A Hologram for the King

Dave Eggers is a writer with his finger on the pulse of global affairs today. He has written about the lost children of Sudan, about Hurricane Katrina, about grief and start-up magazines in San Francisco and even turned Where the Wild Things Are into a sombre, twee, indie children's book. His ability to simply and poignantly sum up the temperature of America is better than most other writers out there.

So, what of his new work of fiction?

It's a simple, sad tale of loneliness and longing. It's about the fall-out from America's outsourcing of all its industries and technologies to a fast-developing world, its sights set on overtaking America as a superpower. It concerns a man in a desert in a Middle Eastern Emirate. He is there to make a presentation to the king of said Emirate. He is selling IT solutions. He will be using a conference call hologram to sell the products. This is his last chance to make something good of his life. He has to win this contract. But as he and his team wait and wait in the desert for the king to arrive, much like Godot, you start to wonder whether this job exists and whether the king will ever come.

It feels like a purgatory for American big business. And as the man starts to explore the fringes of ex-pat culture in the Middle East, he discovers that he and his fellow Americans are together in their loneliness and armed against their doom. Eggers nails the decline of the Western economy and industry and turns it into a sad, brilliant story of a man's inner-turmoil.