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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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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New York Times Bestseller

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

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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by Kathy Reichs

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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.

Dave Eggers
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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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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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‘The Circle’ by Dave Eggers

When I finished reading Dave Eggers's chilling and caustic novel, "The Circle," I felt like disconnecting from all my online devices and retreating for a while into an unplugged world. I gather that's what he had in mind.

Eggers displayed a scrappy ironic side in "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," his 2000 memoir about raising his younger brother after their parents died of cancer. He has written with finesse and empathy from the perspective of a "Lost Boy" forced to fight in Sudan's civil war ("What Is the What," 2006), a Syrian businessman caught up in a post-Katrina nightmare ("Zeitoun," 2009), and a failing American salesman suspended in a desert limbo, hoping to cut a deal with a Saudi monarch ("A Hologram for the King," 2012). "The Circle" is his most satiric work, with shades of Orwell, Swift, Voltaire, even Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein,'' in his dark vision of an insatiable Internet monopoly that breaches the barrier between public and private.

The novel opens as Mae Holland, 24, begins her first day of work at the Circle, a slightly futuristic amalgam of the social-media and personal-tech companies that have emerged over the past decade, from Google to Facebook, Twitter and Square. Mae is enchanted. "My God, Mae thought. It's heaven. The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands."

The 400-acre Circle campus seems like a mash-up of the Googleplex and Disney World, with a picnic area, tennis courts, clay and grass, organic gardens, and towering brushed steel and glass structures with names like Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Cultural Revolution.

On Dream Fridays Mae gets glimpses of "the Wise Men," the trio at the top of the Circle — avuncular Eamon Bailey, ruthlessly capitalistic CEO Tom Stenton, and, via video, reclusive young founder, Ty Gospodinov, who usually wears an oversized hoodie. Ty devised a unified operating system, which combined all users' needs and tools into one TruYou account — e-mail, social networking, banking, and purchasing. "TruYou changed the Internet, in toto, within a year," Eggers writes.

The novel unfolds in an ever accelerating narrative flow. On her first day answering online customer questions, Mae is instructed to score 98 to 100 percent satisfaction on follow-up surveys. By her second week she is supervising a group of newbies. Within a month she is staying up all night to post continuously on the company's social networks after being criticized because her Participation Rank was low. She discovers that the community-building after-work and weekend events — concerts, circuses, theme nights, and all-night parties — are obligatory. And there's a dorm for those who don't want to go home.

Like a modern-day Candide, Mae maintains an optimistic front as she submits to the Circle's increasingly invasive demands. But her impulsive side leads her to take surprising risks. A nerdy coworker videotapes their wine-soaked sexual encounter (the Circle does not delete, she learns). And she enters into a clandestine on-campus affair with a mysterious, wiry, grey-haired man who calls himself Kalden. This relationship grows ever odder.

Back home, her high school boyfriend calls Mae's new colleagues "Digital Brownshirts," and her parents struggle with an insurance quagmire as her father is treated for multiple sclerosis. Mae's parents end up on the Circle's health plan. A miracle? Not exactly, as it turns out.

At the novel's midpoint, as Mae sinks deeper into the cult-like culture of the Circle, Bailey and Stenton begin rolling out newly minted Circle inventions, like SeeChange cameras the size of lollipops planted at Tahrir Square, along beachfronts, and in private homes.

A congresswoman goes "transparent," wearing a camera around her neck and allowing a live feed of her workdays to go online. Within weeks, 80 percent of politicians have followed her, leaving the other 20 percent to fight public perception they must have something to hide. Bailey and Stenton suggest that paying taxes, voter registration, even voting, should be woven into each individual's mandatory TruYou identity and constantly monitored. (If you don't vote, your TruYou account is frozen.) The developers get to work.

Like a concerned uncle, the smooth-talking Bailey coaxes Mae into making statements highlighted onscreen during a Dream Friday chat: "SECRETS ARE LIES. CARING IS SHARING. PRIVACY IS THEFT." Then he announces that Mae, "in the interest of all she saw and could offer the world," would be going transparent immediately. Soon she accumulates millions of followers whose opinions she tracks from a wrist-mounted screen in a continuous flow of smiles, frowns, and zings. Closing the Circle, with mass birth-to-death transparency, becomes the new corporate goal.

Exhausted, Mae has a brief "blasphemous flash" that "the volume of information, of data, of judgments, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too many desires of too many people and too many opinions of too many people, and too much pain . . . and having all of it constantly collated, collected, added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more manageable — it was too much." Indeed.

"The Circle'' reads as if it were written in an urgent rush, just barely ahead of the headlines. Its ending comes as abruptly as one character's drive off a bridge. We are, Eggers warns, at a pivot in history. "There used to be the option of opting out. But now that's over.'' It's a "totalitarian nightmare," he writes."Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape."

"The Circle" is biting, even vicious at times. Despite the polemics, Eggers raises timely questions about transparency, privacy, democracy, and the sinister side of the Internet. And he offers a corrective, in Kalden's manifesto, "The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." "Not every human activity can be measured," Eggers writes.

The list ends with a plea: "We must all have the right to disappear."

Jane Ciabattari is vice president/online and former president of the National Book Critics Circle. Reach her at [email protected] .

Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

Post published: August 13, 2018
Post last modified: August 25, 2022

The Circle by Dave Eggers Summary

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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. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world–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 by Dave Eggers Review

So I just finished watching the movie, because even though people had warned me away from it, I saw Emma Watson and couldn’t help myself. She was the only redeeming part, so this is me warning you: Don’t watch the movie, y’all. Just don’t. The book version of The Circle is far better and very worth your time.

Ironically, seeing the trailer in theaters was the first time I had even heard of The Circle , which prompted me looking it up and realizing it was a book first. Then, as usually happens, I noticed that a bunch of my favorite book people had brought it up in the past and loved it, so I jumped on board (late, per usual), and I’m so glad I did.

The Circle by Dave Eggers was one of the most gripping books I’ve read in a bit. This might be kind of unusual for a reader, but I don’t have the best attention span. Typically a book of this length will take me a bit of time, but I breezed through it in a couple of sittings.

The one thing that threw me was that this book doesn’t have chapters, and, as I mentioned, I’m pretty distractible, so not having a super-easy way to gauge where I am in the book was a bit off-putting.

Eggers, though, does an amazing job of drawing you in. If you’re familiar with my TV references, the book starts off very Silicon Valley , but quickly turns into Black Mirror . In other words, the tech drew me in, but then the sheer creepiness of the whole thing slipped up behind me and blocked the exit.

The story follows average twenty-something Mae after her college roommate helps her get a job at one of the hottest companies in the world, the Circle. Soon, what started off as a beginner’s job in customer service (or “Customer Experience,” as the Circlers call it), turns into very public role, one filled with unseen dangers, lots of shiny new tech, and eventually, possibilities such as the “perfect democracy.”

While a lot of it, admittedly, might seem far-fetched, there is the perfect amount of humanity injected into the story. Take, for instance, Mae’s family: her father, struggling with a recent MS diagnosis, and her mother, left to battle the insurance companies alone. There is also Mercer, an ex-boyfriend and family friend who is wary of the Circle from the start.

I think one of the biggest complaints I heard about this one was that many people believed it to be predictable, and I’ll give you that in some respects. The Circle really doesn’t contain anything you don’t already know about tech, social media, and monopolies, and gives you what you expect. However, I think that’s the point.

While Eggers is pointing out the dangers here, he is also showing just how easy it is to slip into them, all the positives, all the arguments that can box someone into a corner, into believing that they are helping humanity. It is easy (and this might be a mild spoiler) to watch Mae fall into the deep end of this whole thing, and that is the scary part, that is what kept me so interested in reading this book.

The Circle by Dave Eggers pictured from above on a table next to an iced coffee and an aloe plant.

All-in-all, I would say this isn’t one to be missed (as I so obviously did a couple years back). If you are a geek for cool tech, like I am, it is a must, and you’ll surely be caught up just in all the free stuff Mae gets.

If you’re looking for a slightly shorter book by Dave Eggers, check out my review of his novella The Captain and the Glory . Once again, Dave Eggers proves to be one of the most clever writers around.

(Update 2022: Since this review, Dave Eggers has published a sequel to The Circle called The Every, which tells the story of a woman going to work for the company born of a merger with The Circle. I, for one, am dying for a chance to read this. I wrote this post over four years ago and have since converted to being a big Dave Eggers fan.)

See y’all soon,

Review: The Reason You’re Alive by Matthew Quick

Review: an absolutely remarkable thing by hank green.

Review: The Arc by Tory Henwood Hoen

When Privacy Is Theft

November 21, 2013 issue

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Dave Eggers, 2007

The Circle is Dave Eggers’s tenth work of fiction, and a fascinating item it is.

Eggers’s first major book was the much-acclaimed semifictional memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which recounts the struggles of Eggers to raise his younger brother after the death of their parents. By that time he was already active in the underground worlds of comic strip writing, small-magazine founding, and columnizing in the then-embryonic realm of online magazines. He has continued along a multibranched road that has included the founding of McSweeney’s magazine and publishing house, and an associated monthly, The Believer ; of 826 Valencia, a youth literacy charity; and of ScholarMatch, connecting non-rich college-age kids in the San Francisco Bay Area with donors.

Then there’s the writing: the screenplays, the journalism, and, of course, the books. These include two unflinching looks at man’s inhumanity to man, in Africa and America respectively— What Is the What and Zeitoun —and the novel A Hologram for the King , which glances at the decline of America’s international clout through the eyes of a sad salesman. Eggers appears to run on pure adrenaline, and has as many ideas pouring out of him as the entrepreneurs pitching their inventions in The Circle .

The outpouring of ideas is central to The Circle , as it is in part a novel of ideas. What sort of ideas? Ideas about the social construction and deconstruction of privacy, and about the increasing corporate ownership of privacy, and about the effects such ownership may have on the nature of Western democracy. Dissemination of information is power, as the old yellow-journalism newspaper proprietors knew so well. What is withheld can be as potent as what is disclosed, and who can lie publicly and get away with it is determined by gatekeepers: thus, in the Internet age, code-owners have the keys to the kingdom.

Marshall McLuhan was among the first to probe the effects of different kinds of media on our collective consciousness with The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). Even then, before interactive technologies, he pointed out that “the global village” could be an unpleasant and claustrophobic place. As far back as 1835, Toqueville’s Democracy in America predicted the tyranny of public opinion, a tyranny that can be amplified immeasurably via the Internet.

The concerns that underlie The Circle are therefore of long standing, but have been much discussed recently, not only in newspapers and magazines both online and off, but in books. Misha Glenny has written eloquently about cybertheft and cybercrime in McMafia and DarkMarket , and, in Black Code , Ronald Deibert has detailed various cyberthreats to democracy and privacy. In The Boy Kings , a 2012 memoir that chronicles the early days of Facebook, Katherine Losse questioned the desirability of making personal information public.

This, then, is the “real” world to which Eggers holds up the mirror of art in order to show us ourselves and the perils that surround us. But The Circle is neither a tract nor an analysis but a novel, and novels always tell the stories of individuals. In genre this novel partakes of the Menippean satire—distinct from social satire in viewing moral defects less as flaws of character than as intellectual perversions. It also incorporates passages of symposium-like Socratic dialogue by which the central character is manipulated, through rational-sounding questions and answers, into performing the increasingly outrageous acts that logic demands of her.

Some will call The Circle a “dystopia,” but there’s no sadistic slave-whipping tyranny on view in this imaginary America: indeed, much energy is expended on world betterment by its earnest denizens. Plagues are not raging, nor is the planet blowing up or even warming noticeably. Instead we are in the green and pleasant land of a satirical utopia for our times, where recycling and organics abound, people keep saying how much they like each another, and the brave new world of virtual sharing and caring breeds monsters.

The Circle takes its name most immediately from a fictional West Coast social media corporation that has subsumed all earlier iterations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. It traces the rise and rise within this company of its female protagonist, Maebelline, a name that closely resembles that of a brand of mascara, thus hinting at masks and acting. (Names matter in The Circle because they matter both to its author and to its characters, some of whom go so far as to pick out new ones for themselves from the Internet.) Maebelline is commonly called “Mae,” and this nickname is then expanded by a coworker who’s bringing Mae up to speed on her Circle duties. She’s opened a “Zing” account for Mae—zinging being an amalgamation of tweeting, texting, and pinging. “I made up a name for you,” says Gina.

“MaeDay. Like the war holiday. Isn’t that cool?”

Mae wasn’t so sure about the name, and couldn’t remember a holiday by that name.

Clever Mr. Eggers. There is no real war holiday called MaeDay, but “Mayday”—from the French m’aidez —is a venerable distress signal. May Day was once a pagan springtime celebration, but was adopted in the nineteenth century as a workers’ holiday. It was then appropriated for military parades during Stalinism, a period noted for its hyperactive secret police, and satirized in Orwell’s 1984 , a work that is echoed more than once in The Circle. Maebelline, Zing-christened as MaeDay: a makeup accessory, a distress signal, a totalitarian power-show. The reader feels a pricking of the thumbs.

At first Mae is winsomely innocuous. She’s recently been an Everygirl stuck in her own version of purgatory, the humiliating McJob in the gas and energy utility of her small hometown in California that she took out of the need to pay off her crushing college debts. Now she’s called back from the living dead by her college roommate turned Circle higher-up, Annie. Annie too is significantly named: Annies get their guns, being competitive, perky sharpshooting tomboys; they’re Orphan Annies, brave and adventurous and protected by Daddy Warbucks, who uses his wealth for Good. This Annie is a golden-girl scatterbrained “doofus” who slouched around at college in men’s flannel trousers, but then, after a Stanford MBA , was recruited into the Circle and has been soaring like a helium balloon, adored by all.

Annie comes from money and family class—Mayflower rather than MaeDay—not that eye-rolling Annie claims to take her aristocratic descent seriously. None of her privilege has been lost on second-fiddle Mae, who, as she enters the Circle, is suffused with gratitude toward Annie and wonderment at being actually there, part of “the only company that really mattered at all”; but as the reader may anticipate, an All About Eve girl-on-girl mud-wrestling glint soon flickers in her star-bedazzled eyes.

Eggers sets forth the players and ground of his novel right at the beginning, like a gamer setting up the board. The Circle, we learn, is run by a triumvirate known as the Three Wise Men. Like Melville’s Pequod and Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel, the Circle is a combination of physical container, financial system, spiritual state, and dramatis personae, intended to represent America, or at least a powerful segment of it; so these three, like Melville’s three harpooners, are emblematic.

Tyler Alexander Gospodinov, known as Ty, is the “boy-wonder visionary” founder who, by inventing a system called TruYou, did away with passwords and fake identities and trolls, not because he wished to take over the world, but because he wanted things to be simpler and more transparent. The most telling element of his name is “Alexander”—the Great, of course, but also he who wept because he had no more worlds to conquer. Elusive Ty is seldom seen about the place except as an image on a screen, a hoodie pulled over his head. In the Circle, where the alleged mission is to render everyone and everything visible, he is hidden, shadowy: no one ever knows what he’s planning next.

The second Wise Man is Eamon (“rich protector”) Bailey (as in Barnum). A Notre Dame graduate, he’s the company’s genial, uncle-ish public face, combining the flair of a showman with the suave persuasiveness of a Jesuit. “Loved by all,” says Annie, “and I think he really loves them back.” That “I think” should give Mae pause, but it doesn’t.

The third Wise Man is Tom Stenton. In literature, Toms are often scamps and boundary pushers, as are Toms Thumb, Kitten, Brown, and Jones; or they may be pig stealers, as in the nursery rhyme, or rich thugs, as in The Great Gatsby , or even imps or evil geniuses, as in Tom Tit-Tot and Tom Riddle, respectively. A Tom coupled with a Stenton (“stone enclosure”) is likely to be a hard customer. So it is with this shark-like Tom, the CEO , who revels in his money and influence, fights the company’s battles and squashes its enemies, and has eyes that are “flat, unreadable.”

Serving under the Three Wise Men are the members of the inner circle, known jokingly as “the Gang of Forty.” This might seem a nod to the Chinese Gang of Four, but there’s more to it: in scripture, forty is a highly significant number. It rained for forty days and forty nights during Noah’s flood, Moses spent forty years in the wilderness, and Jesus fasted for forty days while being tempted by the Devil, who offers him the world in exchange for his soul. “Forty” signifies a period of trial and testing, with high stakes in the balance, and not only Mae but Annie are indeed tested throughout the novel.

These, then, are the major players of The Circle. There are a lot of small fry, and even some “plankton”—outsiders who pitch their ideas, hoping to be hired. They are the krill on which the larger fish graze, and yes, the marine life metaphors culminate in a Big Metaphor. Not for nothing does the Circle possess a large glass aquarium.

Next comes the physical layout or “campus,” described in lavish, enchanting detail: readers of lifestyle sections will salivate over the adjectives, and are sure to make comparisons between what’s on offer here and what real life has already provided on other such company “campuses.” The Circle’s security walls enclose a paradise of green spaces, buildings, fountains, artworks, and game spaces, with luxurious dormitories for those who may wish to work late and stay overnight, not that there’s any pressure, mind you. The restaurants dish up gourmet but virtuous food, the parties are übercool, and there’s a sample room full of products that their manufacturers are dying to have the trend-setting Circlers adopt.

The different buildings are named after historical periods: the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the like. (He who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past, as 1984 puts it.) Artists, both starving and otherwise, are brought in to entertain, like the troubadours in the Middle Ages or Voltaire at the court of Frederick the Great; for such corporations are the modern equivalent of kingdoms and Renaissance dukedoms. Lest we miss the point, there’s a marvelous collection in the Circle, assembled by Bailey, who, despite his folksiness, is a “connoisseur.” He’s amassed all kinds of obsolete objects, such as leather-bound books and green-shaded reading lamps, loot he’s bought from “distressed estates”—the losers of capitalism, we gather. If you hear an echo of rich financier and art collector Adam Verver from Henry James’s The Golden Bowl , you might be correct: one of the things money buys is the past, all the better to gloat over it.

The palatial buildings are made of glass, ostensibly to underline the Circle’s mantra of “transparency”—everyone should be open to everyone else in all ways, a goal within the Circle’s reach thanks to the ingenious schemes and doodads cooked up by its collective brain trust: the tiny “SeeChange” cameras that can be planted everywhere (no more rapes and atrocities!), the scheme to embed tracking chips in children’s bones (no more kidnapping!). Why wouldn’t any sane person want those things? People who live in glass houses not only shouldn’t throw stones—they can’t throw them! Isn’t that a good thing? And if you have nothing to hide, why get paranoid?

But literary structures of glass, or its close cousin, ice, are never reassuring. Glass buildings are halls of mirrors where one may become lost; or they are illusions that easily melt or shatter; or they are prisons that permit others to look at you unchecked, like the glass cage in which Billy Pilgrim is kept by the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five . The glass buildings in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel We —precursor of both Brave New World and 1984 —allow the totalitarian police to snoop on everyone all the time. To see everything without being seen is, needless to say, the prerogative of the biblical God whose eyes run everywhere, as well as the labor of spies and surveillance agencies, and the fondest desire of the voyeur.

As we move deeper into The Circle we may recall the Snow Queen’s palace in the Hans Andersen tale, where hearts are frozen, the cold queen rules from her throne on the Mirror of Reason, and the puzzle of “eternity” cannot be solved without love. We may also be reminded of the “stately pleasure dome” from Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” “a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.” The poet dreams of recreating this fabled edifice through art, but others find something demonic about his enterprise. “Weave a circle round him thrice,” they chant. The woven circle is to protect others from him, because he’s entranced; in modern parlance he’s been drinking the Kool-Aid and is, like, totally out of his mind.

Which brings us to circles. Both the reader and Mae encounter the Circle first through its logo, which is obligingly depicted on the book’s cover and then described through Mae’s eyes: “Though the company was less than six years old, its name and logo—a circle surrounding a knitted grid, with a small ‘c’ in the center—were already the best-known in the world.” Looked at by someone unfamiliar with it, the logo would surely suggest a manhole cover. I certainly hope Eggers intended this: as a flat disc, the thing might imply a moon or a sun or a mandala—something shining and cosmic and quasi-religious—but as a portal to dark, sulphurous, Plutonian tunnels it is much more resonant.

The circle motif may be Eggers’s wink at Google’s “Circles,” a way of arranging your contacts on its counterpart to Facebook: but it’s much more than that. The circle is an ancient symbol that’s had a variety of incarnations. There are divine circles—the Egyptian sun, the vision of the poet Henry Vaughan, who “saw Eternity the other night,/Like a great ring of pure and endless light”; in case we overlook the point, inside Eamon Bailey’s private lair is a stained glass ceiling with “countless angels arranged in rings.” Bailey himself weighs in on circles: “A circle is the strongest shape in the universe. Nothing can beat it, nothing can improve upon it, nothing can be more perfect. And that’s what we want to be: perfect.” A man with Bailey’s Catholic background should know that he’s verging on heresy, since perfection belongs to God alone. He ought to know also that circles can be demonic: Dante’s Inferno has nine circles. Maybe he does know those things, but has discounted them.

As the story advances, our view of the Circle moves from bright to dark to darker. At first, viewed through Mae’s eyes, the place seems wondrous:

The rest of America…seemed like some chaotic mess in the developing world. Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped funds, unlimited funds, that made possible this, the best place to work. And it was natural that it was so, Mae thought. Who else but utopians could make utopia?

But if this is utopia, why is Mae so anxious most of the time? True, her workload in “Customer Experience” is crushing, as she answers questions, sends “smiles” and “frowns”—the Circle equivalent of Likes and Dislikes and Favorites—to other websites and accounts, fields an avalanche of messages and invitations from other Circlers, and is under increasing pressure to spend all her time “participating.” But her main terror is being cast out of the Circle: she’ll do almost anything to stay inside, and worries constantly about what sort of impression she’s making. Is she getting enough approval, a substance she measures by messages, Zings, “smiles,” and online watchers? Is she making the grade?

The Circlers’ social etiquette is as finely calibrated as anything in Jane Austen: how fast you return a Zing or your tone of voice when saying “Yup” can matter deeply, and missing someone’s themed party is a lethal snub. Every choice is tracked and evaluated, every “aesthetic” ruthlessly judged. The nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin—who famously said, “Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you who you are”—viewed bad taste as a moral offense, and the young Circlers subscribe to this dogma: nothing gets you the brushoff more quickly than a pair of uncool jeans. Utopia, it seems, is an awful lot like high school, but with even more homework.

Just as there are Three Wise Men, there are also Three Inadequate Boyfriends: a conforming wanker who wants to post recordings of his ersatz sex with Mae online; a hapless, arts-and-crafts Jiminy Cricket conscience from her previous life who tries to warn her about the unreality and inherent totalitarianism of the Circle’s proceedings; and a mysterious, sexually charged older man who pops in and out of tunnels like the Phantom of the Opera. It’s this third one who plays demon lover to the Circle’s sunny pleasure dome, and who shows Mae the caverns measureless to man, in this case the underground river cave in which people’s total data profiles—call them souls—are stored in red boxes. His name—not his real one—is Kalden, Tibetan for “of the golden age.” Point being: the golden age is over.

Eggers treats his material with admirable inventiveness and gusto. The plot capers along, the trap doors open underfoot, the language ripples and morphs. Why has he not been headhunted by some corporation specializing in new brand names? Better than reality, some of these, and all too plausible. But don’t look to The Circle for Chekhovian nuance or thoroughly rounded characters with many-layered inwardness: it isn’t “literary fiction” of that kind. It’s an entertainment, but a challenging one: it demands that the reader think its positions through in the same way that the characters must. Some of its incidents are funny, some of them are appalling, and some of them are both at once, like a nightmare in which you find yourself making a speech with no clothes on.

And there’s quite a lot of that: who has the right to see whose dangly bits, and under what circumstances? If everything must be accessible to everyone else—if you’re on camera all the time, so to speak—what times and places can be private, apart from sex and bathroom functions? Sure enough, it’s not long before sex is taking place in toilet cubicles, though not for the first time in either literature or life. Private communication is driven in there too, and those aware of the fact that all their e-mails are potentially monitored—and who can be more aware of that potential than the Circlers?—are driven back on a pitiful Stone Age technology: the note scribbled with some obsolete mark-making device on that despised substance, paper.

But apart from the moments of almost farcical discovery—among them the discovery by the characters themselves that there is indeed such a thing as TMI , or Too Much Information—Eggers has a serious purpose, or several. One of them is to remind us that we can be led down the primrose path much more blindly by our good intentions than by our bad ones. (He’s entitled to speak about good intentions, having manifested so many of them himself, in his various other lives.) A second may be to examine the nature of looking and being looked at.

A face with a direct gaze is said to be one of the first images a baby recognizes. It’s a primary pattern. The human gaze, when languorous, is much celebrated in love poetry, but a blank or hostile stare is intimidating at the biological level. Who can look at whom, and at what, informs not only the parental admonition “Don’t stare” and the insulting childhood challenge “Who’re you looking at?” but a wide range of other human behaviors, from the use of mandatory body and head coverings to PG labels on films to Peeping Tom legislation. “Don’t make a spectacle of yourself,” kids used to be told; but in the world of the Circle, people must make spectacles of themselves: to refuse to do so is selfish, or, as Bailey leads Mae to declaim, PRIVACY IS THEFT .

Publication on social media is in part a performance, as is everything “social” that human beings do; but what happens when that brightly lit arena expands so much that there is no green room in which the mascara can be removed, no cluttered, imperfect back stage where we can be ‘“ourselves”? What happens to us if we must be “on” all the time? Then we’re in the twenty-four-hour glare of the supervised prison. To live entirely in public is a form of solitary confinement.

November 21, 2013

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Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays, including the 2000 Booker Prize–winning The Blind Assassin ; Alias Grace , which won the Giller Prize and the Premio Mondello; The Robber Bride , Cat’s Eye , The Handmaid’s Tale , and The Penelopiad . Her latest work is a book of short stories called Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014). Her newest novel, MaddAddam (2013) is the third in a trilogy comprising The Year of the Flood (2009) and the Giller and Booker Prize–nominated Oryx and Crake (2003). Atwood lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.

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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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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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Look Inside | Reading Guide

Reading Guide

By Dave Eggers

By dave eggers read by dion graham, category: literary fiction | suspense & thriller, category: literary fiction | suspense & thriller | audiobooks.

Apr 22, 2014 | ISBN 9780345807298 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780345807298 --> Buy

Oct 08, 2013 | ISBN 9780385351409 | 6 x 8-1/2 --> | ISBN 9780385351409 --> Buy

Oct 08, 2013 | 823 Minutes | ISBN 9780804191173 --> Buy

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Apr 22, 2014 | ISBN 9780345807298

Oct 08, 2013 | ISBN 9780385351409

Oct 08, 2013 | ISBN 9780804191173

823 Minutes

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About The Circle

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A bestselling dystopian novel that tackles surveillance, privacy and the frightening intrusions of technology in our lives—a “compulsively readable parable for the 21st century” ( Vanity Fair ). 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. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—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.

A bestselling dystopian novel that tackles surveillance, privacy and the frightening intrusions of technology in our lives—a “compulsively readable parable for the 21st century” ( Vanity Fair ). 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. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—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.

Listen to a sample from The Circle

Also by dave eggers.

About Dave Eggers

DAVE EGGERS is the author of many books, among them The Circle—the companion to the book you are holding—and also The Monk of Mokha, A Hologram for the King, What Is the What, and The Museum of Rain. He is… More about Dave Eggers

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“A vivid, roaring dissent to the companies that have coaxed us to disgorge every thought and action onto the Web . . . Carries the potential to change how the world views its addicted, compliant thrall to all things digital. If you work in Silicon Valley, or just care about what goes on there, you need to pay attention.” — The Wall Street Journal “Fascinating . . . Eggers appears to run on pure adrenaline, and has as many ideas pouring out of him as the entrepreneurs pitching their inventions in The Circle . . . [A] novel of ideas . . . about the social construction and deconstruction of privacy, and about the increasing corporate ownership of privacy, and about the effects such ownership may have on the nature of Western democracy . . . Like Melville’s Pequod and Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel, the Circle is a combination of physical container, financial system, spiritual state, and dramatis personae, intended to represent America, or at least a powerful segment of it . . . The Circlers’ social etiquette is as finely calibrated as anything in Jane Austen . . . Eggers treats his material with admirable inventiveness and gusto . . . the language ripples and morphs . . . It’s an entertainment, but a challenging one.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books “A parable about the perils of life in a digital age in which our personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day. Using his fluent prose and instinctive storytelling gifts, Mr. Eggers does a nimble, and sometimes very funny, job of sending up technophiles’ naïveté, self-interest and misguided idealism. As the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier has done in several groundbreaking nonfiction books, Mr. Eggers reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of ‘the hive mind’ can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers’s heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja . . . Never less than entertaining . . . Eggers is such an engaging, tactile writer that the reader happily follows him wherever he’s going . . . A fun and inventive read.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “The particular charm and power of Eggers’s book . . . could be described as ‘topical’ or ‘timely,’ though those pedestrian words do not nearly capture its imaginative vision . . . Simply a great story, with a fascinating protagonist, sharply drawn supporting characters and an exciting, unpredictable plot . . . As scary as the story’s implications will be to some readers, the reading experience is pure pleasure.” — The New York Times Magazine “Eggers is a literary polymath . . . The Circle is funny in its skewering of Internet culture. Holland obsessively tallies the reach of her Twitter-like Zings and enthuses about a benefit for needy children that raises not money but 2.3 million ‘smiles’ (think Facebook ‘likes’). The Circle’s buildings are named for epochs, so at her first party Holland gets her wine from the Industrial Revolution . . . The ideas behind “The Circle” are compelling and deeply contemporary. Holland is an everywoman, a twentysomething believer in Internet culture untroubled by the massive centralization and monetization of information, ubiquitous video surveillance and corporate invasions of privacy. Compare that to A Hologram for the King , in which a middle-aged man thoughtfully but powerlessly observes America’s economic decline, realizing that his efforts to participate in globalization led to his own obsolescence. The two books together are saying something foreboding about America’s place in the world: We have traded making physical things for a glossy, meaningless online culture that leaves us vulnerable to those who see that information — in the form of data, video feeds, or our own consumer desires — is power.” — Los Angeles Times “You can’t really write a 1984 for our times, because 1984 is still the 1984 of our times. But one could think of Dave Eggers’ . . . new novel The Circle as a timely and potent appendix to it. The crux of The Circle is that Big Brother is still haunting us, but in an incarnation that’s both more genial and more insidious. We have met Big Brother, and he is us . . . In The Circle Eggers has set his style and pace to technothriller: the writing is brisk and spare and efficient . . . When I finished The Circle I felt a heightened awareness of social media and the way it’s remaking our world into a living hell of constant and universal mutual observation.” — Time “You may find yourself so engrossed in Dave Eggers’s futuristic novel, The Circle , that you forget about Facebook entirely. And by the last pages, you may think twice before logging on again.” — O, The Oprah Magazine “Bravely, audaciously . . . [Eggers] takes on the online world in The Circle, a provocative novel named for the world’s most powerful Internet firm. Set in the not-so-distant future, the novel is part satire, part corporate thriller. But mostly it’s a cautionary tale about threats to privacy, freedom and democracy.” — USA Today “Page-turning. . . . The social message of the novel is clear, but Eggers expertly weaves it into an elegantly told, compulsively readable parable for the 21st century. . . . 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.” — Vanity Fair “In this taut, claustrophobic corporate thriller, Eggers comes down hard on the culture of digital over-sharing, creating a very-near-future dystopia in which all that is not forbidden is required. . . . Eggers has a keen eye for context, and the great strength of The Circle lies in its observations about the way instant, asynchronous communication has damaged our personal relationships. . . . A speculative morality tale in the vein of George Orwell . . . We go on using the social media platforms that have been used against us; we post geo-tagged photos that could lead potential criminals straight to our private homes and our children’s preschools, and we do all of this with full knowledge of the possible consequences. We have closed our eyes and given our consent. Everyone else is doing it. In the digital age, it is better to be unsafe than to be left out.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Eggers surveys our privacy-annihilating, social media-infested world, recoils in horror at the inevitable consequences, and unleashes a primal scream: Enough! Stop! Stop liking and sharing and tweeting and texting! Stop it all! Readers who share Eggers’ concerns about the Facebook-opticon, the surveillance state that leaves no shred of daily life unscrutinized, this superficial, hollow sense of community spaned by digital connectivity will flock to stand before this brave rallying flag. . . . The world that the Circle is delivering to the online masses is very much our world. This isn’t science fiction . . . We need a legion of Dave Eggers in the world today, calling out the dangers.” — Salon “Eggers’s works pulse with life . . . The Circle pushes his art even further . . . 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.” — Time Out New York, five stars “You can’t read The Circle, Dave Eggers’s novel about a powerful internet company, and not recognize the book’s dystopian vision in our own obsessions with sharing and social media. The novel, set in the near future, is an engaging mix of social satire and cautionary tale . . . captures the perils of the internet — and, in particular, the over-the-top utopianism sometimes espoused by technology executives — more than any other novel of recent years . . . both hilarious and foreboding.” — The New Jersey Star-Ledger “Ripped from recent headlines about privacy, technology and social media . . . A book that begins as a lighthearted cautionary tale grows into a claustrophobic portrait of relentless effort to achieve the culmination of ‘closing the Circle.’” — CNN “Entertaining . . . A sense of horror finally arrives near the end of the book, coming . . . through the power of Eggers’s writing . . . The final scene is chilling.” — The New York Times Book Review “Gripping . . . Set in the not-too-distant future, Eggers’ story takes us inside a shiny-happy California-based media corporation called the Circle . . . a compelling exploration of how individuals excitedly opt into a corporately-controlled culture of complete surveillance billed as a ‘community,’ transforming ‘privacy’ into a quaint notion possessed only by the nostalgic . . . The Circle’s brilliance lies in convincingly taking us inside an extreme vision of what is nascent in the 21st century cyber-utopianism we all endorse, showing us how the visions of digital media moguls are championed and propagated by an overly-willing society . . . Eggers creates for us a surprisingly contemporary world that seems strangely familiar to regular social media users — a world into which all of us excitedly join without much prompting.” — PolicyMic “What fuels this novel is its thunderbolt of an idea: digital culture is suffocating us and, what’s more, is doing so under the duplicitous guise of widespread human beneficence . . . This is a novel about the silence inside your head . . . a powerful argument for turning off your iPhone and going for a walk.” — Newsweek “Dave Eggers is fast becoming one of our fiercest and most compelling writers on the dark side of technology. [The Circle] is a gripping and highly unsettling read.” — The Sunday Times (UK) “It has taken Eggers the 13 years since his breakout memoir to give us a book that truly matched A Heartbreaking Work’s gravitas — but with The Circle , Eggers has given us everything . . . when you put down the book and go to check your email, you might just realize that we are living the fiction . . . [ The Circle ] takes place before a fall that we might really be approaching, and it’s this compelling sense of impending, unpredictable doom that makes this work of fiction feel very real, and very necessary.” — Flavorwire “Dave Eggers’ real heartbreaking work of staggering genius might be this one. The Circle is today’s version of dystopian classics such as George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Eggers’ novel is terrifying, funny, real, suspenseful and visionary . . . Always keeping the focus on Mae, Eggers brings up all the Big Brother issues of our time: privacy, democracy, memory, history and the quality of how we’re connecting.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Eggers has updated Orwell’s vision by inverting it. In 1984 , the members of the Party are watched by Big Brother; in The Circle, it is the people who watch the government . . . Perhaps our need for privacy will erode as technology continues to develop and the world continues to change. Or perhaps humans will still occasionally cling to the need for privacy simply because it is an essential quality of being ‘human.’ Either way, the fact that these questions linger long after finishing this book is a testament to the multiple layers and potential lasting impact of The Circle.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “The Circle is a deft modern synthesis of Swiftian wit with Orwellian prognostication . . . 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 . . . The pages are full of clever, plausible, unnerving ideas that I suspect are being developed right now . . . The book is also very funny . . . 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.” — The Guardian (UK) “Eggers’s past work has tackled sociopolitical issues such as the justice system, Sudanese refugees, and the plight of public school educators. The Circle gives him a new soapbox, and if he can convince a mass audience that Google is even a little bit evil, he’ll have produced some of the most subversive commercial fiction ever written. The novel is a pro-privacy, antitech manifesto masquerading as a Dan Brown thriller. It’s Evgeny Morozov dressed in John Grisham’s clothing.” — Bloomberg Businessweek “Step away from whatever tweet you’re composing for your 484 followers. Don’t click “like” on that Facebook photo of a friend’s kids. Dave Eggers’ chilling and enormously absorbing new novel The Circle , about encroaching tentacles of the world’s most powerful Internet company, demands your thoughtful and committed attention.” — Entertainment Weekly “A fast-moving conspiracy potboiler . . . a zippy, pulpy read that puts pressing issues into sharp relief.” — Slate “ The Circle is Brave New World for our brave new world . . . Now that we all live and move and have our being in the panopticon, Eggers’s novel may be just fast enough, witty enough and troubling enough to make us glance away from our twerking Vines and consider how life has been reshaped by a handful of clever marketers . . . There may come a day when we can look back at this novel with incredulity, but for now, the mirror it holds up is too chilling to LOL.” — The Washington Post “ The Circle may be . . . more fable than novel, but it has all that in common with Brave New World , Animal Farm , Nineteen Eighty-Four , and Fahrenheit 451 . One hopes that it will enjoy pride of place with those books in classrooms, as a reminder that surveillance and transparency were not always judged merely by what they might do for us.” — Daily Beast “Eggers’s writing is so fluent, his ventriloquism of tech-world dialect so light, his denouement so enjoyably inevitable” — The Observer “ The Circle is intelligent and quirky, engaged and affecting and confirms Eggers’ place as one of the most interesting novelists currently writing.” — The Scotsman “Dave Eggers takes the growing inescapabilty of social media and personal technology to clever and chilling places in his new novel.” — Associated Press “Game-changing . . . a fast-paced and suspenseful story . . . Eggers has produced the fable for our wired times.” — AARP.org “Most of us imagine totalitarianism as something imposed upon us—but what if we’re complicit in our own oppression? That’s the scenario in Eggers’ ambitious, terrifying, and eerily plausible new novel . . . Brave and important and will draw comparisons to Brave New World and 1984 . Eggers brilliantly depicts the Internet binges, torrents of information, and endless loops of feedback that increasingly characterize modern life. But perhaps most chilling of all is his notion that our ultimate undoing could be something so petty as our desperate desire for affirmation.” — Booklist (Starred) “A stunning work of terrifying plausibility, a cautionary tale of subversive power in the digital age suavely packaged as a Silicon Valley social satire. Set in the near future, it examines the inner workings of the Circle, an internet company that is both spiritual and literal successor to Facebook, Google, Twitter and more, as seen through the eyes of Mae Holland, a new hire who starts in customer service . . . Eggers presents a Swiftian scenario so absurd in its logic and compelling in its motives . . . sneaking up on the reader before delivering its warnings of the future, a worthy and entertaining read.” — Publishers Weekly (Starred)

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The Circle by Dave Eggers
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'The Circle,' by Dave Eggers
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 Circle by Dave Eggers
But Eggers's novel doesn't demand to be read so weightily. Instead, it's a nicely caricatured vision of hi-tech, soft-touch totalitarianism, a narrative thought experiment in which it's liberal ...
The Circle (The Circle, #1) by Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers. alternate cover for ISBN 9780385351393 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 ...
Book Review: 'The Circle' by Dave Eggers
The Circle is Dave Eggers' 10 th work of fiction and follows on the heels of some much-loved, albeit not hugely commercially successful, books. Eggers is an author, publisher and philanthropist. He is someone who seems to genuinely care about the fate of the world - the work that he's doing with his 826 Valencia project is incredibly ...
THE CIRCLE
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. Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 1.
The Circle by Dave Eggers
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 ...
Book review: The Circle by Dave Eggers
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 ...
Book Review: The Circle, Dave Eggers's Chilling, New Allegory of
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 ...
'The Circle' by Dave Eggers
When I finished reading Dave Eggers's chilling and caustic fifth novel, "The Circle", I felt like disconnecting from all my online devices and retreating for awhile into an unplugged world.
Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers
Once again, Dave Eggers proves to be one of the most clever writers around. (Update 2022: Since this review, Dave Eggers has published a sequel to The Circle called The Every, which tells the story of a woman going to work for the company born of a merger with The Circle. I, for one, am dying for a chance to read this.
Dave Eggers' The Circle: What the Internet Looks Like if You Don't
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 ...
When Privacy Is Theft
November 21, 2013 issue. Reviewed: The Circle. by Dave Eggers. Knopf/McSweeney's, 491 pp., $27.95. The Circle is Dave Eggers's tenth work of fiction, and a fascinating item it is. Eggers's first major book was the much-acclaimed semifictional memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which recounts the struggles of Eggers ...
The Circle Series by Dave Eggers
Book 1. The Circle. by Dave Eggers. 3.43 · 217,489 Ratings · 25,857 Reviews · published 2013 · 66 editions. alternate cover for ISBN 9780385351393. When Mae Hol….
The Circle (Eggers novel)
978--385-35139-3 (first edition, hardcover) The Circle is a 2013 dystopian novel written by American author Dave Eggers. [2] [3] [4] The novel chronicles tech worker Mae Holland as she joins a powerful Internet company. Her initially rewarding experience turns darker.
Book Review: The Circle, by Dave Eggers
The Circle. By Dave Eggers. Knopf Canada/McSweeney's. 504 pp; $34. 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 ...
Book Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers
The Circle. by Dave Eggers. This article is for subscribers only. There's a long tradition of sci-fi horror that cleverly plays on contemporary social trends. The "pod people" trope of the ...
Book Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers
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.
Book review: The Circle by Dave Eggers
Book review: The Circle by Dave Eggers. ... THERE is a distinctly Orwellian aroma to Dave Eggers' latest fiction. It edges towards a genuinely chilling dystopia, made all the more monstrous ...
The Circle: Study Guide
Published in 2013, Dave Egger's dystopian novel The Circle traces a young woman's rise through an innovative tech company—called "the Circle"—whose power begins to threaten the foundations of democratic institutions.Against the backdrop of a coming-of-age story about the young woman's journey from college to the working world, the novel was an international bestseller that examines ...
All Book Marks reviews for The Circle by Dave Eggers
The Circle becomes interesting when Eggers begins to invoke the quandary presented by Edward Snowden and his release of classified information regarding the government's surveillance of our phone conversations and e-mails. Snowden has raised awareness of the extent to which our government values privacy less than security. Ironically, the Circle would agree …
The Circle by Dave Eggers: 9780345807298
The Circle gives him a new soapbox, and if he can convince a mass audience that Google is even a little bit evil, he'll have produced some of the most subversive commercial fiction ever written. The novel is a pro-privacy, antitech manifesto masquerading as a Dan Brown thriller. It's Evgeny Morozov dressed in John Grisham's clothing.".
The Circle: Full Book Summary
The Circle Full Book Summary. Mae Holland is a young woman a few years out of college who has just landed a job at the Circle, a major tech company voted "most innovative" four years in a row. The company has swallowed up its competitors with the invention of TruYou, a system that funnels a user's accounts and online activity into one ...
The Circle 2 Books Set
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 ...

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Book review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

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