ABSTRACT
Dave Eggers’s What is the What and Zeitoun are transnational works in that their narratives detail a passage between nations and concentrate on the experiences of individuals of ‘hyphenated identity’. The sequence of novels Eggers has published in the second decade of the twenty-first century mark a distinctive ‘American turn’ in his work which offers an alternative but complementary transnational perspective. Hologram for the King (2012), The Circle (2013), Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (2014) and Heroes of the Frontier (2016) focus on ‘unhyphenated’ American protagonists, and examine the United States both as a specific place and as itself typical of a nation in the globalised twenty-first century world. In their post-postmodern ethical approach to fiction and their assumption that fiction’s duty is to ‘make reality credible’, as Philip Roth once put it, these novels are themselves typical of the values and practices of a specifically US historical category, Mark McGurl’s Program Era, but also of categories of transnational fiction critics have recently described as ‘global’ or ‘planetary’. Eggers’s US quartet critiques globalisation, but is ultimately more interested in asserting the value of connections between human beings in a globalised world.
