by Dave Eggers
Book list *Starred Review* Alan Clay is in Saudi Arabia, hired by an American company to sell an IT system based on a revolutionary hologram that enables far-flung associates to instantly commune with the telepresence of their colleagues, to the nascent (in fact, barely begun) King Abdullah Economic City. As down and out as they come overleveraged, unable to pay his daughter's college tuition, and scarred by his long-over marriage Alan hopes all wrongs will be righted when his team lands the deal, and his fat commission will be enough to pay his many debts and start over. But days become weeks while the team waits in the ghostly desert for a meeting with the king, a moving target. Slowly revealing Alan's history as a salesman who encouraged his employers at Schwinn to manufacture overseas, and only too late realized his compliance in rendering his own irrelevance, Eggers effectively shows why Alan wanted to believe that this kind of thing, a city rising from dust, could happen. In a land of contradictions Alan repeatedly experiences exactly what guidebooks told him he wouldn't and in a time when we depend on the instant, laser-sharpness of computers to direct decisions, Alan's greatest glories are in the waiting and in the uncertainty of his own and humanity's gray spaces.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission. |
