book review the circle by dave eggers

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By Ellen Ullman

• Nov. 1, 2013

Mae Holland, a woman in her 20s, arrives for her first day of work at a company called the Circle. She marvels at the beautiful campus, the fountain, the tennis and volleyball courts, the squeals of children from the day care center “weaving like water.” The first line in the book is: “ ‘My God,’ Mae thought. ‘It’s heaven.’ ”

And so we know that the Circle in Dave Eggers’s new novel, “The Circle,” will be a hell.

The time is somewhere in the not-too-distant future — the Three Wise Men who own and rule the Circle are recognizable as individuals living today. The company demands transparency in all things; two of its many slogans are SECRETS ARE LIES and PRIVACY IS THEFT. Anonymity is banished; everyone’s past is revealed; every­one’s present may be broadcast live in video and sound. Nothing recorded will ever be erased. The Circle’s goal is to have all aspects of human existence — from voting to love affairs — flow through its portal, the sole such portal in the world.

This potential dystopia should sound familiar. Books and tweets and blogs are already debating the issues Eggers raises: the tyranny of transparency, personhood defined as perpetual presence in social networks, our strange drive to display ourselves, the voracious information appetites of Google and Facebook, our lives under the constant surveillance of our own government.

“The Circle” adds little of substance to the debate. Eggers reframes the discussion as a fable, a tale meant to be instructive. His instructors include a Gang of 40, a Transparent Man, a shadowy figure who may be a hero or a villain, a Wise Man with a secret chamber and a smiling legion of true-believing company employees. The novel has the flavor of a comic book: light, entertaining, undemanding.

Readers who enter the Circle’s potential Inferno do not have the benefit of Virgil, Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory, but they do have Mae, a naïve girl with the sensibility of a compulsive iPhone FaceTime chatterer. (Oddly, Mae does not lead us through the ranks of programmers — let alone offer a glimpse of a woman programmer — a strange omission in a book purporting to be about technology.)

Mae has been introduced to the Circle by her friend and former roommate Annie, who is close to the Three Wise Men. She begins work in lowly Customer Experience, providing boilerplate answers to client questions and complaints. Her performance is tabulated after every interaction, her ratings displayed for all to see.

Mae is an eager competitor, earning a record score on her first day. Soon she is a champion Circler, moving ever closer to the company’s inner rings. Eventually she becomes as transparent as a person can be within the realm of the Circle: wired for the broadcasting of her every waking move. In the bathroom, for instance, she can turn off the audio, but the camera stays on, focused on the back of the stall door. (If she is silent for too long, her followers send urgent messages asking if she is O.K.)

At each advance into “participation” (or descent into hell, as the case may be), Mae is a tail-wagging puppy waiting for the next reward: a better rating, millions of viewers. Far from resisting, she finds each new electronic demand “delicious” and “exhilarating.” Now and then, she briefly feels a black “tear” opening inside her, but the feeling comes at improbable moments and in such overheated prose as to parody emotion: “a scream muffled by fathomless waters, that high-pitched scream of a million drowned voices.”

Can anything prevent Mae’s fall into the depths of the Circle? Enter the mysterious Kalden. While everyone else lives in the clear light of transparency, Kalden emerges from the shadows. Everyone working at the Circle can be located, but Kalden’s name appears nowhere; Mae experiences his invisibility as “aggressive.” Everyone inside the Circle is young and healthy; the outside is for the old and ill. And here is Kalden, who has gray hair yet looks young. The symbolism — is he a vibrant Circler or an old man from the dark outside? — is all too obvious.

At their second meeting, Mae follows Kalden down long corridors, through underground tunnels, down and down and down. What she sees in this netherworld is a metallic red box the size of a bus, wrapped in tentacles of “gleaming silver pipes.” Kalden tells her it stores the experiences of the Transparent Man, who for five years has recorded everything he has seen and heard. Kalden makes some excuse for the box’s huge size, but his technical explanation is ridiculous. There just happens to be a mattress in an alcove, where Mae and Kalden have sex — she thrills as he breathes “fire into her ear.” Later Kalden will say the Circle is in fact a “totalitarian nightmare,” as if a reader did not know this from the start.

Like Kalden, alas, Eggers tends to overexplain. An example of what might have been a fine scene: Mae is with her ex-­boyfriend, Mercer, who makes chandeliers out of deer antlers. (Eggers has not been kind to Mercer in giving him this occupation.) Mae takes out her digital device and, without Mercer’s asking, starts reciting negative online reviews of his work. He begs her to stop. But Mae reads another: “All those poor deer antlers died for this?” The scene, having established Mae’s casual cruelty, should have ended there. Instead it continues for five more pages, during which Mae and Mercer debate the effects of social media. The words “author’s message” flash above the scene, as they do above too many others.

Do we even care about Mae? What remains of her life outside the Circle — Mercer, her family, her father’s multiple sclerosis — she relentlessly (and blithely) draws inside the power ring of the company, to disastrous and tragic effect. And finally Annie, the onetime friend who drew her into the Circle: Mae wants to triumph over her and push her out, again to disastrous effect. A sense of horror finally arrives near the end of the book, coming not through Mae’s eyes but through the power of Eggers’s writing, which we have been waiting for all along. The final scene is chilling.

Mae, then, is not a victim but a dull villain. Her motivations are teenage-Internet petty: getting the highest ratings, moving into the center of the Circle, being popular. She presents a plan that will enclose the world within the Circle’s reach, but she exhibits no complex desire for power, only a longing for the approval of the Wise Men. She is more a high school mean girl than an evil opponent. Perhaps this is what Eggers wants to say: that evil in the future will look more like the trivial Mae than it will the hovering dark eye of Big Brother. If so, he should have worked much harder to express this profound thought. The characters need substance; Mae must be more than a cartoon.

There is an early scene in which Mae could have become a rounded character, one we might worry about. It is her first day on the job. All information on her digital devices has been transferred to the Circle’s system. During the introductory formalities, she is asked if she would like to hand over her old laptop for responsible recycling. But Mae hesitates. “Maybe tomorrow,” she says. “I want to say goodbye.”

If there was ever a need for a pause in the narrative, it is after that “goodbye.” In the opening of a white space, we might imagine Mae’s feelings as she holds the device containing her private experi­ences. We might linger over what it means to surrender — voluntarily, even eagerly — the last shreds of one’s personal life.

By Dave Eggers

491 pp. Alfred A. Knopf/McSweeney’s Books. $27.95.

Ellen Ullman’s most recent book is the novel “By Blood.”

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The Circle by Dave Eggers – review

I n a recent essay published in these pages, Jonathan Franzen inveighed against what he sees as the glibness and superficiality of the new online culture. “With technoconsumerism,” he wrote, “a humanist rhetoric of ‘empowerment’ and ‘creativity’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘connection’ and ‘democracy’ abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it’s far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people’s worst impulses, than newspapers ever were.”

I cite this because it chimes with the points that Dave Eggers is making in his latest novel, The Circle ; we are at an interesting moment when two such significant figures of American letters have both independently been so moved to expound on the same subject. But my guess is that Eggers won’t suffer the same online crucifixion that has subsequently been Franzen’s fate. Why? Because although Eggers is saying all the same things as Franzen (and so much more), he makes his case not through the often tetchy medium of the essay, but in the glorious, ever resilient and ever engaging form of the novel.

The Circle is a deft modern synthesis of Swiftian wit with Orwellian prognostication. That is not to say the writing is without formal weaknesses – Eggers misses notes like an enthusiastic jazz pianist, whereas Franzen is all conservatoire meticulousness – but rather to suggest that The Circle is a work so germane to our times that it may well come to be considered as the most on-the-money satirical commentary on the early internet age.

This is the story of Mae Holland, a woman in her early 20s, who secures a job at the vast techno-sexy social media company, the Circle, an approximate combination of Facebook, Google, Twitter, PayPal and every other big online conglomerate to whom we have so far trusted our lives. Run by the “Three Wise Men”, the Circle recruits “hundreds of gifted young minds” every week and has been voted “most admired company four years running”. Among their inventions is “TruYou”, a single integrated user interface that executes and streamlines every internet interaction and purchase: “One button for the rest of your life online.” Their philosophy is total transparency and their campus is an architectural essay in glass, a temple to all the geek-chic entertainment and amenities that limitless profits can buy.

Mae is absurdly grateful for the opportunity to work in this brave new world. The novel tracks her own integration into the ethos and activities of the Circle, gradually illuminating a deeply disconcerting vision of how real life might soon be chased into hiding by the tyranny of total techno-intrusion. Mae, herself, ends up suggesting that an account with The Circle should be made mandatory by the government, this being the most effective way to increase vote turnouts.

There is much to admire. The pages are full of clever, plausible, unnerving ideas that I suspect are being developed right now. “SeeChange” is one such: millions of cheap, lollipop-sized “everything-proof” high-resolution cameras with a two-year battery life that can be taped up anywhere so that the video streams can be accessed by all. “This is the ultimate transparency. No filter. See everything. Always.” Meanwhile, there are some fine moments of description – Eggers portrays the mysterious Kalden as a man whose “skinny jeans and tight long-sleeve jersey gave his silhouette the quick thick-thin brushstrokes of calligraphy”.

The book is also very funny. Dan, Mae’s boss, is described as “unshakeably sincere”; he nods “emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered something his ears found quite profound”. One of my favourite passages describes Mae’s frenzy as she attempts to raise her “PartiRank”, her relative Circle social-participation score, calculated as the result of her digital interactions. After work, therefore, she sits for hours in front of her myriad screens and posts in 11 discussion groups, joins 67 more feeds, replies to 70 messages, RSVPs to dozens of events, signs petitions and provides widespread “constructive criticism” before realising that, in order to make real headway up the ranks, she had better stay up all night and manically comment, smile, zing, join, frown, befriend, invite …

Mae has a boyfriend from her past, Mercer, her main antagonist. Mercer spends hours thinking of ways to “unsubscribe to mailing lists without hurting anyone’s feelings”. He finds that the digital bingeing of the world leaves him “hollow and diminished”, and that there is “this new neediness [that] pervades everything”. Indeed, it is Mercer with whom Franzen might best get along; Mercer feels that he has “entered … some mirror world where the dorkiest shit is completely dominant”, that “the world has dorkified itself”. And it is Mercer’s fate – when Mae tracks him down in hiding using Circle technology – that furnishes the novel with its most kinetic passage of satire.

There are a few weaknesses. Eggers struggles here and there to balance psychological plausibility with the outlandishness of his satirical flourishes; he sometimes needs his characters to behave in ways that seem – certainly when you put the book down – to be wholly implausible. There is also a clumsy metaphorical scene where a shark eats all the other fish in the aquarium tank. But this is a prescient, important and enjoyable book, and what I love most about The Circle is that it is telling us so much about the impact of the computer age on human beings in the only form that can do so with the requisite wit, interiority and profundity: the novel.

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Book Review: The Circle , Dave Eggers’s Chilling, New Allegory of Silicon Valley

By Lauren Christensen

McSweeney’s founder and former Pulitzer finalist Dave Eggers today publishes his latest work of fiction, The Circle (Knopf). In it, the famously staunch defender of the printed page allegorizes the Digital Age as a pseudo-theological cult, issuing a grave—and page-turning—warning about the perils of a society obsessed with technology.

The story follows young and impressionable Mae as she navigates a new job at The Circle, an eerily familiar-sounding Silicon Valley corporation that’s known for its immense resources and relentless ambition. At The Circle’s sprawling campus—which Mae considers a “utopia” where “all had been perfected”—employees are indoctrinated in the company ideals of constant connectivity, transparency, and accessibility.

At first, The Circle’s mantra of an inclusive community sounds nurturing and forward-thinking, particularly compared with the dreary job Mae has left behind in her hometown, at the cement building of a utility company, which “felt like something from another time, a rightfully forgotten time.” But as our starry-eyed heroine makes her way around The Circle, the reader begins to sense Eggers’s implicit denunciation of the company culture: boundary-less communication can cause paranoia and hypersensitivity among those who attempt it, and can give the people who facilitate it utter control. The social message of the novel is clear, but Eggers expertly weaves it into an elegantly told, compulsively readable parable for the 21st century.

Mae’s official role at The Circle is in its so-called customer-experience department, where she answers clients’ questions and is expected to aim for a satisfaction rating of 100 percent. But, as Mae soon learns, her duties at the company extend far beyond this job description. Punished for traveling home for the weekend to visit her ailing father without keeping the Circle community constantly apprised of her whereabouts via social media, Mae naïvely acquiesces to the new demands, not worrying, as the reader does, that she’s putting her basic human autonomy at risk. Later, she fails to notice when her closest friend and co-worker Annie cracks under The Circle’s unrelenting pressure and the humiliation that can come from complete visibility. And, most tragically, her ex-boyfriend meets a horrific fate after Mae rejects his skepticism about the company’s vision.

Mae, meanwhile, walks the line of indoctrination and disillusionment until the novel’s closing pages. The protagonist is at last forced to choose between the prospect of “completing” the Circle and recognizing its hollowness when she discovers the truth about a mysterious and alluring fellow Circler, Kalden.

What may be the most haunting discovery about The Circle, however, is readers’ recognition that they share the same technology-driven mentality that brings the novel’s characters to the brink of dysfunction. We too want to know everything by watching, monitoring, commenting, and interacting, and the force of Eggers’s richly allusive prose lies in his ability to expose the potential hazards of that impulse. There might be hope for us after all, though, for the simple fact that we’ve just been reading a work of literary fiction and not a 140-character tweet or zing. Even if some of us did download it on an e-reader.

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by Dave Eggers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2013

Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by...

A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers ( A Hologram for the King , 2012, etc.).

Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that’s effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she’s seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the “Circlers” are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae’s workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it’s a polemic that’s thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle’s rapid expansion—the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel’s tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle’s demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that’s terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel,  A Hologram for the King , but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-385-35139-3

Page Count: 504

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION | THRILLER | TECHNICAL & MEDICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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BOOK TO SCREEN

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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Book review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

Eggers's satire of social media, which might be his 1984 or Brave New World, touches us IRL.

By Dave Eggers. Knopf, $28. From his breakout memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , to last year’s National Book Award finalist A Hologram for the King , Eggers’s works pulse with life. His latest novel, The Circle , pushes his art even further; this dive into technology’s intrusive ubiquity is his Brave New World or 1984 . Mae Holland, a 24-year-old idealist working at a gloomy utilities company in her small Californian hometown, calls in a favor with her college roommate and gets a job working at a utopian tech company called the Circle. Think Facebook or Google or Apple, but more impressive and intrusive than all of them combined. As the company asserts its disconcerting global omnipresence, Mae becomes more and more involved until she finds herself the Circle’s head cheerleader. Eggers’s work, part dark comedy, part sobering glimpse into the near-future, stuns for two reasons: Mae’s humanity and compassion are apparent even as she helps erode our civil liberties; and two, it doesn’t feel like science fiction. It feels like the next horrific—but very plausible—small step for mankind.

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Graeme McMillan

Dave Eggers' The Circle : What the Internet Looks Like if You Don't Understand It

How you react to The Circle -- the new book by McSweeney's founder, novelist and occasional screenwriter Dave Eggers -- will doubtless depend on your own relationship to technology. If you're someone who remains skeptical about the blogging, tweeting, Tumbling and Facebooking that have shaped society in recent years, The Circle may seem like a work of brilliant satire that suggests a chilling potential future for us all. On the other hand, if you're someone who's actually familiar with those online communities -- and since you're on WIRED reading this article, I'm going to guess it's the latter -- The Circle will likely sound more than a little tone-deaf.

Spoilers for the plot of The Circle follow.

The plot of The Circle is simple: In the near future, Mae Holland -- an ambitious college graduate who's unsure about her place in the world -- lands a job at The Circle, a groundbreaking tech company that created an all-in-one password solution and revolutionized the Internet by pushing users to adopt their real names online. One revolution wasn't enough for The Circle, however, and Holland soon becomes involved in the roll-out of an inexpensive, high-quality camera that streams HD video to the Internet and leads to a new golden age of honesty and crime-free living -- all for the low, low cost of individual privacy.

According to The Circle's corporate slogan, "ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN." Or in a more Orwellian turn: "SECRETS ARE LIES, SHARING IS CARING, PRIVACY IS THEFT."

While the book is fiction, the world it presents is similar enough to our own that its notion of how the Internet works seems incongruous and out of touch. Take TruYou, the password product that made The Circle so powerful. "TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year," the book tells us. "Though some sites were resistant at first, and free-internet advocates shouted about the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all meaningful opposition. It started with the commerce sites. Why would any non-porn site want anonymous users when they could know exactly who had come through the door? Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness."

Yes, that's right: In Eggers' world, only trolls and porno fans want the right to remain anonymous on the Internet. When forced to use real names, "all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable" because, as we all know, there's no way that boorish arguments could possibly start between people who know each other's names! That would be ludicrous ! He goes on to explain that, after tying everyone's online accounts, credit cards and bank accounts together, "the era of false identities, identity theft, multiple user names, complicated passwords and payment systems was over." Problem solved, Internet . Except that it only makes sense in a world where it'd be much easier to commit identity theft because you could access all that information in one central location.

Eggers, who has given interviews boasting about the lack of research he engaged in before starting the book, writes about technology and the tech world with the air of a man who's just, like, not sure about what the Internet really means . All throughout the book, there are strange moments that demonstrate his lack of research, like supposedly tech-savvy characters who don't understand that information "in the cloud" doesn't need server storage.

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The problem isn't just that Eggers doesn't understand how technology works; it's that he also doesn't seem to realize how people work, either. At one point midway through the book, we're told that the idea of transparency has become so viral that politicians start wearing cameras that transmit an audio and video feed for every waking moment of their lives. This idea becomes so successful that 90 percent of U.S. politicians -- yes, U.S. politicians -- follow suit within three weeks. (Some politicians balk at the idea, but they quickly fall away from the narrative thanks to political scandals engineered, we're told in an off-hand aside, by The Circle.)

In his desire to create a world where The Circle rules all, Eggers creates so many extremely unlikely or outright impossible scenarios that happen simply because he needs them to happen. As they stack up through the course of the book, it gets harder and harder to take it seriously even as satire until finally it becomes outright fantasy, with only a tenuous connection to reality as we know it.

Eggers' distrust of the digital future is represented by Mae's ex-boyfriend, Mercer, a character who gets to give numerous speeches about the ways in which technology is dehumanizing everyone. "Even when I'm talking to you face-to-face you're telling me what some stranger thinks of me. It's become like we're never alone," he tells her at one point. Later, he is literally * driven off a cliff* by robot drones piloted by social media hordes.

An unsubtle fate, sure, but subtlety is a surprisingly rare commodity in the book. For example, after The Circle is referred to as a shark, there's a moment where Mae -- and millions of people on the Internet -- watch an octopus being torn apart by a shark in an aquarium, because it had nowhere to hide . "We saw every creature in that tank, didn’t we? We saw them devoured by a beast that turned them to ash. Don’t you see that everything that goes into that tank, with that beast, with this beast, will meet the same fate?" someone says after the shark/octopus scene, in case anyone had missed the point. Eggers bludgeons the reader with these moments, as if he's afraid that they wouldn't understand him otherwise.

The book's biggest fault, however, is that it's boring. Unrealistic tech and lack of subtlety can be forgiven if you're invested in the story; just ask anyone who's enjoyed a Dan Brown novel, or a Star Wars movie. For all of Eggers' gifts as a writer, including some lovely prose and surprising humor that surfaces here and there, The Circle lacks anything resembling tension or excitement. Every plot development is telegraphed, every mystery obvious. If you've ever wanted to see what Dave Eggers would sound like channeling Michael Crichton, then The Circle is for you.

It's a shame, because The Circle raises questions that are worth discussing. A theme Eggers returns to throughout the novel is that people aren't inherently good, but become good when others are watching; a benevolent big brother, if you will. Although the book spends a lot of time foreshadowing that The Circle as A Bad Company Up To Bad Things For Humanity, it actually accomplishes a lot of good: eradicating crime, quashing despotic regimes, deterring election fraud and making healthcare more available to Americans. The debate over whether such changes would be worth surrendering some level of privacy, freedom and individual responsibility could have been an interesting one -- if only characters had been allowed to see things in anything other than black and white.

Ironically, The Circle comes across like one of the Internet trolls that Eggers promises no longer exists in his fictional world: Entirely convinced of its righteousness, unafraid to use straw man arguments to "prove" its points, and completely disinterested in dialogue when polemic is easier. It's something that will be gratefully received by those who already agree with the arguments it put forwards, but met with disappointment and disinterest by everyone else. Perhaps the most appropriate response is that favored by many online trolls: The Circle ? Meh.

Jason Parham

Angela Watercutter

Jennifer M. Wood

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy

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Dave Eggers

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

A young woman named Mae Holland arrives at the campus of a company called the Circle, one of the most highly praised and innovative tech companies in the world. Mae has been recruited to work at the company, thanks to the help of her close friend and college roommate, Annie Allerton , who is one of the Circle’s highest-ranking employees. Annie welcomes Mae warmly and gives her a tour of the facilities, which are beautiful and cutting-edge. Everyone Mae meets is extremely gracious and enthusiastic about Mae joining the company.

During the course of the tour, Annie tells Mae about the Circle. It’s run by three people who are known as the Three Wise Men. Ty Gospodinov , the founder and most tech-savvy of the Wise Men, is a recluse and he almost never appears in public anymore. Tom Stenton , the most aggressive and money-hungry of the Wise Men, is in charge of the company’s “dirty work.” Finally, Eamon Bailey , the most charismatic and beloved of the Wise Men, is responsible for realizing the company’s vision of global interconnectedness.

Mae begins working for the Circle in the Customer Experience department. There, she spends her time interacting with customers who have questions about Circle products. Her job seems to be generally superficial and it’s not clear how it fits in with the company’s mission overall. Mae quickly finds that the Circle throws parties and social events near-constantly. At one party, she meets a quirky employee named Francis Garaventa . Mae quickly learns that Francis is an orphan, and several of his siblings were kidnapped and killed when he was a small child. As a result, Francis is working on a project for the Circle designed to track abducted children. Mae also attends presentations led by Eamon Bailey. At one, Eamon introduces a program called SeeChange—a system of cameras that allow Circle users to watch any point on Earth at any time.

Although Mae is impressed with the utopian spirit of the Circle, she doesn't spend as much time on campus as her coworkers do because she likes to visit her parents. Her father is suffering from MS and he needs constant care; unfortunately, his healthcare doesn’t provide him with the painkillers that he needs to feel comfortable. At work, Mae is encouraged to spend much more time participating in social life at the Circle. She is supposed to attend parties and gatherings, and, much more importantly, she is urged to post online about her activity. Sensing that this is important to her job, Mae throws herself into the task of building an online presence: she stays up late at night posting statuses, liking other people’s videos, etc.

Around the same time, Mae meets a mysterious man named Kalden . Kalden asks Mae questions about herself and about her work, but he refuses to answer many questions about his own life—he doesn’t even give Mae his last name. Mae tries to find Kalden online, but she can’t find anyone with his name. Later, Mae goes on a date with Francis, and they kiss.

The day after their date, Francis helps give a presentation about a new dating website called LuvLuv; during the presentation, he demonstrates the website by displaying Mae’s personal information. Mae is furious with Francis and she refuses to talk to him. Soon afterwards, she learns that her father’s health is declining rapidly. She goes home to visit her father, and, during her visit, she argues with her old boyfriend, Mercer Medeiros . Mercer expresses his skepticism about Mae’s new employer and he suggests that constant texting and social networking are destroying Mae’s relationships with her friends and family. Around the same time, Mae meets Kalden at a Circle party, and they have sex in a secret room.

At work, Mae learns that she can put her parents on her company’s health insurance plan; with Annie’s help, she does so. Meanwhile, the Circle begins to push the idea of becoming totally transparent (requiring its users to share all their personal information and experiences with other users). The Circle installs cameras almost everywhere on its campus. In secret, Kalden and Mae meet up in the bathroom (one of the only places without cameras) and have sex.

One night after seeing Mercer and her parents for dinner, Mae goes out to the beach and sees an unreturned kayak near her favorite kayak shop. She decides to take it out and then return it, planning to leave it just as she found it. When she returns to land, however, she’s surprised to find police officers waiting to arrest her. Mae is forced to call the owner of the kayak store, a woman named Marion. Although she’s ultimately not arrested, the experience frightens Mae. The next day, Mae learns that Circle users reported Mae after they saw her “stealing” the kayak on a hidden camera installed near the beach. Mae goes to meet with Eamon Bailey, who persuades her that “secrets are lies” and that human beings have a moral obligation to share their experiences with other people. Afterwards, Mae posts online near-constantly, sharing every detail of her life with other people.

The novel jumps forward almost a year. The Circle has grown to handle virtually all of the world’s information flow, and Mae has gone transparent and has been promoted to being a virtual tour guide for the company. As part of being transparent (which is inextricably linked to her job as a guide), Mae wears a lens around her chest at all times that allows anyone in the world to see what she sees and hear her voice. Mae savors her transparency, noting that it keeps her honest and energetic at all times: she always has to be “on” for her millions of watchers. Mae revives her relationship with Francis, but is unable to have sex with him, since he suffers from premature ejaculation. Mae also finds herself growing increasingly distant from Annie, who seems overworked and envious of Mae’s burgeoning popularity at the company and with its users.

Mae learns that her family has been “disrespecting the Circle.” After her parents accepted the company’s health insurance, the Circle installed cameras in their home, which Mae’s parents then covered with cloth to block their view. Furious, Mae begs her parents to uncover the cameras. Mercer tells Mae that her parents deserve privacy—a suggestion that Mae dismisses as absurd.

At work, Mae proposes a new idea: to require all Circle users to vote online through an interface controlled by the Circle. Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton like this idea, and they further propose that the company require all Circle users to pay their taxes through the Circle, test their children through the Circle, etc. The resulting program, called “Demoxie” allows anyone in the world to vote on any topic. Mae gets several phone calls from Kalden, in which he urges Mae to speak out against the Circle because it is becoming dangerous and totalitarian. Mae ignores Kalden. She stays up late at night posting online, and she becomes paranoid and anxious about the smallest problems.

The Circle proposes projects that would allow police officers to target people who might become criminals, though they have not yet committed any crimes. Meanwhile, Mae realizes that Annie is suffering from crippling anxiety. Annie has signed up as a guinea pig for a new Circle program that tracks people’s ancestry and family history. Through this program, Annie has discovered that some of her ancestors were slave owners, and as a result, her online followers are sending her cruel messages. Mae tries to help Annie by telling her own watchers—millions of them—to be supportive of Annie and overlook her family’s crimes.

Mae gets a letter from Mercer explaining that he’s going to become a hermit in order to escape the surveillance of the Circle. Shortly afterwards, Mae demonstrates a new Circle program that is designed to track down fugitives. She chooses to demonstrate the program on Mercer, and she sends a team of drones flying after him. In the middle of her demonstration, Mercer drives his car into a gorge in order to escape the drones (and, perhaps, to escape the surveillance culture that the Circle has enshrined more generally). He dies—it’s an apparent suicide. Mae is distraught, but Eamon Bailey convinces her that Mercer was a disturbed young man and that she played no role in his death.

Mae is finally introduced to Ty Gospodinov, the third and most reclusive of the Wise Men. She’s amazed to see that Ty is actually Kalden. In private, Ty explains that he’s been trying to destroy his own company for years: he never wanted the Circle to destroy peoples’ privacy, and believes that Tom Stenton is going to turn the Circle into a tyrannical monopoly. He begs Mae to use her influence to denounce the company.

In the brief, final part of the novel, Mae has chosen not to denounce the company, but rather to inform Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton of Ty’s subversive plans. Stenton and Bailey then placed Ty under arrest (or potentially murdered him), and Mae hasn’t seen Ty since. Mae visits Annie, who had a nervous breakdown following her participation in the genealogy project and is now in a coma. She looks at the screens showing Annie’s brain waves, and resolves to propose a project for listening to other people’s thoughts. The novel concludes, “The world deserved nothing less and would not wait.”

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Book Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers’ novel about privacy and democracy in the Internet age,  The Circle,  asks, “If you aren’t being transparent with your personal information, what are you hiding?”  Set in the near future, the story revolves around an omniscient tech company called The Circle that wants to digitally record your past, present and future, allegedly in the name of  promoting human rights and democracy. Personal data is volunteered freely by the public, and so populist governments and online communities join the march towards total informational transparency. In The Circle , Eggers portends to expose the soft-totalitarian nightmare that waits at the logical end of such thinking – an extreme metaphor about transparency as a virtue, but maybe not extreme enough.

“All that happens must be known.”

The book follows young Mae Holland at work on the company’s sprawling Californian campus. Mae, accustomed to the drudgery and chicken-coop work of a call-centre, finds The Circle’s amenities and open-plan layout initially enticing – what’s more, the company’s medical benefits cover her sick father. The first part of the novel casually introduces this environment, an increasingly odd synergy between upbeat, blue-sky-thinking creatives and the institutionalisation of suspicion, conformity and mutualised invigilation.

The Circle’s digital tools are dominant, ubiquitous and free. An eager public adopts them voluntarily at first, but soon find that they have become mandatory. Privacy is theft. Secrets are lies. Caring is sharing. The company is managed by “Three Wise Men”: Tom Stenton, “world-striding CEO and self-described  Capitalist Prime ”; Eamon Bailey, the loveable, witty face of the company; and the enigmatic Ty Gospodinov, The Circle’s “boy-wonder visionary” and founder – who himself remains unseen and anonymous. Ty is the brains behind TruYou, a revolutionary system that combines social media profiles, payments, passwords, e-mail addresses and interests into one account. Following TruYou’s success, The Circle develops SeeChange, a surveillance platform where mini-cameras stream footage directly to the company, and then Demoxie, a system making Circle membership and direct democracy compulsory. Mae, along with a number of desperate and popularity-hungry politicians, volunteer to “go transparent”.

Despite flat characterisation and a reliance on overused dystopian tropes, there are many good ideas here on the danger and banality of sharing “intimate trivia”. Eggers is most effective in his critique of contemporary trends through exaggeration: the vapid nexus of social endorsements and the elevation of self-expression as an achievement in its own right. Circlers sound progressive, but this is juxtaposed against an unconscious acceptance of authoritarianism. Their utopianism is delusion: The Circle urges people to share more in order to mine their personal information for commercial and, eventually, political, purposes.

You’re here because your opinions are valued. They’re so valued that the world needs to know them – your opinions on just about everything. Isn’t that flattering?

Do novelists now have to be technologists to write contemporary fiction? Of course not. But intentionally not researching your milieu or inventing more convincing fictional technologies is a failure of craft. For such a contemporary novelist, Eggers’ prose lapses into primness and old-fashioned phrasing that takes some of the edge away from The Circle ’s silicon-gloss. The two main opponents to the closing of The Circle are both fairly unappealing, didactic, moralists who spout Eggers’ anti-modern humanism. As with Jonathan Franzen’s miserablism, The Circle is another example of a major contemporary novelist reacting conservatively to modern developments.

Mae is absurdly passive. There is a suggestion that the attitudes behind her desperation to fit in with the public’s eagerness to embrace The Circle eventually lead to totalitarianism. But nobody is that passive. The idea that society is going to the dogs because people post selfies and food porn belies a reactionary contempt for the public. It’s a basic lack of sympathy that disengages with the potential for real human subjects and instead lapses into moralism.

We don’t yet live in a panopticon of co-opted mass surveillance where somebody watches everything we do. The information mined by the NSA and GCHQ has been user-generated for semi-public viewing. But how much freedom should we have over our own data? How public is private? The Circle will make you think twice about how much you do share. After all, sharing is caring. Right?

About Wes Brown

Wes Brown is a writer based in London. He is a Co-ordinator at the National Association of Writers in Education, administrator at Magma Poetry and Director of Dead Ink Books. He is currently writing a novel based on the Shannon Matthew's kidnap and training as a professional wrestler for a book about masculinity and storytelling. His debut novel, Shark, was published in 2013.

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Book Review: The Circle, by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers asks the right questions in the wrong ways in The Circle

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If you are under the age of 30, you will probably not enjoy The Circle . It is a book about the Internet, social media and consumer technology that is so utterly wrong , you’ll feel compelled to take to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr to catalogue all the ways.

Book Review: The Circle, by Dave Eggers Back to video

Of course, you would also be proving author Dave Eggers’ point. The Circle is a book about a company of the same name, a sprawling, idealistic mash-up of Google, Facebook, Twitter and all of the Internet’s most popular bits, but inflated to levels of hyper-connectedness of which even the most plugged-in teen could scarcely dream.

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In this world, everything is liked, shared, commented on and captured by its users thousands of times per day, and to not swim in this constant, crashing, digital ocean is to be perceived as anti-social — as weird. On the surface, it’s a scathing and arguably obvious commentary on how we — the collective, digital “we” — apparently now live our lives. But below Eggers’ imagined deluge of likes and tweets, more interesting topics sadly remain untouched.

Our proxy for this descent into digital excess is a young woman named Mae Holland, who moves from small-town obscurity to entry-level Circle employee thanks to the influence of a Circle executive and old friend. We see Mae climb up the ranks of the company, absorbed into its culture — and as Eggers no doubt intends — witness the havoc such networks and services are apparently wreaking upon our relationships, our ideals, and our expectations of privacy and self.

Key to this vision is The Circle ’s embodiment of common Silicon Valley stereotypes and tropes. We are reminded, constantly, that most Circlers — a play on Googlers — are in their twenties. There is the Mark Zuckerberg-like autistic-savant founder, swaddled in hoodies and toques, flanked by a pair of slick co-executives that direct The Circle towards any number of eccentric, world-changing pursuits — location-aware bone implants that promise to eliminate child abductions, or deep-sea subs capable of surviving the depths of the Marianas Trench. Employees embrace the quantified self movement, using wearable technology to track their health, location history and social engagement in real time. Tablets and smartphones are always cutting-edge, employees spread data across nine screens or more, retinal computing is apparently common place and everything — everything — is stored, permanently, un-deletable, in the cloud.

There is the sprawling, self-contained campus in a fictional suburban south Californian town, with tennis courts and medical clinic and dorm rooms and concerts and kitchens staffed with professional chefs all conveniently splayed on site. And this is to say nothing of the search queries, emails, instant messages, tweet-like analogs called Zings, online payments, surveys, smiles, frowns, petitions and protests that course through The Circle’s digital, circuitous veins.

It is all perfect distillation of the promise and excess of modern industry giants — less fiction than an honest, selective portrayal of the reality of working in present day tech.

Quite early on, the subtext of this wonderment becomes clear: here is a company that does so much, controls so many things, that it has practically become the underpinning of society itself. That, Eggers posits, is what should scare us most of all. But it reads like a less compelling 1984 for the Internet set — a totalitarian future fallen victim to its own utopian ideals, where Googley mantras such as “ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN” are trotted out without a hint of levity.

What is frustrating about this portrayal is that it poses a very legitimate question — what would happen if such a company were allowed to truly become so pervasive as to subsume society itself? — but goes about answering it in all the wrong ways.

Frank discussions about privacy and surveillance are well worth having, after all: We should all know, or at least consider, the implications of putting so much of our lives, our connections, our likes and habits, into the cloud. But Eggers feeds off a popular, albeit not entirely accurate belief, that technology itself is to blame for our societal ruin. Put another way, imagine being told for nearly 400 pages that cellphones are changing the way our children write and speak — a fact which has demonstrably been proven to be untrue.

This manifests itself most obviously in the way The Circle ’s central characters are portrayed. Mae, eager to please and oblivious to the company’s domineering goals, is merely a prop through which we learn about The Circle, it’s founders, its products and its plans. Later, she is quite literally turned into a lens, live streaming the company’s inner workings and minutiae for all to see. The exposition here is often dreary and lengthy, an exercise in meticulous world building that presents clunky, distorted aphorisms of how present day social networking and online interactions work.

Characters don’t merely Like things — they smile, and frown. They participate in online petitions and surveys, believing their choices hold tangible, worldly weight. They are wholly and utterly complicit in The Circle’s intrusion into their lives, and in a tired, predictable trope, it is up to a mysterious, shadowy figure to warn Mae of impending societal ruin.

There are brief mentions of resistance, a small percentage of people who seek to resist the mass surveillance and societal sublimation The Circle represents. But Eggers seems to have no desire to explore this opposition with anything more than passing derision, through an analog character named Mercer who makes deer antler chandeliers for a living.

It says nothing of the people who, in the present day, use technology against those who seek to digitally oppress — the online activists who champion anonymity, privacy and security, who are dismissed early on with an assertion that everyone in The Circle’s universe simply grew to prefer the use of real names.

Rather, technology’s ability to enable, as much as enslave, is just as worth exploring in a context such as this, but Eggers opts for the easier, more alarmist tale.

The Circle bludgeons its reader over the head — swiftly, repeatedly — with its message of societal doom and gloom. It is tedious, twice as long as it should be and reduces a topic rife for serious, smart and witty exploration into easily consumable popcorn fare. For those unfamiliar with the machinations of social media, or who grew up outside the Internet’s pervasive grasp, it may delight. But for the rest it will merely frustrate, a naive vision of pixelated ruin that could more accurately be summed up as “old man yells at Cloud.”

Matthew Braga writes about technology for the Financial Post .

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The Circle Paperback – Large Print, December 15, 2015

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• Book 1 of 2 The Circle
• Print length 630 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Large Print Press
• Publication date December 15, 2015
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 159413961X
• ISBN-13 978-1594139611
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Large Print Press; Large type / Large print edition (December 15, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 630 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 159413961X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594139611
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.59 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• #47,684 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Dave eggers.

Dave Eggers is the author of ten books, including most recently Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, The Circle and A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of eight tutoring centers around the country and ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects students with resources, schools and donors to make college possible.

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