Wednesday, July 25, 2012

‘A Hologram for the King,’ by Dave Eggers

Desert Pitch


Lori Nix



Where is our new-millennium Norman Mailer? It’s startling, 50 years on, to look back at the work of Mailer in the 1960s — from “The Presidential Papers” to “The Armies of the Night” — and see such unabashed ambition, such reckless audacity and such a stubborn American readiness to try to save the Republic from itself and bring it back to its original promise. Mailer’s very titles — “Advertisements for Myself,” “An American Dream” — told us he was on a mission, committed to the transformation of country and self, and even as he gave himself over to unremittingly private (and epic) meditations on God, the Devil, cancer and plastics, he was also determined to remake the civic order. He ran for mayor of New York City, he tried his hand at directing movies and in 1955 he helped start an alternative weekly known as The Village Voice. Part of the exhilaration of Mailer was that he cared so ravenously even when he failed; he was shooting for the moon even when he shot himself in the foot.


A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING 
By Dave Eggers 
312 pp. McSweeney’s Books. US$25.


Author photo - Paolo Vescia for The New York Times

Dave Eggers comes from a much more sober, humbled, craft-­loving time, and his latest novel is the opposite of a failure: it’s a clear, supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped and sad. But for all the difference between their generations, you can feel in Eggers some of the hunger, the range and the unembarrassedly serious engagement with America and its ideals that gave Mailer’s work such force. Eggers asserted his bravado — along with some tonic self-­mockery — in the very title of his first book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (a title of which Mailer would have been proud); he followed it up with a very different kind of book, a novel, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” about the impenitent determination of two young Americans to travel the world giving money away. Yet even as he has written seven substantial books in 12 years, Eggers has also established his own publishing house, bristling with attitude and backward-looking invention. He’s started two magazines whose names (Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and The Believer) openly declare their interest in homemade whimsy and optimism — or, you could say, in the past and in the future. He’s established nonprofit writing and tutorial centers across the country and, in his spare minutes, helped write two feature movies, “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Away We Go.” 

No comments: