The Circle by Dave Eggers | 2013 | Vintage Books | Paperback $15.95
When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America — even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
The Circle was chosen for a community-wide book club, Galveston Reads, sponsored by the local public library and some local foundations and businesses. This program always includes several themed events and book discussions, which I look forward to participating in this year.
I can see why this book is so popular. Comparisons to dystopian classics Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are apt, except that this time the boogeyman isn’t Big Government or Big Industry — it’s Big Tech.
It is flawed, mind you. I got the feeling that the author was trying to be subtle about the moral of the story at first — that allowing the encroachment of technology into private lives is perilous — but I personally thought it was immediately obvious and got to be a bit tiresome. And I’m a librarian, for heaven’s sake, practically a card-carrying member of the Privacy is Fucking Important League. Perhaps my impatience with this is merely a function of being steeped in the issues on the daily.
And I have to admit that I bristled two or three times at the descriptions of the young, hip techies — including our supposed heroine, Mae — just blindly accepting whatever shiny new thing their company asked them to swallow (quite literally, in one instance… except it wasn’t even a consensual swallow, which I know sounds dirty, but it just bugged me, and I’d better stop talking before we get into Spoiler Territory).
Maybe I’m just a little touchy about all the “Millennials blah blah this,” and “Millennials blah blah that,” swirling around in the media these days, but the assumption that pretty much everyone, but especially almost all young adults would just unquestioningly accept some of the shit that went down in this story really rubbed me the wrong way.
Mae, the main character is… annoying in a sympathetic sort of way. She’s self-centered and often purposefully oblivious to actual human communication, ready to lie (even to herself, especially to herself) in even the most ridiculous circumstances (even when she thinks she’s being “transparent”, especially when she thinks she’s being transparent), and she has terrible taste in men. Unfortunately, she genuinely assumes she’s doing the right thing in most situations, she wanted so badly to get out of her home town that she took a huge risk to make it happen, and she often wishes that someone else would make important or confusing decisions for her… which I all find embarrassingly relatable.
Speaking of terrible taste in men… there was one plot twist in particular that I didn’t find at all surprising, and I won’t say too much about it in order to avoid spoiling the plot for potential readers — except to say that it should be obvious to just about anyone who isn’t an oblivious idiot like Mae. Once I had this figured out, nothing at all about the rest of the novel was a surprise. There are some plot holes related to this particular revelation, too.
Despite all of that, I practically devoured the book. I stayed up too late reading it and couldn’t stop thinking about it after working through a few pages during my lunch break.
Even a week after finishing it, I kept thinking about it. I got more and more irritated with the premise and the bleak assumptions about human nature, but I kept thinking about it, and that’s something.
The plot pacing is addictive. The insidious way that a giant tech company can fool the world — starting with itself — into believing that it cares is depicted in a perfectly creepy way. Warts and all, it’s still a well-written, provocative book.
Links:
- McSweeney’s Q&A with Dave Eggers (Note: Eggers founded McSweeney’s)
- Book review at The New York Times
- Book review at The Atlantic
- Book review at Wired
- Book review at The New York Review of Books (by Margaret Atwood!)
- Publisher page
Publication information: Eggers, Dave. The Circle. New York: Vintage, 2014. Print.
Source: Purchased for home library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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