2012 National Book Award finalist in Fiction: Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

– Well, it's pretty interesting, Dad.  I'm here with Reliant, and we're pitching an IT system to King Abdullah.  We've got this remarkable teleconferencing equipment, and we'll be doing a presentation to the King himself, a three-dimensional holographic meeting.  One of our reps will be in London but it will look like he's in the room, with Abdullah –

Silence.

Then: – You know what I'm watching on TV here, Alan?

– No.  What are you watching?

– I'm watching this thing about how a gigantic new bridge in Oakland, California, is being made in China.  Can you imagine?  Now they're making our goddamned bridges, Alan.  I got to say, I saw everything else coming.  When they closed down Stride Rite, I saw it coming.  When you start shopping out the bikes over there in Taiwan, I saw it coming.  I saw the rest of it coming – toys, electronics, furniture.  Makes sense if you're some shitass bloodthirsty executive hellbent on hollowing out the economy for his own gain.  All that makes sense.  Nature of the beast.  But the bridges I did not see coming.  By God, we're having other people make our bridges.  And now you're in Saudi Arabia, selling a hologram for the pharoahs!  That takes the Cake! (e-book p. 65, Ch. XII)

Globalism confuses quite a few people, when the concept does not terrify them.  Made in ________, a locale most reading this will likely never visit.  Fruits grown a hemisphere away, cheaper than produce from a local farmer.  Outsourcing of jobs, of products, of patents – all of these part and parcel of an international economy that no longer is fully threatened by any single government's policies.  Only a few people seem to understand their niche in this, only the select seem to have some say as to what products are pitched to others and where these products will be assembled.  For the 99% of the global population that are the workers, the engines of the global economy might as well be on Cloud Cuckooland.

Over the past twelve years, Dave Eggers has written a series of acclaimed fictions and a couple of non-fictions that frequently featured characters who in divergent ways were set adrift in a rapidly changing and often callous world.  In his latest novel, A Hologram for the King, Eggers explores the effects that globalization has had on American business through the experiences of a middle-aged sales executive, Alan Clay, whose experiences trying to sell a prototype holographic IT system to Saudi King Abdullah is in equal parts a Godot-like wait of futility and a vivid depiction of the uncertainties that face American businesses and workers alike.

A Hologram for the King is written from a limited third-person PoV.  There are frequent asides to Clay's past experience working as a salesman for Schwinn Bikes, before their business collapsed some years ago and the century-old business was liquidated, their name and products being divvied up and sent outside its traditional Chicago base to other countries, where the bike parts could be made cheaper.  In his conversations with his younger co-workers at Reliant, Clay's growing pessimism regarding American businesses being able to survive in the new international economy of outsourcing and patent licensure  to non-American corporations provides a sobering look into a mindset that more and more Americans, particularly those approaching or passing middle age have developed.  This brave new world does not seem conducive for business – and friendships among business partners – as usual.

For a relatively short novel (barely 230 e-book pages on my iPad), A Hologram for the King contains a lot of character interactions, from the nouveaux riches among the Saudi subjects (a sandal manufacturer and his playboy son and a surgeon who removes a cyst from Clay's neck late in the novel are but two examples out of many), to a European fellow business traveler who initiates an aborted romance, to others who struggle to understand if the King's planned King Abdullah's Economic City (KAEC, pronounced like "cake") will actually come to fruition outside of Jeddah.  Yet for the most part, these characters and their situations feel too much like symbols for globalization and its positive and not-so-positive aspects rather than fully-fleshed simulacra of human beings.  Even Clay feels like a metaphor for the failing American (business) dream, with his slight stirrings of activity/lust, only to be disappointed by sluggish performance and baggage.  By the novel's end, there were hints of intriguing characters from Dr. Zahra Hakem and a relative of King Abdullah, but ultimately they were just glimpses of some substantive and only Clay possessed any depth of emotion or character.

A Hologram for the King works well as an extended metaphor for the decline of the United States' importance in the global economy.  However, it falters when it comes to its characterization and that lack of fully-realized characters robs the novel of some of its impact.  Ultimately, it is a good novel that could have been a great novel if more time had been devoted toward developing characters that were more than representations of the global changes that Eggers wanted to explore.  Compared to other National Book Award finalists in Fiction, A Hologram for the King is a weaker entry for the noticeable flaw mentioned above.

Down in the Flood: Marvin Mann and A. David Lewis's Some New Kind of Slaughter, Dave Egger's Zeitoun

If it keeps on rainin, levees goin to break,
If it keeps on rainin, levees goin to break,
When the levee breaks Ill have no place to stay.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Lord, mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.
Don't it make you feel bad
When youre tryin to find your way home,
You dont know which way to go?

- Led Zeppelin, "When the Levee Breaks"

Water is the source of life. Yet despite our bodies being mostly composed by water, there is something terrible about drownings, especially in the violence of a flood. The rapid, threatening torrents of water bursting through levees, dams, and other natural and manmade structures, swamping all in its path. Death by the inhalation of what sustains us. There is something more terrible about that irony when the nature of mass death is that of death by water. It is not surprising therefore that so many global myths revolve around the notion of a huge flood that threatens the annihilation of all life.

In Marvin Mann and A. David Lewis's Some New Kind of Slaughter~or~ Lost in the Flood (And How We Found Home Again): Diluvian Myths from Around the World, the author/illustrators concentrate on the mythic, purifying qualities of the diluvian myths from the ancient Middle East, the Americas, Australia, Greece, Africa, China, as well as elsewhere. Utilizing a rapid-fire switch of narrators, from that of Noah's son Khem to the Aboriginal priests capable of entering Dreamtime, Mann and Lewis break their graphic novel into four parts, focusing on origins, preparation, the downpour, and the aftermath. The reader is confronted with certain uncomfortable truths, namely that human societies have seen themselves as being not just products of a god(s)'s thought, but that humans often suffer from divine caprice; that floods serve to wipe out the wicked...and those not quick enough to separate themselves from the wicked; that sometimes the "true believers" may be worse than those abandoned to their fates; and that faith is not always enough when faced with sudden natural disaster.

Mann and Lewis's illustrations fit the storylines well. Seeing the looks of anguish, despair, forlorn hope, and determined resistance in the characters from the world diluvian myths made me pay closer to the themes the authors had woven into the images and text. Have we ever managed to overcome ourselves? Or do our vanities, fears, and prejudices still affect us, with the Flood ever looming over us?

In Dave Eggers' Zeitoun, the answer to those questions unfortunately is a resounding no. Eggers in this book tells the moving story of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun and their experiences before, during, and just after Hurricane Katrina broke the Lake Ponchartrain levees and flooded much of New Orleans. Eggers continues here his mastery of taking another's story (witness the power of the novelized memoir of 2006's What is the What) and making it feel both like a novel and like the slice of an everyman's life.

The Zeitouns are sympathetic characters, as Abdulrahman has, after growing up in Syria, established a successful house painting/building business while his American wife Kathy struggles with raising her children in a society that has become increasingly xenophobic after the 9/11 attacks. But Abdulrahman refuses to heed the evacuation orders even as his wife and their children flee to the home of an old friend of Kathy's in Phoenix.

Eggers describes the flood sparsely. Although written in the third-person limited point of view informed by the Zeitouns' discussions with Eggers, the main action of the novel takes on the cast that Abdulrahman gave it. He does not despair of the devastation wrought as much as he dwells upon how he can help reconstruct the city. In this, his attitudes are similar to those of the survivors of the global diluvian myths touched upon the Mann and Lewis book. But what makes the Zeitouns' story gripping is what happens when a good deed fails to go unpunished.

The heart of the book concerns Abdulrahman's abrupt, scary, and ultimately humiliating treatment after he and his friends' good neighbor work is misinterpreted and they are arrested. In roughly one hundred pages, Eggers recounts Abdulrahman's confrontations with the fears and hatred of those who purportedly were there to "help" and to "restore order." Although both Abdulrahman or Eggers might have been tempted to expound upon the mistreatment and humiliations that Abdulrahman has to endure for close to a month while his family never gets to hear of his fate because of FEMA and Department of Homeland Security concerns that he might be a terrorist, the fact that these scenes are told in brief, matter-of-fact passages serves to underscore just how terrifying the scene could be in its hypothetical universal application to us as human beings.

Reading both the Mann/Lewis and Eggers book back-to-back added to my enjoyment of both. Each story is, on the surface, told simply, but the real power is in how these "simple" stories reveal so much about ourselves as people and how we confront not just disasters like floods, but even more how we assign guilt, blame, or conversely, take responsibility for providing care for the destitute. Stories like these tend to stick with me for a long time and I am certain that both books will be deserving of slots in my year-end Best of 2009 reviews.