June 25, 2012
Eggers's first unabashedly fictional, original novel in some time nonetheless grounds itself as firmly in the real world as Zeitoun or What is the What. Businessman Alan Clay has reached middle age with experience in manufacturing and door-to-door salesmanship considered almost wholly anachronistic and in post-industrial America, "as intriguing... as an airplane built from mud." Deeply in debt and unable to continue paying for his daughter Kit to go to college, Alan finds himself in Saudi Arabia awaiting the arrival of "the Kingdom's" elusive monarch for a chance to pitch his employer, Reliant, as the information technology supplier for a massive new King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) development. In limbo, Alan writes letters to Kit that he'll never mail, frets about his health (he's discovered a growth on his neck), and wrestles with insecurity over his past personal and business failings. This conflation of Waiting for Godot and Save the Tiger is unsurprising, if sympathetic, in its portrait of a global economy with all the solidity of a sandcastle. Eggers strikes fresh and genuine notes, however, in Alan's burgeoning friendship with the young Saudi man, Yousef, assigned to be his driver. Both Eggers's fans and those previously resistant to his work will find a spare but moving elegy for the American century.
July 1, 2012
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.
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Starred review from August 1, 2012
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 comeoverleveraged, unable to pay his daughter's college tuition, and scarred by his long-over marriageAlan 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 contradictionsAlan repeatedly experiences exactly what guidebooks told him he wouldn'tand 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)
Starred review from October 29, 2012
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.