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.

But of course Eggers brings his own special charms to Hologram. For starters, he sets the book not in the past but in the science-fiction present. Clay works for a company that has created a new technology that allows users to communicate via lifelike holograms. He and a team of disaffected younger employees are stationed in Saudi Arabia to show the new technology to the nation's king. They never know when or even if the king will appear, however, so they commute back and forth between their hotel in Jeddah and a tent in the nascent King Abdullah Economic City to prepare their presentation in case he ever deigns to arrive.

Like Clay, and like the holograms with which he hopes to impress the king, the Economic City is only half there, a cluster of skyscraper shells in the shape of a city. Clay's internal monologue is at least as real as the world around him. He laments the decline of the Schwinn Bicycle Company, where he used to work. The once-great company was humbled and sold off for scrap in the face of cheap labor conditions in countries that can do capitalism better—by which I mean they celebrate a more pure condition of capitalism, without pesky regulations and human rights to get in the way—than the United States. The company's collapse is a metaphor for the America we find ourselves in now...

(Keep reading for more about Hologram and Ben Fountain's excellent Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which is about war and football and somehow still manages to be amazing.)