A Hologram for the King is the story of the new economy written through the lens of the old. The protagonist, Alan Clay, is about as classic a prototype of mid-20th century Americana as you can get: a salesman for consumer goods manufactured in the US, a white guy who is both overly confident in his own material manifest destiny and financially reckless, a middle management type who is all too happy to bust unions and chase after cheap labor. He is on a mission to solve his own economic woes by closing a huge IT contract with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. His strategy for winning the contract: to impress the King with a new-fangled contraption that perfectly symbolizes the 21st century economy - a hologram that facilitates face-to-face communication with people halfway across the world.

This story draws on motifs from mid-20th century literature - Waiting for Godot and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf come to mind. And it’s written with a perspective which reifies the social structure of Nixon’s silent majority: a pecking order of men seeking the approval of still more powerful men, an economic elite content with its own privilege and uncaring about the suffering implicit in that privilege. It’s as though someone dusted off a set of Archie Bunker’s Neighborhood scripts and updated it for the early 21st century.

Or in any case, that’s how the book reads through the first two-thirds or so. The final third is an interesting diversion into the wilderness, both literal and emotional, and it puts the lie to Alan’s self-concept, his understanding of Saudi society, and also, perhaps, our own understanding of the new economy. The ending is totally predictable and it reveals just how empty our sympathies for Alan should have been all along.

What remains is a reasonable question: Is this novel a piece of protest literature, which attempts to make us rethink some of the common tropes about globalization? Or is it an all-too-trite attempt to sympathize with the anxieties of an economic elite struggling to adapt to a new reality of its own making? It’s possible to read this story in both ways, and I think that makes it rather interesting.