A Hologram for the King

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney's, 2012)Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King plots the expatriation of American Alan Clay, who travels to the United Arab Emirates to sell King Abdullah telecommunications for his city in development. The baldly named 'King Abdullah Economic City' would outdo Dubai in its expression of limitless ambition, in size, in defiance of habitat. Following Clay's dogged attempt to find business there, the plot presents a series of displacements that show how 'westernisation' no longer exists as such. The proposed city, whose immediate models are eastern, is an obvious sign not of western imperialism, but of globalisation. Eventually, the contract Clay vies for is finally awarded to a Chinese company (one that has appropriated an American patent). Ultimately, Clay is a deterritorialised American for whom all roads lead east. Clay's fate parallels America's in the era of globalised techno-capital, its great age as a superpower supported by domestic production and national economic agency decidedly past. In the end, Clay remains in the UAE, hoping to be repatriated in a city that doesn't yet exist. He is the very subject of multinational business, with no real home, no determinate national base. Thus Clay represents American industrialism that has literally lost its place in the world's economy. He seems virtual, the eponymous hologram, no more American the golden arches or any other multinational brand (such as the Schwinn bicycles he once sold, lost to outsourcing and finally to China). On the other hand, Clay (as his name suggests) is constituted by earth, however pliable. Indeed, like the absurd but realisable city King Abdullah builds on earth that can hardly support it, Clay is a paradox.Egger's postnationalist theme displaces rather than foregrounds environmental concerns. While the novel includes careful descriptions of the mountainous land around Jeddah, the coast where the new city is in being built, the desert in between, all appear as an uncanny frontier where the American cannot adapt. No one can because the enthusiastic creation of all-you-can-eat markets promote blatant disregard for human and environmental wellbeing. Unfortunately, when Egger addresses the division of the virtual and biotic, he does so with romantic asides that maintain their separation. Nature, here, provides a romantic counternarrative to the story of economic progress: '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.' This Ozymandian mystique obscures the premodern history of coexistence between bioregion and human lifeways. The only past the novel really concerns itself with is Clay's, with its domestic post WW II trajectory leading directly to the Middle Eastern present.Hologram sounds the death knell of American exceptionalism as the late petroleum economy and the information age move the action decidedly away from a North American centre. The American Dream defined by immigration to American shores has itself become an export, many times removed. At one point, the novel describes a sandal merchant whose goods seem indigenous but are actually imported from India, where they can be made cheaply enough to earn him a castle, built in what may one day be the suburbs of the Economic City. Meanwhile, Clay and his staff experience one minor indignity after another attempting to do business with a nation state whose alliances are complex, obscure, and indifferent to the west.The society Clay tries to immerse himself in, with not much success, is also a theocracy where civil rights are reduced to the worst nightmares of the Cold War, wherein individuals may be denounced by resentful rivals to the state at any time for transgressions (here, religious taboos), but where everyone who can finds a way to party like it's always the end of a millennium rather than the start of a new one. Clay is dragged to one orgiastic bacchanal after another, in a country where drinking and sex outside the strictest possible terms are both illegal. …