When What is the What? came out in 2016, a lot of people told me to read it because I work with former refugees. I bought it or someone gave it to me because I have it on the shelf, but I didn’t read it because either I thought Eggers wrote in overly short sentences or I couldn’t handle the content. Probably the latter. It’s about someone who came here as a Lost Boy of the Sudan. Now that I know someone else who also was a Lost Boy, I can probably stop being a chicken and read the book.
I decided to read A Hologram for the King first. My first Dave Eggers. It’s about a washed up American business man who goes to Saudi Arabia in a last ditch effort to save himself financially with a hologram presentation to convince King Abdullah to hire the company he works for to do IT for KAEC: KIng Abdullah Economic City. KAEC is a real place and if you need to see if Eggers’ depiction of it in this novel is accurate, all you need to do is look at some Trip Advisor reviews of Americans visiting the city, and the connections between the novel and the reviews will shock you.
I only know two things about Saudi Arabia. One of my African American Muslim colleagues at the Islamic school I used to work at told me that when she and her husband lived there she saw all the Saudi ladies throwing the wings off the chicken in the garbage because this wasn’t considered good enough meat to eat. She was very pleased that she was able to correct this culinary error and teach the Saudi ladies in her community to understand the appeal of chicken wings.
And my only other heresay about Saudi Arabia is Some of my in-laws’ friends who live in a suburb outside of Austin now lived in Saudi with their families for many years, making money in the oil industry. When I asked them, “Did you learn to speak Arabic?”, they looked at me like I was crazy and then said they almost never left the compound.
The novel depicts life in Saudi Arabia for an American kind of like I’d pictured it from my in laws’ oil friends, gray, uncluttered, barren, very, very quiet. Now add to this in the novel that the KAEC is basically like one huge unfinished development. Which is sounds like it still is to some extent even though it was started in 2005. It reminds me of one time I went to Huatulco which is a small beach town in Mexico that the government decided to try to develop. There was nothing there except for expanses of Disney World size empty parking lots that the government had constructed for crowds that never came. That’s kind of what KAEC reminds me of in the novel but sadder because of the hopelessness of the main character, Alan, who is with a group of three young people stuck in an un-air conditioned tent for weeks on end, waiting to show the king, who it seems will never come, their presentation.
Not a lot happens in this novel, and Alan is a sort of quintessential well meaning but sad sack middle aged white heterosexual male so you would think I would get bored and quit on him, but I didn’t. The book is so well written and the character is so believable that you kind of stick with him even though he’s really not in good shape. He has this horrific cyst on his shoulder that he thinks might be a secret cancerous cause of his malaise and after drinking a half a bottle of contraband Saudi moonshine that is strong enough to strip paint in his barren hotel room, he impales his own cyst with an unsanitized steak knife to poke around in it to see what it is instead of visiting a doctor. To be fair, I could totally see myself doing the same thing. My partner, when I told her that said, “Yes, but like years ago, right? Not now..” and I just shrugged and said, “Huh,” as in “Sure. We’ll go with that.”
So not a lot happens but they made a movie of it anyway with Tom Hanks. Ok. I guess Tom Hanks is sometimes in the business of being in movies where very little happens.
If there’s a hell for me it’s sitting in a private theater next to Kelly Loeffler and all the other people who profited from insider information about Covid watching Castaway and Broke Back Mountain on a continuous loop.
But maybe Hologram will be better. I’ll give it a shot. It has this really attractive woman in it: Sarita Choudhury who is British Bengali and plays the most interesting character in the novel who is 100% Saudi which is quite important to the character in my opinion so I am not sure why they cast Choudhury even though she is stunning and was in Mississippi Masala.
So I’m going to keep reading Dave Eggers. I don’t know why his man of many sorrows appeals to me, but it does. Maybe being stuck waiting for a king that will never come while you impale yourself with a dirty knife in a hotel room drunk on contraband homemade alcohol that may kill you in a never to be developed city that is somewhere between failed capitalism and a dream of capitalism that never was born is a lot like living under Trump in Covid times. So yeah. I’ll keep reading Eggers, and if you look at the list of non profits and stuff he’s started, God Lord, it will make you realize Hologram definitely isn’t autobiographical, or if it is….he is much farther away from his drunk cyst puncturing past than I am.
Good that there’s always room to grow.
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