REVIEW: The Circle by Dave Eggers
We are introduced to the Circle, a technological behemoth that would have Google and Apple frantically calling for diaper changes by Mae, a 20-something neophyte, who, frustrated with her dead-end job, has managed through the kindliness of an ex-college roommate to be hired there. What exactly is ‘there’? It’s a 400-acre “campus,” a mash-up of every office-worker’s not-so-secret dream workplace that is, we are told in the very first line of the novel, “… heaven … vast and rambling, wild with Pacific colour … shaped by the most eloquent hands.”
Populated by thousands of hyper-intelligent computer programmers and their associates, this location houses the Circle, a stranger-than-fiction hybrid of Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, which has predicated its success upon the creation of a single, “honest,” completely transparent online digital identity, TruYou. This identity is the basis for every single thing that the Circle does; created by a reclusive autistic-savant founder who is only just barely a parody of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, TruYou is what Eggers calls a “Unified Operating System,” one that in his narrative, “changed the Internet, in toto, within a year.” Through the miracle of TruYou, everything is, as Mae discovers, “tied together and trackable and simple.”
As Mae begins her time in the Customer Experience department, we start to get hints of just how tied together the Circle wants everything to be. Actually, that’s not fair — we don’t receive hints as much as we become Loony Tunes characters to be smacked over the head by giant Acme anvils of foreshadowing, irony and pedantry. On day one, Mae’s supervisor lets her know that the expectation is that she will score 98 to 100 percent satisfaction on interactions with customers, and that she should use follow-up surveys to do so. Somewhere around week two, Mae is handed an extra computer screen, and a team of new recruits to supervise.
By week four, she’s constantly scanning approximately 30 screens (honestly, they seem to proliferate like particularly lustful rabbits), and by week eight, she has thoroughly assimilated into the perpetually chirpy community of perpetual status-updating (“zinging”), product-ranking hyper-sensitives who simply cannot understand why they shouldn’t (a) share every single detail about their lives with the world; (b) why everyone in the world shouldn’t care about these details; and (c) how on Earth someone could be offensive enough to not attend their Portugal brunches (read the book for this section alone: it’s positively cringe-worthy, as an oversight by Mae turns into a crying jag mediated by her manager and the Circle’s human resources department).
It is here that Eggers’ writing excels, shamelessly lampooning the insularity and mob mentality of people who seem to live their lives in a state of perpetual connectivity; they come across as children, constantly seeking out attention, affirmation and validation from something as meaningless as a complete stranger clicking on something trivial posted on an “interactive” forum. Much of what Eggers takes aim at is clearly interaction for the sake of interaction, rather than because there is actually something meaningful to say or share. Nowhere is this more evident than in his pointed, scathing indictment of people who send a virtual smile as their expression of solidarity with victims of natural disasters, or “frown” at evil dictators, and then sit back, smug and comfortable in the knowledge that they have “made a difference”. The only people worse than these morons, Eggers implies, are the foolish Circlers who enable — nay, encourage! — the notion that a mouse-click makes a difference. Also, that you must tell all. All the damned time.
A major goal for the Circle, we soon discover, is for everyone to “go clear,” i.e. to be wired for the live audio-visual broadcasting of their every waking move. Mae, who has made a couple of missteps such as going kayaking without having checked the appropriate social media streams on weather conditions, or rushing home to see her father who is suffering from multiple sclerosis without first “zinging” the world at large for their advice, information or to share her own is the first person within the Circle to opt for total transparency. Soon, she is a champion Circler, espousing Big Brother tripe such as “privacy is theft” and forcing her family and ex-boyfriend into hermetic panic by broadcasting them to the world against their wishes.
The problem, though, and this is what makes The Circle so hard to take seriously, is that Mae has all the emotional depth and resonance of a member of the Kardashian family. There are amoebae out there with more nuance and substance; but at least Mae is getting paid to be a mouthpiece for ideology; her “foil” (and I use the word in its loosest possible sense) of an ex-boyfriend, Mercer, is equally idiotic. A “craftsman,” who makes a living by creating chandeliers out of responsibly-sourced deer antlers, Mercer is pedantic and sententious to the point that you find yourself flipping through his lines, waiting for the Public Service Announcement to, for the love of all that is good and right in this world, just bloody end.
In creating the binaries of Mae and Mercer (because frankly, everyone else is a throwaway character used merely to signpost plot progression), Eggers seems to have intentionally dumbed down his ability to tell a story. This is true even when it comes to his allegories: one particularly ham-handed scene involves a shark tearing apart everything in its habitat at the Circle’s state-of-the art aquarium, including a turtle that attempts to hide in its shell. Even his language suffers: members of Mae’s team are in a “pod”; there’s a constant stream of politico-literary puns such as “PartiRank,” which goes right for the Communist-China-overtones jugular, or “SeeChange,” the always-on-everywhere hidden camera network that the Circle rolls out.
It’s like Eggers is giving you guidance notes for a reading group comprised exclusively of the functionally illiterate. And this is a shame, because Eggers’s utopia/dystopia is actually rather chilling, and although vicious almost to a fault (really — there’s no one who isn’t crucified or pilloried), the book raises some questions that are truly worth considering: about privacy, democracy, the commoditisation of government and the power of corporate lobbies.
This is hardly something new; every day, there are more and more debates happening about the tyranny of cyberspace, the simulacra of an online presence replacing real life — there is much baying at the moon about how technology is pushing us further apart under the illusion of bringing us together, and none of this is exactly untrue. But Eggers fails, despite his clear gift of prose, to do more than re-frame arguments about WikiLeaks, the National Security Agency’s wire-tapping operations, the “outsourcing” of government to the private sector. If anything, The Circle reads more as a morality tale than anything else; despite clever references to Maoists, a shadowy anti-hero or a villain and dozens of misguided people who just want to make the world a better place, Eggers’ novel is hardly more substantial than like-button-clicking, status-updating, constantly tweeting lemmings who are subject to its wrath.
The Circle
(NOVEL)
By Dave Eggers
Random House, Canada
ISBN 978-0-385-35139-3
504pp.