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Jonathan Messinger

Ofce Girl
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By Joe Meno. Akashic Books, $23.95.

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Now in 3-D
Dave Eggers shifts gears once again with the new A Hologram for the King. By Jonathan Messinger ttttt
By Dave Eggers. McSweeneys, $25.

To hear how people have talked about Dave Eggerss new novel, A Hologram for the King, you would think that the author has embarked on a new beginning as dramatic as his heros. Alan Clay is a former door-to-door salesman who worked his way up the corporate ladder at Schwinn Bicycles, just in time to play an integral role in outsourcing its labor and tanking the company. Now adrift in a post-manufacturing economy, hes deep in debt, cant afford his daughters expensive college education, and has called in a final favor to close a big deal, right his finances and restore his daughters waning respect. Alans new beginning coincides with a much larger new undertaking. Because he once knew the nephew of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, hes representing the IT company Reliant, hoping to procure the contract for King Abdullah Economic City, the kings new city being built on the shores of the Red Sea, a beacon of Arab economic development to rival Dubai in hubris.

But it turns out the KAEC of Eggerss novel is born a ghost town, with only two buildings, one of which hosts a far-fetched model of what the city could one day be. Alan and his team are set up in a dark tent with inconsistent Wi-Fi, and their meeting with the kingor even his underlingsis perpetually postponed. Compared to Eggerss early workmost notably 2000s hyperkinetic A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Geniusthe prose is unadorned, written in a manner that almost resembles the script for a play. But this isnt actually anything new for Eggers, who over the last decade has become less interested in literary gamesmanship (at least as it pertains to his own writing) and moved toward a cleaner writing style, or at least one more suited to the topic at hand. Though it might surprise someone who read only Heartbreaking Work that this is the same author, it wouldnt surprise a reader of, say, his 2009 release Zeitoun. In fact, it would be a bigger surprise if he remained the same writer he was 15 years ago. Whats fascinating about Eggers as a writer is the way his activist

His activist pursuits have increasingly informed his fiction.

PHOTO: LEFT, ERIC WILLIAM CARROLL

pursuitsfounding the youth literacy org 826, building a school in Sudan, publishing oral histories of imprisoned womenhave increasingly informed his fiction. Though Hologram isnt an activist novel, it has at its center a sort of moral vision quest: Alan is out in the desert looking for some better version of himself. And as he spends his nights in his hotel room trying to write letters to his daughter and assess his current condition, its clear that hes not simply looking to be financially better off. There is a link, for Alan, between improving morally and improving materially, though that link always eludes him. As he awaits a meeting with someone, anyone, in that tent in the desert, the book becomes possessed of a Godot-like nervous energy. And like Eggerss past books, Hologram maintains a pervasive sense of humorin one scene, drunk alone on contraband moonshine, Alan falls in fleeting love with his hotel room. Alans plight is endearing in its universality, even while being singularly his.

A Hologram for the King is out now.

Chicago author Joe Meno has long and somewhat lazily been labeled a punk rock author. Thats largely due to the punk protagonists of his breakout novel, Hairstyles of the Damned, and his role in the early-2000s reconfiguring of live readings as performances (often incorporating music). But with this, his sixth novel, the analogy is starting to make a little sense. In the way record labels for years served as a home for bands to explore their sound, New Yorks Akashic Books has become a place where Menos books have become increasingly liminal and idiosyncratic. In this latest, it feels as if Meno has written the book hes been wanting to write for years, combining all of those classic elements of his previous work: the stop-and-start of youthful inertia, the painful purity of romance, the way childhood informs (i.e. wrecks) us as adults and a direct prose cut into vignettes and montage (He also works with longtime collaborators photographer Todd Baxter and painter Cody Hudson). The story tells of Odile and Jack, who work together in a colorfully monochromatic officeOdile is an artschool dropout agitating Jacks static life. Also a playwright, Meno staged a play a few years back that laid the groundwork for these characters, and the novel retains the claustrophobic air of a stage and the theaters reliance on subtext and offstage tension. Gorgeously packaged, its like a Meno box set 15 years in the making. Jonathan Messinger

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