Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

I've decided to kick off my return to blogging with a book review, but let me warn you that posting a review of this particular book on a blog strikes me as somewhat ironic .... Anyway, I'll get to that.

It has been a busy past few months, but I'd like to return to sharing some of my upcoming summer projects, and I'd also like to start reviewing some of the books I read this summer - so there is a a clearer purpose, perhaps, to my frenzied reading. I plan to tackle at least 10 books this summer, more if possible.

I recently finished The Circle by Dave Eggers. I'd heard a bit about this book--set in a dystopia where an internet company, rather than the government, is the tyrannical force--and I love dystopian fiction, so I was excited to try it. I also love me some Margaret Atwood, and she calls the book "Fascinating . . . [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" according to the back cover of the novel and this article. Looking back, I guess the praise here is mostly stating what the book is about ... but I figured if Atwood said it was fascinating, it must be good.

In the end, I think what she said about a "novel of ideas" is a good way to put it. I think the idea of the novel really intrigued me, and was an interesting idea to explore, but perhaps the execution of the novel was not as good as it could have been.

Unfortunately, about 60 pages into the novel, I decided to read some other reviews, and I'm afraid they colored my further reading negatively. Some other reviewers did not seem to like the book, while others said the idea was good but perhaps not well played out.

Mia Lipman says: "It's not subtle, but neither were "Harrison Bergeron" and 1984, and in its best moments The Circle is equally terrifying. Let's just hope it's not prescient." 

She's right. It is not subtle. One review called it propaganda-like ... Eggers makes it very clear that the "utopia" the Circle is striving for is anything but. However, going into the novel knowing it was dystopian, that wasn't really a surprise.

Ellen Ullman writes for the New York Times Book Review: "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.)" 

Ullman is right that Mae is pretty willing to take in every new thing the Circle suggests ... she squashes down the ever-widening rip of anxiety that she--justifiably--feels as things get worse and worse. With her for the protagonist, it was a bit hard to keep reading enjoyably, and perhaps Mae is more naive and compulsive and willing than a real person would be ... but I think not.

In fact, the more I read, the more scared I became that there are many Maes out there. At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, I do think that teens are being raised in a world that tells them to share everything, and tells them that this is good. If they already willingly share so much on media sites, and in person, I don't think it would be hard to get them to share more, like the Circle encourages employees to do in the book. On the subject of compulsion, one thing that made my cringe so much while reading is that I, sometimes, can be as compulsive as Mae when it comes to checking things off a list.

The innumerable amount of tasks Mae is asked to do seems impossible time-wise, but I could see how she would feel compelled to do everything asked of her (and she is basically told she has to). To be more specific, Mae starts out answering customer queries. She sends a quick review after each one, and if she does not receive a 100 rating, she sends a follow up to try to see what she could have done better. Usually the customer will then recant and give a 100. This is her regular job at first. But later, she is asked to also keep up with messages from bosses and workers around "campus," be a part of many groups and activities, send out "zings" (which are sort of like tweets or instagram posts), and answer survey questions through headphone throughout the day. She is expected to reply to thousands of messages from coworkers a week, answer a "quota" of around 500 survey questions a day or more (which Mae pushes towards 1000), put in extra hours for activities with co-workers, recommend products at a rate that 250 or more people per week choose to purchase the same items, and several other daily tasks. It is a bit impossible to believe she can make time for it all. Ignoring messages or prompts just gets her more messages and anxious requests for answers. 

Everything the employees do is rated, and although at one point someone says Mae is not judged by this rating ... clearly, clearly she is meant to be judged by her rank. She spends hours (meticulously detailed by the author) in raising her rank by commenting, posting, and the like. It is as if to feel valuable she has to share or tell or be a part of everything. There are pages of descriptions of the amounts of things ... I see that Eggers is trying to show how the Circle tries to make everything quantifiable, and it is maddening.

The leaders of the Circle want everything to be known, leaving no room for crime because everyone is watched or can be watched. Here, it becomes very much like Big Brother, and though the transition seems fast, it is meant to be taken in steps, one slightly more invasive thing after the next. And most people willingly eat it up. The ones who protest are bewildering to Mae.

I think overall, the book did have interesting (and scary) ideas ... and ones I could believe in the possibility of. That's one factor I believe is necessary in a successful dystopian novel: it has to seem, on some level, able to happen. I think some readers might say the transition happens too fast and people wouldn't really go along with it, making the book seem unreal. However, I read two Facebook posts while reading The Circle that made me fear that people are already being pulled into this life of sharing everything with everyone. One of the posts stated that the writer felt scorned by family and wanted them to state, on Facebook, why they were mad at him (even though he acted like he already knew). He said he wanted them to reply to his post, or be cowards and send him a private message. As if airing dirty laundry is the brave and right thing to do, instead of having a meaningful, private conversation about those things. But in the book, that's how everything is viewed. "Secrets are lies; privacy is theft." Mae can't have any personal moments or private hobbies; she is expected to share them all and others are hurt if she chooses not to.

The book was a bit long and had a TON of specific examples that just got worse and worse, as in, worse to imagine. It made me very confused about my use of technology, such as this blog. I think I am still pretty selective and careful about not OVER-sharing, but I do have to check myself sometimes when I think "Oh, I could say ______," and then I realize there's really no reason (or in fact it is a bad idea) to share said information.

Towards the end of the novel, I knew where things were going and just wanted the anxiety and anticipation to end, but I'm glad to have tried it out. It was worth reading for the ideas and it definitely made me think.