“A Hologram for the King” By Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s, 312 pgs., $25)

The hero of Dave Eggers’ absorbing new novel “A Hologram for the King” is a penny-ante Job named Alan Clay, who finds himself in an absurd situation. Alan is deeply in debt, unable to pay his daughter’s college tuition and plagued by a scary golf-ball-size lump on the back of his neck. He’s betting everything on a last-ditch chance at a big payday, hoping he can sell the Saudi king, Abdullah, on a lucrative technology contract — a contract that depends on Alan’s going to a real estate development in Saudi Arabia and making an elaborate holographic presentation to the king, who may or may not even show up.

“Hologram” is studded with allusions to a rich array of literary classics, but Eggers uses a new, pared down, Hemingwayesque voice to recount his story, a voice that stands in sharp contrast to the baroque, hyperventilated one he employed in his dazzling 2000 debut book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”

Gone are the self-conscious commentary and postmodern pyrotechnics of “Genius.” Gone too are the less effective exercises in mimicry and pastiche featured in his 2002 novel “You Shall Know Our Velocity.”

In any case, he demonstrates in “Hologram” that he is master of this more old-fashioned approach as much as he was a pioneering innovator with “Genius.”

In Eggers’ telling, the 54-year-old Alan is not just another hapless loser undergoing a midlife crisis. Rather, his sad-funny-dreamlike story unfolds to become an allegory about the frustrations of middle-class America, about the woes unemployed workers and sidelined entrepreneurs have experienced in a newly globalized world in which jobs are being outsourced abroad.

On Alan’s way to Saudi Arabia a fellow passenger complains that America has “become a nation of indoor cats,” a “nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers.” A U.S. architect, who has designed a couple of the tallest buildings in the world, tells Alan he has been working for 10 years in Dubai, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and China, where “the dreaming’s being done” now.

A summary of such moments may make “Hologram” sound like a schematic lesson on the United States’ decline, but it’s not. Thanks to Eggers’ uncommon ability to access his characters’ emotions and channel their every mood, we are instantly immersed in Alan’s story, rooting for him somehow to win an audience with the king and turn his life around. He holes up in his Jidda hotel room, scrolling through the personal photos on his laptop, “the vast grid of his life in thumbnails,” and like Saul Bellow’s Herzog, writes letters he never sends.

When a European woman named Hanne comes on to him, Alan finds himself wishing he could go home. All he wants to do is drink by himself and watch old Red Sox DVDs.

It doesn’t take long for Alan to discover the incongruities of life in the kingdom, where the wretched excesses made possible by oil money coexist with ancient mores regarding women, where a craving for the modern conveniences of life coexists with a suspicion of the West.

The analogies to Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” seem completely intentional. Eggers wisely does not strain to try to turn Alan’s story into an existential parable of the human condition like “Godot.” Instead, he has achieved something that is more modest and equally satisfying: the writing of a comic but deeply affecting tale about one man’s travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times.