East Meets West

This week, I finished a book and movie, which both explore a well-trod path, encounters between the Atlantic and the Orient.

England and the US have ruled the world for the better part of four centuries. Throughout that time, we’ve had a strange obsession with a broad swath of land from the Muslim heartlands of Africa and the Middle East, through the melange of South Asia. Dave Eggers has been chronicling our attempts to both merge with and understand a civilization which provides us with motive power in exchange for vast wealth, but desperately wants to chart its own course.

His first book, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), showed none of those themes. With the energy, passion, and innovation of youth, he told how, after losing both their parents within six months at age 21, he was left to raise his middle-school brother Topher. In his next effort, the novel You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), he makes the transition from the sudden responsibilities of adulthood to the orient through the guise of two young men, Will and Hand, both still in their mid-late 20s. Will has come into a sudden cache of $80,000, when a photo he took is used as a logo for a light bulb manufacturer. These young men are Bay Area liberals of the NP ilk; Will feels uncomfortable possessing what he see  as ill-gotten capital, so they determine to travel around the world, giving money to worthy people in third-world countries. Mostly, they muddle around in Senegal, trying hard to comprehend the culture within their still formative world view.

In 2006, What is the What, the fictionalized autobiography of a Sudanese “lost boy”, Valentino Achak Deng, traces war orphan from his Dinka homeland into Ethiopia, then Kenya, and finally transported to Atlanta as a teen refugee. Entwined in the story of that journey are Achak’s travails with life in the US. Already, the ability of Eggers to adapt his writing style to the subject was becoming obvious. His next major book, Zeitoun, stays within the East meets West theme, using novelized non-fiction ala Norman Mailer in his works The Executioner’s Song and Oswald, introduces us to the Zeitouns of New Orleans, and how they were changed by Katrina. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American, married his wife Kathy after emigrating to the US in his 30s. He became a moderately successful contractor. When the storm hit, his out-going nature and ingrained desire to be useful lands him in detention for suspected terrorist activity. Again, the ragged edges of America’s pushme-pullyou relationship with the Muslim world is the subtext of the story.

Eggers is prolific and a literary polymath. Stories, collections with others, humor bits with his brother Christopher, and screenplays (Promised Land, Where the Wild Things Are, Away We Go) crowd his bibliography. Through it all, he demonstrates not a single and distinct voice, but a deft ability to deploy the style and genre best suited to the subject at hand.

So what are we to make of his latest effort, A Hologram for the King? Eggers inhabits the familiar turf of Middle East/American interpersonal conflict. Now in his 40s, he has added to his vision not only the personal, but also broader cultural memes. America in decline to China’s ascent, the self-immolation of American manufacturing and associated off loading of wasted human capital, our youth’s passive obsession with self and virtual community, oil kingdom’s wanton and often fruitless investments in a barren and unforgiving land…all of these thread through this tale of inactivity, a modern day Waiting for Godot or Oblamov. And the fascinating thing is, Eggers makes a page-turner out of the main plot line which moves ever so slowly from point A to point B, and no further.

Here’s the entire primary plot: Alan Clay, a peripatetic salesman who helped lead Schwinn into oblivion, goes to Saudia Arabia to present Reliant Technologies’ (a smaller IBM) plans for developing and running the entire IT infrastructure for King Abdullah Economic City, which is fitfully being carved between the Red Sea and the desert an hour north of Jeddah. Every day he goes that hour north, and either waits in a tent with his three 20 something support team, or attempts with little success to get either (a) better wi-fi, (b) air conditioning, or (c) a meeting with his contact, Kareem.

Not much there to interest us, really. But Eggers sneaks in his usual East/West encounters through almost invisible side doors (wait until Clay is mistaken for a CIA agent, and ends up himself mistaking a goat-herder for a wolf). And, most deftly, his writing shifts gears yet again, this time using short chapters containing small bites of separated paragraphs, and the simple, plain language which seems an amalgam of Ernest Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, and Kurt Vonnegut. Shorn of all adornment, beauty and any convolution, Eggers’ prose is always precise, concise, and never more than needed to pull you forward. He tells his simple story, wraps the uncomprehending civilizations against each other, and produces another profound and profoundly readable book.

A much simpler, but just as entertaining tale, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, is a film by John Madden with an all-star veteran English cast. Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, and (OK, not English so much) Dev Patel. Briefly, 7 refugees from Albion, seeking new meaning as they enter the cast-off stage of life, meet on a plane/train/bus/pushcart journey to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, run by the prolix, infuriating, and endearing Patel. There over the next two months, in the squalor of Jaipur, they act their fools heads off, as only the British can, and tell a story which may only make sense to the over 55s. If that’s you, you’ll be enthralled by this little gem.