“He could not pay her tuition because he had made a series of foolish decisions in his life. He had not planned well. He had not had courage when he needed it.”
So here it goes, The Vandenburg Rewrite’s second post of our Dave Eggers Week (by week I mean about 8-9 days). If I were more intelligent, I would have insisted that I post first because I’ve been experiencing a bit of a block all week figuring out how I was going to follow Lemon’s last post. I’m definitely not going to try to live up to Lemon’s subject matter, and though I love the book I’m going to be writing about, this book for me was not life-altering, it’s not my favorite book in the world, but it’s great literature that I believe is important.
In his latest novel, A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers presents what I have interpreted as a modern day Death of a Salesman. The protagonist, Alan Clay, is a struggling divorcee trying to maintain a veneer of success, keep his house, and pay for his child’s education amidst the economic crisis. Similar to Arthur Miller’s work, Eggers strikes a chord with far too many Americans at the time of the novel’s release last summer. The novel does well to point out the complicated struggles of many Americans during this time in our history, but the motivations of Clay and his reflections on how he got to this point reveal issues within the American concept of success. It is, by and large, a criticism of the American dream.
Clay is introduced as a distraught character for numerous obvious reasons. He can’t pay his bills, he can’t catch a break, and he can’t give his daughter what she needs. Ultimately, Clay is a character who sees himself as a failure, and he has one chance to redeem himself. He must put on an impressive hologram presentation for King Abdullah, of Saudi Arabia, that will persuade the King to hire his firm to equip the country’s latest up-and-coming urban development, KAEC, with the necessary technology. Hence, the book title.
Again, it would be easy to explain Clay’s feelings of failure by crediting to his lack of professional and financial success, but, again, just like Willy Loman, (I can’t stop seeing comparisons you guys) his feelings of inadequacy are deeper, a more complex issue within the fabric of our American culture.
Eggers is bringing attention to the same old America that authors were talking about 60 years ago. We’re still obsessed with living up to one generalized definition of success. To be a man, for an American, means to be depended on, to feel needed, to be the foundation of a household, the provider, the backbone. To be a man means to be successful in every aspect of the word. Most importantly, to be a man means to be strong, to never be weak, and to never admit your own failure. That’s Alan Clay’s greatest sorrow; he can no longer ignore his weakness, his failures, or his inadequacy according to his culture. It’s this definition of success that leads to his feelings of worthlessness rather than his actual mistakes. Though we all make mistakes, it’s our perspectives that influence how we weigh those mistakes and the significance we place on them.
At different points throughout the novel, Clay recognizes the problematic thinking ingrained in him by his culture. He places the goals society has deemed acceptable as his ultimate priority which essentially dooms him from the start. Despite this reflection, he is never able to break free from those expectations. It’s the great lie of the American Dream, displayed for the reader in a modern yet familiar setting. To expect that the possession of a family, a home, and a socially acceptable profession will bring you happiness will only render disappointment sooner or later.
The shame of Clay’s failure drives him, quite literally, to the other side of the world, and his continued failure causes him to never want to face the picture of success he failed to live up to. At the end of the novel, despite Clay’s momentary reflections, we see that obtaining success is more important than the non-material life he has created, mainly his relationship with those in his life he is close to. He opts to stay in Saudi Arabia, despite further rejection, rather than returning home to his family empty-handed.
Sure, he doesn’t literally take his own life to provide for his family, Willy Loman style, but he does so in a sense. He cuts himself off from his former life to exercise every attempt to put his daughter through college and maintain the same comfortable home she has grown up in. In both works, you see the motivations of these men not being out of love for their families (though I don’t doubt they have love for their families). Rather, their greatest motivation is the American definition of what it means to be a man, their sense of duty. Eggers is pointing out that we really haven’t come so far in the past 60 years. We maintain the same damaging standards in our culture, and it’s not doing anyone any good.
Put Eggers on your shelf next to Fitzgerald, Miller, and O’Neil. He is, for me, a constant reminder that modern literature is in no way inferior to our classics and our literary cannon. Though he is by no means the only important voice among contemporary writers, he is a great one.
-Kansas
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