aware, at least understand that they're reading disposable, escapist fluff. But Eggers clearly imagines he wrote a serious novel--as do virtually all of the positive reviewers here on Amazon and elsewhere--when nothing could be further from the truth. AHFTK is kitsch: the most pernicious and unnecessary sort of artistic production on the planet. Zero stars.
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