First-World Problems: Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King and John Lanchester’s Capital

What was once a nasty secret became an open secret and is now common knowledge: The middle class is being squeezed, mostly downward, out of existence.

First-World Problems: Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King and John Lanchester’s CapitalWhat was once a nasty secret became an open secret and is now common knowledge: The middle class is being squeezed, mostly downward, out of existence. Journalists and authors like Barbara Ehrenrich have exposed the shift from middle-income, salaried employment to minimum wage, hourly work experienced by so many. But what about the people who’ve been squeezed up? The people, who, while far from oligarchic wealth, have not only kept their salaried jobs, but have been promoted and blessed with bonuses? Two recent novels, Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King and John Lanchester’s Capital, inform us that life in the upper middle class has its tribulations, too, and both document the stresses of being, as one Capital character puts it, not rich, but part of the “struggling well-off.” From the point of view of these “struggling well-off,” both books take us on a tour through the brave new world of wealth and worth in the wake of the 2008 global financial collapse, a world where absurd economic inequality has rendered £1.6 million ($2.48 million) the price of a run-down London house with an outdated, dishwasher-less kitchen, yet it’s too expensive to pay factory workers $5 an hour.

A Hologram for the King tells the story of Alan Clay, an American business consultant of undeterminable purpose (even to himself). Clay finds himself in a tent in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert, awaiting an audience with King Abdullah, whom he wishes to dazzle with a presentation of a holographic teleconferencing system. Or rather, he wishes his “team” to dazzle the king because though Clay is supposedly “leading” the team, he has no technical expertise about the teleconferencing system and the team functions perfectly without him. To keep busy, Clay runs menial tasks like inquiring about the catering and air conditioning, exposing the arbitrary farce that is much of corporate hierarchy. Selling the teleconferencing system is merely the first step toward scoring a contract for the system’s parent company to handle all IT for the yet-to-be-built King Abdullah Economic City, known amusingly as KAEC (pronounced as “cake”). Clay’s secret is that though he lives in a large house in suburban Massachusetts and is the picture of privilege, he has somehow run out of money. Clay also has a daughter at a liberal arts college that Eggers keeps reminding us is very pricey (though someone should tell Eggers that it’s not like state school is a bargain anymore) and he needs the Saudi commission to pay her tuition and keep her enrolled. His more immediate problem is that day after day the king keeps not showing up.

A Hologram for the King draws on two theatrical classics, Waiting for Godot and Death of a Salesman, but Eggers writes about Clay in a wry, ironic voice that’s “very now,” as a Project Runway judge might say—distinctly of the 21st-century hipster era. Even the book cover is hipster-cool. Originally released in embossed hardback designed by the popular graphic designer Jessica Hische, it has the updated-antique aesthetic coveted by people who home brew and buy moustache wax. The narrative tone only gets serious when Clay takes an excursion with his driver, Yousef, deep into the Saudi hinterlands and has a terrifying brush with tragedy. Afterward comes an exchange that’s bold in its longing, acknowledgement of pain, and potential for grace: “It’s important to me that you’re my friend,” Clay tells Yousef, who replies, “Give me some time. I have to remember what I like about you.”

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Otherwise, Clay is kind a hipster at heart; he’s aware of his life’s absurdity, that he’s really a leech filling up on the blood of globalization’s slave labor, but he’s entirely unmotivated to take meaningful action against it all. What he really wants to do—and failed once at doing—is establish a boutique bicycle brand, an expensive one focusing on quality and craftsmanship. But he shrugs at the realization that such a business is almost guaranteed to be unprofitable and thus doomed. Clay, today’s Willy Loman, feels disaffection, not indignation, at capitalism’s broken promises of comfort and an ethical code. The dreams of Loman are to an extent, Clay’s dreams (to sell things and provide for his family), but unlike Loman, Clay has no illusions that he’s not a useless sham. There are no existential wails of “I am not a dime a dozen!” in A Hologram for the King. Clay is a dime a dozen and he knows it.

Capital, Lanchester’s longer, more complex narrative, begins on a nondescript residential street in London, Pepys Road. A developer had built the homes on Pepys Road in the late 19th century for lower-middle-class clerical workers—London’s Bartlebys—willing to live in an unfashionable quarter in order to own a spacious house. By December 2007, when the novel opens, every home on Pepys Road is worth at least £1 million. Lanchester provides a concise example of the pre-2008 crash magical thinking that accompanies such a sudden mushrooming of wealth:

“The fashion was for people to install basements, at a cost usually starting at around £100,000 a time. But as more than one of the people digging out the foundations of their house liked to point out, although the basements cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, they also added at least that much to the value of the house, so looked at from a certain point of view—and because many of the new residents worked in the City of London, this was a popular point of view—the basement conversions were free.”

It’s just at this pre-crash moment that someone begins surreptitiously filming Pepys Road, and mailing postcards to each of the homes that state merely: “We want what you have.” The postcards introduce us to the Pepys Road’s denizens: Petunia Howe, an elderly woman and perhaps the only resident with a memory of Pepys Road’s less glamorous days; the Kamals, Pakistani immigrants who live above their convenience store; Freddy and Patrick Kamo, a Senegalese teenage soccer phenom playing in the Premier League and his father living in a house owned by Freddy’s team-employed minder; and the Younts, a British family with two young boys headed by their banker father. We also meet several people who frequent Pepys Road: Zbiegniew, a well-liked contractor from Poland who has converted many a Pepys Road basement and loft; Quentina Mkfesi, a Zimbabwean meter maid; Matya, the Younts’ Hungarian nanny; Howe’s grandson, Smitty, who’s an anonymous prank-conceptual artist (modeled closely after Banksy), among others.

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With this diverse cast, Lanchester depicts the broad range of fortunes and values that converge on Pepys Road. Through the Kamos we see the bewilderment of sudden, explosive wealth; Petunia Howe is oblivious to the value of her home and therefore to the fact she’s very rich. The Younts, Roger and Arabella, of 51 Pepys Road, encapsulate the runaway crassness and vulgarity of a poisonous financial culture imported to London from Wall Street, and it’s their story as much as the “We want what you have” postcards that loosely holds the threads of Lanchester’s web together.

Roger Yount is an executive at a boutique investment bank, and like Clay, he’s been promoted high enough to no longer fully understand the mechanics of what his company does—a fact that consumes his creepy deputy, who does know “the maths,” with resentment. When we first meet Yount, he’s at his desk wondering whether his year-end bonus will amount to £1 million. He wants the million pounds because “he felt it was his due and it was proof of his masculine worth. But he also wanted it because he needed the money.” Yount does indeed need the money, considering his household expenses: Pepys Road house, country house, private school, two foreign holidays annually, full-time nanny, weekend nanny, cars (BMW, Lexus, Mercedes) and upkeep, home improvements, the £10,000 summer party (also annual), taxes, his wife’s shopping addiction, and incidentals.

And that’s where we are: The value of money is so diminished that people who live in four-bedroom houses feel that one million British pounds on top of their annual salary is just enough to keep up appearances. It’s their “due.” People need commissions from Saudi royalty to put one child through college. On the one hand, this sounds gross and farcical. On the other hand, many of us know people—good people, even liberal people—who earnestly proclaimed that a $250,000 annual salary “isn’t that much, actually” when President Obama proposed raising taxes on those earning more than that. And so, probably, do people who read novels by Dave Eggers and John Lanchester, if they aren’t those very same people themselves. And if we’re being honest, we could probably find ways to make £1 million not last very long in London. Eggers and Lanchester don’t excoriate, especially since they know who their readers are, but they do pity. The bigger the salary, the more expensive life gets, and despite their large-seeming bank accounts, today’s lower wealthocracy aren’t able to escape the crushing grind of work and the existential anxieties that money and privilege used to exempt people from. Clay and Yount are doofuses, but their predicaments aren’t trivial. Providing for a family in today’s economy is no small feat, no matter where on the economic ladder one stands, and the disorientation they feel—at the valuelessness of money, at how quickly it disappears, at its inability to secure any kind of stability—is real. They’re rich white men. So why are they getting left in the dirt? There’s a condescending tenderness with which the authors treat them, the way one does with a not very intelligent dog.

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There’s one character, however, that Eggers and Lanchester cannot abide, and that’s the Horrid Wife, who appears in both novels (though in A Hologram for the King it’s Clay’s ex-wife). The Horrid Wife is a fixture of the Western narrative from Jane Austen to Woody Allen, and her purpose is to henpeck, humiliate, and otherwise castrate likeable-in-spite-of-themselves male characters. And so it is that Clay has his Ruby (fiery, expensive) and Yount his Arabella. Ruby only appears in Clay’s (obviously biased) recollections and is more operatically unhinged than Arabella, what with her DUI and tendency to lose her temper in public. Lanchester, who only needs two pages to create a unique yet plausible character, barely gets Arabella past the level of caricature after 400. Toward the end of the book, we see that the disconnect between Arabella and her children is true, sad alienation, and not merely a lazy over-reliance on nannies. This revelation sketches some dark shadows behind Arabella’s airheaded, manic spending, but is overwhelmed by her expensive hijinks and the hideous conversations she has with her equally materialistic friend, Saskia.

It’s a truth universally unacknowledged that it’s money, above all things, that determines how we relate to other people. This truth is deeply embarrassing to Americans, who, despite empirical evidence to the contrary, cling to the idea of ourselves as a more socially mobile society than countries with archdukes and princes. Think of your friends: They may have more or less money than you, but I wager that they have the same general attitudes toward money. You probably spend your monthly incomes similarly, and agree that books and travel are worthwhile splurges, whereas snowmobiles are silly (or vice versa). If there are any disconnects, they tend to be small (usually turning up when everyone has to divvy up a bar tab), but tolerated with good cheer. Our relationships are defined by what we value and how we assess the social, cultural, and financial capital of ourselves and others. In Capital, Matya, the Hungarian nanny who once entertained fantasies of finding a rich London banker boyfriend reflects on the comforts of having a partner who is, like herself, working class:

“He wasn’t rich. That meant he knew the value of money: you could trust him with money, trust him to get to the point of it. A rich boyfriend might make her own economies, her choices, her triumphs seem petty. There were people in London who earned ten, twenty, fifty, a thousand times what she did—lots of people. How much did she really have in common with any of them? How would a boyfriend from that world feel about her flat-sharing, or know what to say when she lost her Oyster card with a full £30 on it?…[His] money values—his sense of what things cost—were completely in alignment with hers. That meant that their dreams were similar too.”

The money values of Clay and Yount—their sense of what things cost—are values we’ve been conditioned to strive for. We all want to get to a place where losing a transit card with $46 on it doesn’t register as an irritation. The warped logic of capitalism keeps us striving, even though it’s clear that the Clays and Younts of the world don’t necessarily lead dignified, or even less anxious existences. They need more, must work more. Flights to Jeddah for business, offices overlooking London’s Canary Wharf, and homes with multiple bathrooms are still badges of success. Perhaps they never guaranteed personal fulfillment, but there might have been a time when they were enough.

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Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King will be available in paperback on June 4 from Vintage, and John Lanchester’s Captial will be available in paperback on May 28 from W. W. Norton & Company.

Miya Tokumitsu

Miya Tokumitsu is a curator and writer. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin and the author of Do What You Love: And Other Lies about Success & Happiness.

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