Zeitoun + 10, 1

Dave Eggers' Zeitoun is, of course, a book primarily about race and religion. By linking the disasters of Hurricane Katrina and the War on Terror, Eggers draws our attention to the ways Arab and Islamic people came to bear the brunt of American neuroses during the Bush era. Re-reading the book 10 years after Katrina, however, it is clear that the book is also about capitalism, about the way contradictions in our understanding of market forces help shape our understanding of character.

Both proponents and critics of capitalism have long noted a tension within it between creation and destruction. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx, of course, argues at length the case against capitalist exploitation and brutalization. But he begins by noting the enormous productive powers of the bourgeoisie: "It (the bourgeoisie) has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades." Conversely, capitalism's greatest fans routinely cheerlead with a kind of semi-irony for its destructive realities. Joseph Schumpeter, the rightwing, Austrian School economist, derives from Marx the notion of "creative destruction" and uses it as an argument explicitly in favour of free-market capitalism. Thus capitalism pulls intriguingly (and, for some, appealingly) in two directions at once, balancing destruction against creation.

In the character of Zeitoun and the disaster of Katrina, Eggers finds a man whose story he can tell through precisely this tension.

Zeitoun is Americanized through capitalism. His story, at one level a foreign tale of a Syrian Muslim sailor, is rendered instead as a familiar arc of American self-improvement. Zeitoun begins his life in America as a day-labourer, accrues the capital to start his own business, and ultimately becomes the employer of young immigrants like he once was.

Zeitoun's chosen industry is crucial: He is a home builder. (The word "builder" is Eggers' own.) Here Eggers has found a sweet spot in the American class structure: Zeitoun is both a paternalistic boss who looks out for the best interests of his workers and, at the same time, a working-class labourer who gets his hands dirty doing real work. Thus Zeitoun is the best of the bourgeoisie and the best of the proletariat rolled into one.

When Hurricane Katrina strikes, the tension within capitalism between destruction and creation is brought to within an inch of the surface of the text. For Zeitoun the capitalist, Katrina seems an obvious long-term boon. There are thousands of houses that will need to be renovated and many more that will need to be rebuild entirely. This is exactly the kind of work from which Zeitoun profits, and thus the disaster should be to his ultimate gain. Indeed, the closing section of the book describes the financial success to which this destruction has led: "But now things are moving. The city is rising again. Since Hurricane Katrina, Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC has restored 114 houses to their former states, or improved versions thereof" (323). Here is the destruction upon which "creative destruction" relies rendered literal and biblical, and Zeitoun the capitalist is a beneficiary.

Eggers, though, is careful to choose his wording when it comes to the relationship between destruction and profit, and here Zeitoun's trade as a "builder" is crucial. For when destruction is invoked, Zeitoun's work is rendered not in terms of profit but in the non-economic terms of "building." In the midst of the disaster, Zeitoun thinks of "the damage, how long it would take to rebuild" (96). In the months following he thinks of non-competitive, non-financial building: "Every time he sees a home under construction, no matter who's doing it, he smiles. Build, he thinks. Build, build, build" (323, Eggers' italics). Thus what is, in fact, profitable work for a small business owner is described in the almost pre-economic terms of building structures for the psychological satisfaction of doing so: small business as therapy and small business as ritual.

My point here is not that that Zeitoun is a predatory capitalist. Rather, it is that in the wake of the financial crisis, the ways in which Eggers narrates the book reveal fault lines that were less obvious before. The same system of semi-regulated capitalism that built American homes also took them away in the wake of the housing bubble collapse. The same system that created home equity (the most important form of capital for most Americans)  can destroy that same equity through the vicissitudes of its own functioning. Eggers renders that process almost literal in Zeitoun. Here the man who builds homes also makes his living from their destruction. Home renovation is a business working both sides of the fence and, in Zeitoun, that dialectic is rendered visible as creation and destruction are linked in the adventure of a single protagonist.