The one thing Dave Eggers had not done until now is give us a novel you could safely describe as traditional. But his newest, A Hologram for the King, practically sounds like a John Updike book, or something by any number of literary authors who came of age between 1950 and 1979. It's about the internal life of an ordinary, melancholic middle-class white man named Adam Clay sliding down the back slope of middle age. Clay—even the name is portentous in an old-school symbolic way—struggles with his own impending irrelevance in the face of a new, younger generation of workers and a world that seems to have passed him by.
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