A Hologram For The King, Eggers - B

                                          There is something about nuanced, sophisticated writing that eludes my straightforward mind.  I put this book on my list because the author is someone I've read before, and he is a famous graduate of our hometown Lake Forest H.S.  This very brief tale is of a middle-aged man hip deep in nothing but middle-class trouble. He is broke, he is trying to sell the house that he and his ex lived in, he doesn't have his daughter's college tuition money, he owes money left and right for a failed venture that he tried to make a go of, he's occasionally impotent, and he's off on a sales mission to King Abdullah Economic City to try and right the ship.  In essence, he's an American who has been globalized into middling irrelevance and who is throwing a hail Mary pass to save the day.  His outing eventually starts to feel like 'Waiting For Godot', but after ages of waiting, the King eventually shows up.  Trumped by the Chinese, who now buy more oil than we do and can do the job at half the price, he loses the sale, but doesn't give up. The writing is laser sharp, witty, very well-done and thus, this is a good read.
                                           I then turn to the NYTimes review and learn that I've missed at least half the book. Within a few paragraphs, the reviewer compares Eggers to Miller, Mailer, DeLillo, and Hemingway. "Every detail perfectly advances a vision of American aspirations at a time of economic collapse and mid-life crisis". "It is among other things, an anguished investigation into how and where American self-confidence got lost and - …..defeated". "In places, the book becomes almost a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands, knew struggle." "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." "In much the same way, Eggers has developed an exceptional gift for opening up the lives of others so as to offer the story of globalism as it develops and, simultaneously, to unfold a much more archetypal tale of struggle and loneliness and drift."  Whew!  And here I thought Springsteen  had summed it all up when he sang, "the foreman said these jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back."