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.
Operating [with a third-person perspective] Eggers proves it is not, in fact, a handicap at all. Alan feels like Eggers’s most fully-realized character to date ... If A Hologram for the King merely showed us this [setting within the context of conducting business] it would be a stylish, good book. But narrating in discrete paragraphs, some as finely spun as prose poems, Eggers drags three layers of story forward ... The true genius of this book is that as we careen toward its final pages, these stories all collapse into one complex tale: the point at which a man’s need for love from home and his need to be effective in business meet ... in A Hologram for the King, Eggers has given us a sad and beautiful story...
Hologram flashes past in an appropriately quick series of brief, displacing passages with plenty of space around them for us to feel the vacancy and nowhereness ... Scene after scene is so clear and precise... that it’s easy to overlook just how strong and well wrought the writing is ... Eggers’s command of this middle-management landscape is so sure — and his interest in the battle between humanity and technology so insistent — that his book might almost be a DeLillo novel written for the iPhone Generation, though delivered by DeLillo’s more openhearted and Midwestern nephew. Eggers’s inhabiting of the terms and tics of a distinctly American consciousness is as remarkable as, in earlier books, his channeling of Sudanese and Syrian sensibilities ... But the strength of all [Eggers'] work comes from his sense of loss and pain, mixed with his decidedly American wish to try to bring his orphaned characters to a provisional shelter ... In the end, what makes A Hologram for the King is the conviction with which Eggers plunges into the kind of regular working American we don’t see enough in contemporary fiction, and gives voice and heft to Alan’s struggles in an information economy in which he has no information and there’s not much of an economy.
The reader soon adjusts to the leisurely, almost desultory pace of the story, to the relative austerity of the prose. Sometimes Eggers offers neat capsule vignettes ... At other times Eggers grows sententious, perhaps deliberately in Alan’s letters to Kit, but apparently without irony in several vaguely philosophical passages ... A diverting, well-written novel...