Dave Eggers has consistently chosen somewhat off-the-beaten fields for his book length projects. See my review from August, 2013, of Hologram For The King, for a full summary of his oeuvre. In general, he juxtaposes ordinary, contemporary Americans with an exotic idea, locale or person. In The Circle, he seems to be saying that young Americans, at least those more embedded in emerging social media, are themselves the exotic species invading the rest of us.
Mae Holland, 24, is living in a dead end town (somewhere between Stockton and Fresno) in a dead end job with the local electric utility. Annie, her best friend from college, is working at The Circle. Not only working there, but one of the illustrious Gang of Forty, responsible for the burgeoning corporation’s response to regulatory requirements around the globe. After Mae nursed her back to health following a broken jaw, Annie, despite being two years ahead at Carleton, became a loyal friend. After one two many tearful phone falls, Annie advises Mae to apply at The Circle, the most sought after sinecure in Silicon Valley.
The Circle is meant to be an all encompassing amalgamation of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all their spawn. Possessing prowess in hardware, advertising, online communication, with its sights on finance and government, The Circle can’t help reaching its tentacles into the entirety of one’s life. Those who work there, the Circlers, have no reason to leave the campus, a cocooning combination of college dorm, new age church, and hyperactive dot.com startup.
Employees are the guinea pigs for The Circle’s endless procession of new products and services. Without realizing what’s happening, in fact, welcoming it, Mae is ensnared in the endless cycle of call and response, creating and responding to an ever-widening onion of surveys, “smiles”, “frowns”, and company sponsored activities which totally demolish any boundaries beyond work and personal life.
Eggers has always written page turners, and this is no exception. The difficulty is, we are pretty clueless about what we’re turning the page towards. Is it a love story, about Mae and her secret assignations with the mysterious grey-haired, smooth cheeked Kalden? Is it the rise and potential fall of another corporation seeking to drive the American dream? Is it a hidden cabal, the Tres Amigos who run the place, plotting to benignly capture the minds and behavior of every last person in the world? Or is it a titanic struggle between good and evil, with Mae’s soul the ultimate prize.
Though Egger’s prose remains as clear and compelling as ever, he keeps dodging the question for a good 3/5ths of the book. But once Mae comes up with a few slogans such as “Secrets are Lies”, and “Privacy is Cruelty”, we begin to see that this is 1984 for the 21st century, cloaked in a near-future techno cloud. The love story, corporate greed, and megalomania all merge near the end. The fate of the world , seemingly, lies with Mae’s decisions.
Eggers makes pretty clear which side he is on. Letting corporations like Google and Facebook have more and more entry into and control over who we are, what we do and who we do it with is leading us down a very dark path, he seems to be sayhing. Even if the choices seem to be one’s own, once those choices are made within the context corporate growth and profit, we end up choosing to lose ourselves.