It has gotten a lot easier to love Dave Eggers’ fiction. I read his “memoir” and experienced all the theatrics that came with it (I was front row at the Astor Place, BN in NYC for A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius book tour, which is like saying I saw The Police open for XTC). Last year the guys here on the blog spilled a significant amount of ink on A Hologram for the King, it was bad-ass, and an amazing piece of fiction. Then out of the blue, along comes The Circle.
What if everything you did was transparent to everyone you knew? What if everything you said could be heard by all of your followers on Twitter, and everyone on Facebook tapped into a live feed that transmitted from a necklace around your neck, and those followers could post comments about the conversation’s you were having? You bought a pack of toilet paper, and two million of your followers went out and bought it too. The market swing would be amazing, and companies would kill to be part of it.
That’s The Circle, Too Much Information on overdrive.
Mae Holland is the stranger that comes to town and gets a job at The Circle. At first she’s overwhelmed, then impressed, as her hair is blown back by the amazingness of the place. Imagine Apple and Amazon in one office in northern California, great stuff, and everything you’d ever want an office to be, a doctor in the building, an apartment where you could sleep when you worked late, and some clothes your size in the closet.
Then there is the consumer; you sit down at your computer in your house, login and speak directly to Mae Holland, tell her about your latest experience with whatever consumer product you have just purchased, and at the end of the conversation you give her a rating, then you ask her to be your friend on social media, and she will go to your blog and read it. Then Mae starts communicating with the people who have left comments on your blog. Presto. You’ve just joined The Circle. Mr. Eggers doesn’t specify modern social media by name, he just spins it a little to make it his own. Before anything starts we hear that The Circle has convinced everyone that they do business with to put a lollipop-sized camera wherever they are, and allow The Circle to broadcast it. Suddenly nothing is off-limits, and in seconds you can find anyone. When the founders of The Circle convince a politician to go “transparent”, and provide an unfiltered look into the system of politics by wearing a necklace that lets the voters see and hear everything, it occurs to everyone at The Circle that this might be a good idea.
This might be the next step for our over sharing culture, maybe it has already started, but to me, it sounds a lot like The Forum, that shadowy self help group that took your money in the late 80’s and told you “you can do whatever you want! You have the power!” I do, and my money stays with me. Thanks!
Mae Holland and her best friend Annie begin this book together and over time we learn where each came from, who their families are, and eventually we see how these little nuggets of backstory will play out in the rest of the novel. Warning: oversharing never works. It’s better to have secrets.
The story kicks wide open around page fifty, and Eggers moves so fast, with such flexibility that the prose soars. You never really have a chance to catch your breath. When you do, it is too late. Mae and her old boyfriend Mercer argue during a dinner scene that is off-the-hook good, Mercer is realized by Eggers as incredibly dull, because he’s not in The Circle and he doesn’t overshare, or truck in social media, unlike Mae who interacts with people all day long on her computer. Mercer is an artist, and he needs to be dealt with. Nobody can be more creative than The Circle. I’m stiff-arming this part of the story because it’s so precisely drawn I feel like I need to push back. When Eggers opens the doors on relationships, it is an icy blast of wind. He did this repeatedly in Hologram. Men and women in his world don’t get along, or when they do disaster is just around the corner. It seems like he can’t deliver the goods on relationships. Or maybe this is on purpose? We meet one of Mae’s co-workers who coming up with a plan to eliminate child abduction from the planet, and in doing so will create a way to safeguard our kids. One early test case of this idea goes the way of Apocalypse Now, “all those inoculated arms, in a pile…” I will leave this revelation for you.
The Circle is billed as a thriller, but I’d disagree, it is a watch-and-wait story, mostly about Mae, who comes to a place that will change her. Her job inserts itself into her life, helps with her ailing parents, and makes her more self-confident. An impressive side to this story is that Mae loves to kayak, and we sit with her as she glides through the open water and experiences the natural world, but it all seems so big, dangerous, even slightly manipulated by The Circle. Her life is taking off; she has the power to be someone special.
The sweeping grandeur of this novel is a leveling experience, while reading it everything around you seems to drift away. You are sucked into this northern California ideal, and there is no outside world, especially for Mae. She’s not perfect, but even in her imperfection; she finds a way to make herself unique. Annie is a superstar at The Circle, and when Mae starts working there Annie is all gold and silver, over the course of the story the rolls reverse. We get to know The Circle through Mae’s entry-level job in Customer Experience. Anyone who has ever dealt with “the general public” will appreciate this smooth curve in the narrative. When 90 percent of the world’s “searches” go through The Circle, things begin to swing out and away from the story and back to reality. Which is a moment of focus for the reader. Eggers has built a sturdy ship, with so much plausibility that it is hard to remember that there are things like laundry, jobs, picking your child up from school.
Years ago Kurt Anderson traveled forward in time to 2010, took notes and came back to 1999 and wrote Turn of the Century. Which is more or less what Eggers has done here, albeit with a wink-wink to the ills of our generation, the loss of privacy, and with a strong sense of social responsibility. A lot of novels will be published this fall, but none of them will feel anything like The Circle.
