How is digital technology-which Alan is now trying to sell to King Abdullah-different from the creation and export of manufactured things? How do the young people Alan is working with on the hologram presentation differ from him in their assumptions about work and business?ħ. How are Alan’s jokes important to the friendship? What is appealing about Yousef? What does he distrust about Alan?Ħ. But the friendship between Yousef and Alan continues nonetheless. While Alan’s whole life depends on selling an IT system to King Abdullah for the new Economic City, Alan’s driver Yousef believes the city will never be built. Is Alan’s life exemplary of this crisis in American identity?ĥ. He attributes the decline partly to the fact that “People were done manufacturing on American soil” (13). Alan sits next to a drunken man on the plane to Saudi Arabia who argues that the United States is a nation in decline: “We’ve become a nation of indoor cats,” he says. What has caused the decline of Alan’s career? Is there any way he might have averted the situation in which he now finds himself?Ĥ. Alan “had moved from Schwinn to Huffy to Frontier Manufacturing Partners to Adam Clay Consulting to sitting at home watching DVDs of the Red Sox winning the Series in ’04 and ’07” (11).
What does Charlie’s suicide mean to Alan, and why does he keep thinking about it?ģ. The story of Charlie Fallon’s suicide comes up in the first chapter (5-6), and then intermittently throughout the novel (59-60, 128, 183-84).
Do you feel distant from Alan, or do you feel empathy for him? Does your response to him change as the novel proceeds? Can you think of similar protagonists in other novels you have read?Ģ. He had not had courage when he needed it” (4). We are told, “he had made a series of foolish decisions in his life. In the first few pages, we learn many things about Alan Clay: he lacks the courage to spend more time with a woman he is attracted to he lacks the money to pay his daughter’s college tuition he is divorced his house is on the market but has not yet sold he owes money to many people.
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