More than any other writer of his generation, Dave Eggers is a brand. The 42-year-old author is accomplished in many fields — he’s the founder of McSweeney’s, a successful independent publishing house and innovative literary journal that grew out of a still-vital humor website. He’s the head of the multi-city literacy nonprofit 826, which is partly supported by whimsical storefronts like the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store. For his work, he’s been awarded the TED Prize, the Heinz Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovators Award. Yet inside all of that is Eggers the writer, who’s publishing his first novel of pure invention in a decade.

Lately, when he’s not writing screenplays, Eggers has written bestselling books with a strong sense of social justice that are true or based in truth. The nonfiction Zeitoun is about a Syrian American who, despite valiant actions after Hurricane Katrina, wound up locked in isolation; What Is the What novelizes the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a “lost boy” of Sudan.

There is no wronged man in the fictional departure A Hologram for the King. Instead our protagonist is Alan Clay, a 54-year-old American whose circumstances are because of his own choices or bad luck or a destiny he failed to see coming.

In the wake of the 2008 recession, Clay is a former upper middle class salesman whose job evaporated and whose income as a consultant has dwindled to an unsustainable pittance. He is divorced, indebted, trying to sell his home so he can pay for his daughter’s second year of college. His vices are mild, and he’s not degenerate, but he is close to desperate. He’s got an opportunity, a one-last-chance kind, to close a major IT deal in Saudi Arabia; if he can pull it off, his commission will be enough to keep body and soul together, or at least get him back in the black.

This is a classic action setup, but the action here is subtle: Clay waits. He waits for King Abdullah to come; every day, he travels to the remote, unbuilt, ambitious metropolis envisioned by the king, the KAEC. Rather than being welcomed into a completed office building, he is relegated to a tent, where his much-younger staffers idle away in the heat. To them, Clay is “more burden than boon, more harm than good, irrelevant, superfluous to the forward progress of the world.” Although he has occasional blasts of a salesman’s bravado and optimism, he generally believes they are right.

The novel is solidly constructed and elegantly told. There is nothing inaccessible about it, but it may be difficult for some because it is so deeply forlorn. That stands in contrast to Eggers’ first book, the monumental memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which despite dealing with serious issues was a delightful, giddy, exuberant work. The tone of this book is far away and so somber.

Clay may not be like each of us, but he is an everyman whose irrelevancy is parallel to America’s own. We learn that the company he worked for was Schwinn, that he helped it move from making bicycles in the United States to China, which led to its downfall and bankruptcy. This cycle, of American ingenuity and commitment being shipped offshore, is reflected again and again in the book: in the anecdotes of architects, in the possible competitors for the contract, in the slow unwrapping of Clay’s past.