I recently read Dave Eggers’s new novel, “A Hologram for the King,” which is published by McSweeney’s press today. It’s set in Saudi Arabia and concerns an American businessman who’s travelled to the country in an attempt to revive his flagging career. Through the figure of Alan Clay, Eggers explores the changing realities of the global marketplace and reveals hidden aspects of life in Saudi Arabia. It’s a fascinating novel, and I realized midway through it that I’ve read far more journalism than fiction about both globalization and Saudi Arabia. I was interested to find out why Eggers chose to make these the subject of his latest novel and I sent him a few questions about it.
“A Hologram for the King,” is about an American businessman who has flown out to Saudi Arabia to pitch an I.T. system to the Saudi royal family. When did you start thinking about setting a novel in Saudi Arabia?
It started with thinking about this businessman, Alan Clay. He’d been kicking around in my head for a couple years—his state of mind, his background, his place in the economy and in his life. He was a salesman, and was then in manufacturing, and like so many in that line of work, his place now is unclear, his expertise superfluous. I always knew the book would find him adrift, but when I heard about the King Abdullah Economic City, it seemed inevitable that Alan would be there, not exactly knowing why, but waiting for the king to determine his fate.
Did you visit Saudi Arabia while you were doing background research for the novel? Did you have any expectations about what you’d find?
I went to Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City a few years ago. My brother-in-law had been there, so I had some idea of what to expect. But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization. Every stereotype was shattered in the first hour, and every assumption was upended within a day.
Your protagonist, Alan Clay, spends much of his time in the King Abdullah Economic City, an ambitious new development, which is far less of a city-to-be, Alan finds, than the name suggests. As he approaches with his driver, they arrive at a modest gate. “It was as if someone had built a road through unrepentant desert, and then erected a gate somewhere in the middle, to imply the end of one thing and the beginning of another,” he thinks. “It was hopeful but unconvincing.” Did you visit the K.A.E.C. yourself? Can you describe it? Did you share Alan’s response to it?
K.A.E.C. was absolutely surreal; I’ve never seen anything like it. When I was there, there was little more than a grid of roads cutting through desert as far as you could see in any direction. But then, by the Red Sea, there were beautiful canals being carved, and you could see the possibility that the city presents. If it’s executed to any extent, it would be an incredible thing, on a physical and symbolic level.
It doesn’t take long for Alan to encounter the contradictions of Saudi society, as he’s drawn into the myriad ways the country’s residents circumvent its rigid code of conduct. “This was the cat-and-mouse game being played in the kingdom,” he observes. “Its people were forced into the role of teenagers hiding their vices and proclivities from a shadowy army of parents.” What kind of challenges or opportunities did these contradictions present for you as a novelist? Could you have written about it in the same way as a journalist?
Well, I didn’t look at the country through journalistic eyes. I didn’t ask the same questions I would have asked if I was trying to represent it that way. I went trying to see it through the eyes of someone like Alan—what he would see, whom he would have met, what he would have done alone in a hotel room. But I will say that it was not as restrictive a society, on an hourly basis, for a tourist like me, as you might expect. I won’t for a second propose that my experience was indicative of what it’s like to be a woman in Saudi, or even what it’s like to live or visit Riyadh—which is much more conservative than Jeddah—but I will say that there was a very loose, very idealistic spirit to the young people I met. And K.A.E.C. was a bit of an island of relative liberalism, where the women were uncovered, were treated as equals, and the staff was decidedly international.
This is a novel about globalization. In his current role, Alan is a consultant, travelling across the world to sell a software program, but for decades he worked for a bike manufacturer, first as a salesman and then as an executive, overseeing the company’s American production lines before moving its factories overseas in the search for a cheaper labor force. Alan’s sense of dislocation seems to come not only from the strange, almost dreamlike quality of his days in Saudi Arabia but also from his feeling that America’s economy has gone off-kilter—that there’s no place for a man like him, and that, to some extent, he participated in his own exclusion. Did you set out to write a novel about the American economy, or did this aspect of the book surprise you?
Before I heard about K.A.E.C., I had been kicking around ideas about a character who had been in manufacturing. The idea of Alan having been in bicycle manufacturing arrived next, and was personal to me, given I grew up about twenty miles from the Schwinn factory, which was building great bikes until the eighties on the west side of Chicago. I wanted to explore how an essentially good man like Alan participated in the process of manufacturing moving offshore in the eighties and nineties, slowly making the factories, workers, supply chain, and eventually, himself, unnecessary.
Did you ever think of having a counterpart to Clay? Someone who could extoll the virtues of a global, interconnected marketplace?
There are two counterpoints to Alan, I think—or groups of counterparts even. One group is the young team of American I.T. experts he has with him: they’ve never known anything but the interconnected global marketplace (and this is why they see Alan as anachronistic and not so useful). The second counterpart group is the team at K.A.E.C., who work out of a enigmatic black building and are trying to get the city off the ground. The K.A.E.C. people have to believe that partners from all over the world will see the city-to-be as a viable investment and jump in. But there’s a “you first” mentality at play, which has crippled the development. No one has the certainty, or courage, to move first. And in the meantime everyone—the salespeople of K.A.E.C., the I.T. people with Alan, and, of course, Alan—waits.
McSweeney’s is publishing the hardback edition of “A Hologram for the King,” and in your acknowledgments, you thank the entire staff at the Thomson-Shore printers in Dexter, Michigan. Did you make a deliberate decision to print the book using a U.S. printer? How often do you find yourself making decisions about costs, and whether to use domestic or overseas firms when you’re working on McSweeney’s other publications?
I have to admit that I had a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment when it came to the printing of McSweeney’s books. Over the years, we’ve done a lot of our production in the U.S., and even more in Canada, and then, about five years ago, we started printing in Asia, too. But then, a few years ago, I got to know this printer outside Detroit called Thomson-Shore. They’d done some pro-bono work for our tutoring center nearby, 826 Michigan, so I visited the plant, and thanked them, and saw some beautiful books they’d made, and met the men and women who worked there. Walking the production floor was very much like meeting members of an extended family; most of the people at Thomson-Shore have been there for decades. And they’d just done a beautiful job printing the Mark Twain autobiography, so we decided to do a book with them—that was the John Sayles novel, “A Moment in the Sun”—and they did a fantastic job with that book. The fact that they’re in Michigan makes it easier to communicate, to reprint, and to correct problems, and the prices are close enough to China’s numbers, when you take shipping and various delays into account. I don’t mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn’t feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S. And as you can see, Thomson-Shore did an incredible job with “Hologram.” We did a lot of tests for the cover, and made a dozen adjustments, and doing that in Michigan is really easy, and even fun. When I was thinking of the acknowledgments, it made sense to thank everyone at the printing plant, given they’re a big part of getting the book out into the world.
Do you think you’ll visit Saudi Arabia again?
I hope so. I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I’d like to see them again. And I’d love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.
Photograph by Alex Majoli/Magnum.
