A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers: review Clay has a divorced wife, a semi-estranged daughter, a vexed relationship with his shrinking bank balance and a strange growth on the back of his neck. We first encounter him in a hotel room in Jeddah as he prepares for a last-chance attempt to snatch victory from defeat. Clay is in Saudi Arabia as a consultant to an American IT company, hoping to use a distant connection to the royal family to sell a holographic telepresence system to King Abdullah. "If Abdullah was impressed," he thinks, "he would award the IT contract for the entire city to Reliant, and Alan's commission, in the mid-six figures, would fix everything that ailed him." It doesn't work out like that, of course. The novel takes its epigraph from Beckett's Waiting for Godot - "It is not every day that we are needed" - but Eggers's story lends the phrase a punning twist of which its creator might grimly have approved. It is, in fact, not any day that Clay is needed; he spends day after day trekking out to the King Abdullah Economic City under the Saudi sun, there to swelter and wait in the company of a bickering team of twentysomethings who think he is "nothing, an irrelevant man." This premise - a man called Clay baking in the desert to peddle a telepresence system to a man who's never present - has something of a Beckettian absurdity of its own, especially when the fabled Economic City turns out to be a cluster of semi-deserted buildings in the middle of a sand dune, assiduously prettified by an army of undocumented workers. "This is where the money's going," observes Clay's driver. They're sweeping the sand in a desert. So Clay is forced to fill his time by other means. He gets drunk on local moonshine and writes self-justifying Herzogian letters to his daughter, watches Red Sox games on cable and, in the depths of abject drunkenness, performs some gruesome amateur surgery on his sinister spinal lump. He reflects on his career, in sequences that give Eggers the opportunity to roll out some dense research on the decline of American industry. Clay, it turns out, is a former Schwinn bikes executive who presided over the transfer of its manufacturing to the Far East, thus creating the economic climate that has so messily eviscerated his career. "You helped all that move to China," rails his father when Clay makes the mistake of calling him for advice. You can't put that genie back in the bottle. Meanwhile, his dream of building a line of bicycles "with clean lines, tons of chrome, everything built to last a thousand years and never look weary" has been scuppered by another American institution, the credit-check system: thanks to a dispute over a $32 charge six years earlier, he is now unable to raise a mortgage or get a loan. As he gloomily reflects, knocking back the Saudi white lightning, "the age of machines holding dominion over man had come." This relentless focus on the demolished man has already drawn comparisons to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in the US, where Eggers's book was shortlisted for the National Book Award after its publication last year. But the narrative's most effective and haunting moments come from somewhere quite different, a sandy Kafkaesque hinterland of unease. Such scenes - the moment in a mostly empty skyscraper where Clay comes across an apartment full of fighting migrant workers, a chillingly anticlimactic moonlight wolf-hunt - gesture towards the dislocation of another brilliantly sinister book about the Kingdom, Hilary Mantel's Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988). And Eggers's strange, deliberate sidling around the question of Clay's vanished libido is also very effective, emphasising the lunar emotional affectlessness that eventually swallows the entire narrative. "I feel," Clay confesses to a colleague at one point, "like a pane of glass that needs to be shattered." Stylistically, too, this is the sparest of Eggers's books, channeling a tradition of bleakly declarative writing that flows from Hemingway down through American letters; it offers another reminder of how far Eggers has come in the 10 years since his debut. In 2011, answering an interviewer who asked about the criteria for publication at McSweeney's, he gave a reply that might apply equally well to the transformation in his own writing. "There was a time when we looked first and foremost for successful or at least interesting experiments in form," he said. Now we're really looking for plain old good writing. After living for a while, and knowing that things do happen in this world, I look for novels and short stories to reflect that. This serious-minded, thoughtful book sticks devotedly to that mission statement, justifying its place in an increasingly important body of literary work. A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers 328pp, Hamish Hamilton, t £16.99 (PLUS £1.35 p & p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £18.99, ebook £10.99)