“Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Holograms of Hope

A comparative review of Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King and popular TV show Raising Hope.


I  read Dave Eggers novel, A Hologram for the King, as a cautionary tale: one I needed to hear. While well written, the novel is one I recommend reading quickly. I did not want to linger with the protagonist, Allen Clay; Rather, I hoped to  get in, survey the nasty business, and get out.  Clay is a washed up business man, whose personal and career disappointments have left him impotent by choice. He can’t connect and he can’t succeed.  He waits for a big break, but circumstances and self-doubt sabotage himself at every turn. He is my ghost of the future, and I turned pages wondering how I could close the book and make my future more meaningful?

Eggers text did not leave much room for hope.  Allen is pathetic because his path to failure was so hopeful--so like my own. He is all of us who are trying to make something of ourselves. Allen was trained to expect disappointment because his wide-eyed eagerness and gumption are smothered by the realities of a down-turned economy and a dog-eat-dog business world, in which hard work is a small percentage of the equation that yields success. Sound familiar?
As I edge towards thirty, I can relate to Allen’s predicament. I chose to be a teacher, hoping to avoid the vapid allure of success and money for real fulfillment changing lives. Turns out that isn’t so much a reality either. Don’t get me wrong, I like being a teacher, but I come home feeling like a failure more often than a success. I get the feeling the kids who succeed would do fine without me, and the ones at risk often need more than I can give.
  
Fortunately, as I shoveled M&M’s into my mouth, depressed by this literary fiction, and determined to stare at the TV and forget all this meaning of life stuff, my husband and I landed on Raising Hope. We watched episode after episode on Netflix, laughing out loud. The show seems at first a silly guilty-pleasure, probably offensive to Americans struggling financially, and full of cheap jokes. The characters are inarticulate, and are the trashiest of families. However, as I watched, I see myself in the family. It is an exaggeration of American life.  As I watch the grandparents in the show, young and already trapped in tough careers and their son, still in his twenties and tethered by a baby from a one-night stand, I can kind of relateWho among us doesn’t sound stupid half the time we open our mouths, or at least worry our ignorance is showing through. Who among us has a life exactly like we imagined it? While the family’s life is by all accounts disappointing, the family deals with what life throws at them with imagination and team work. Through the family's exaggerated failure, the show reminds us that joy doesn’t come from success in careers and the perfect family. It comes from taking yourself lightly enough to make a hotdog into an octopus to make your husband smile. If I am waiting to be perfect, the show reminds me, I will always be disappointed.

 Raising Hope reminds me to humble myself. Allen Clay’s tragedy isn’t his failure. It is his lack of humility. He can’t handle being a regular guy and so he can’t connect to anyone else around him. His tragedy is entitlement. I shouldn’t expect to change every life. I should expect to hug children when they need it most, to teach them something new every day, to introduce a reluctant reader to a great book. As my husband snuggles closer to me, and kisses me on the head as we wait for the next episode of our Netflix marathon to load, I realize it isn’t that I need a new path. It’s that I need new eyes: ones that see all I have to be thankful for instead of just my own failures.

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