Although Dave Eggers has worked with movies before with And Away We Go (in collaboration with his wife Vendela Vida) and his adaptation of of Where the Wild Things Are, A Hologram for the King occupies a unique position among his work: it is the first and (until The Circle gets released later this year) the only of Eggers's novels to be adapted for the screen.
A Hologram For the King is an unlikely choice for Hollywood: the book is replete with flashbacks and long scenes of displacement -- wandering through an incomplete city in the desert, confused and out of contact -- and it only partly resolves at the end. That is, the book's conclusion retains a hint of a salesman's forced optimism, but a darkening sense that the book's home on the bookshelf will still remain very much between your beat-up copies of Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot.
It's also the first of a three novels (Hologram, The Circle, and Your Fathers) that center, in very different ways, on economic anxiety, globalization, and job loss. In Hologram, Alan Clay is part of a class of executives that have modernized and outsourced themselves out of existence, a man falling apart in a distant land, with his daughter's own advancement and education slipping away back home. The Circle, amid timely concerns about social media and technology, also has economic anxiety running throughout: Mae is fleeing miserable underemployment, and The Circle -- a company of what initially seems weird and unearthly benevolence -- appears as the saviour of her parents from ruin at the hands of insurers. Your Fathershas economic anxiety right at its fiery core of anger over a spendthrift government and its foreign policy.
These issues were not so far from Eggers's nonfiction and quasi-nonfiction from Teachers Have It Easy onwards; but at the time, Hologram was a clear change from previous volumes of outright fiction. It takes time, perhaps, for readers and reviewers alike to move on from where an artist was to where they are. And with A Hologram for the King, Eggers's art and his advocacy alike work show a marked focus on issues of economic insecurity and education.
The hardcover edition's a fascinating example of the influence of 19th century bindings in Eggers design: the combination of washed-out brown cloth, heavy blind-stamping, and a foil stamped lettering is a distinctly mid-19th century look. (As you get more towards the Gilded Age, you get a little less blind-stamping, and more... well, gilding.) It is a design from an even earlier age of manufacturing -- what Eggers described in this 2012 interview as "actual objects by actual people" -- a solid contrast with the holograms being conjured in a mirage of a city.
