The Circle

I'm not sure what to say about a book that gave me anxiety attacks throughout the reading. Is that kudos to the author, or not? But let's just say more than once did I find this book infiltrating my sleep and me waking up in a dead panic. I'm not sure if my age and lack of social media savvy is to blame for the reaction I had to this novel (I've posed it to my students as an interesting read merely out of curiosity if they will feel the same way, being younger and more tech taught than myself) or if the conflicts and paradigm shifts of living are what nearly drove me over the edge. The disaster is coming - it's right in front of you - OPEN YOUR EYES!!!

The Circle is a novel by Dave Eggers that mimics the front-lines of Facebook with its focus on social media. Not only is it the backdrop of the tech company "The Circle" - it's a means to an end of seeking total transparency for everyone's life. And that is NOT a good idea. There's a reason we don't all need to know everything about everyone - imagine the consequences, the utter destruction of people's lives (hint...hint...). However, within the novel, there are compelling and sometimes logical reasons that transparency would be a good idea - crime watch comes to mind.

Mae Holland is a newbie at The Circle. She starts out her job in CE (Customer Experience) where she answers questions and queries from those using The Circle as part of their lives and their business. The Circle encompasses all - it's not just for smiles and frowns and zings, but for everything from monitoring the populaces health to their eating habits to their business success. Upon gaining employment, via her best friend Annie who is "important" at The Circle already, Mae is plunged into a world of transparency in her life, and dark secrets she tries to hide. Being sucked into this lifestyle, Mae struggles with her desire to be liked in the online world of friends and loses sight of humanity.

The writing of Dave Eggers is excellent - he portrays life in The Circle as real life. However, in literary works such as Our Town, the stage manager suggests that one of Wilder’s purposes for writing Our Town was to document “the real life of the people” for future generations. The Circle claims to do this not only through "work" but through social interactions while trying to work. When Mae first begins her employment and finds herself overwhelmed with the expectations stating "...I haven't had time to do extracurricular stuff" she is rebuffed by Gina who has come to "talk to Mae" telling her, "That's so interesting you put it that way...we actually see your profile and the activity on it...this is how your coworkers know who you are. Communication is certainly not extracurricular, right?" - and Mae finds herself embarrassed (Eggers 94). People are quite literally not allowed to just "be" at The Circle. Doing your job well isn't enough, it is total submersion into an online life. There is a clear juxtaposition between a technological life and simplicity throughout the novel and part of Mae's journey in the text is determining which side she'll land on.

The novel reads as a Juvenalian satire with harsh and abrupt criticism of the pervasiveness of social media in our lives. The programs developed by The Circle for "total transparency" (Mae actually ends up wearing a camera 24/7 for the world to see) such a TruYou, SeeChange, ChildTrack, StudentTrack (this one was laughable), etc...while in premise seem like a good idea, but in clear realistic measures, they are a Molotov cocktail for absolute chaos. The Circle believes they are pulling people out of a "dark age" but as noted by the Dragon in John Gardner's Grendel, "It's damned hard, you understand, confining myself to concepts familiar to a creature of the Dark Ages. Not that one age is darker than another. Technical jargon from another dark age" (67). This is a dark age to anyone in the future, and so on and so forth...we all live in the dark ages.

Overall, this novel was a challenging read, but I think it poses valid philosophical questions. If it weren't for the random sex (why must there be random sex that is irrelevant), I'd teach this novel to students comparing it with works like Our Town for the contrasting ideas of real interaction and real life versus a life in the proverbial "cloud."

Eggers gets ☕☕☕☕from me, and I'm sure the movie adaptation starring Emma Watson will be just as anxiety ridden as the book.

The Circle by Dave Eggers
497 pages
What’s it about?

Mae is a few years out of college and hates her boring job with a utility company. She finally asks her best friend Annie to help her get on with the big tech firm that Annie had started with right after they graduated. With Annie's help and support Mae finds herself in a new fabulous world where all her needs are met and she is truly a part of a community. But when does "community" go too far?

What did it make me think about?

This book was so timely for me! Like many of us I struggle with the role of social media in my life, and although this was a dystopian novel and takes many issues to an extreme, it certainly had a point to make. Keep in mind I am saying this as I prepare to post this review online! At what point do we lose our individuality to the opinions of the masses? Do we really need to share everything? What is the role of privacy in our actual relationships versus our online relationships? How real are all our crafted online identities? So much to think about here!

Should I read it?

I recommend this novel! I had read about this book when it first came out but some of the reviews (and Dave Eggers reputation as a literary heavyweight) made me put it off. At the advice of a friend I picked it up and started it on a plane flight (the easiest way for me to get into a difficult book). What a surprise! This book just flew by for me. Although Mae could have been a stronger more vivid character (most people have a little more backbone-right?) her story still kept my interest. Also the book was dystopian, but it was different in that the world had not been destroyed. I certainly can not think of a book that would create as much conversation as this novel would generate. Book clubs take notice!

Quote-

"The flash opened up into something larger, an even more blasphemous notion that her brain contained too much. That the volume of information, of data, of judgements, 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 from too many people, and 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."

SECRETS ARE LIES SHARING IS CARING PRIVACY IS THEFT As a society currently living exactly as described in this book, do we even know the difference between being seen and being watched anymore?

Maybe 2.5 stars?? I really wanted to like this one. And yes, I only picked it up because of the new movie being released, but the book was disappointing. While the concept and the subject matter is timely and riveting, I found it hard to believe that so many people were blindly and easily convinced to give up their privacy. If the book would have included pockets of resistors or people rising up to challenge The Circle, it would have been more convincing. And I couldn't muster any real feelings for Mae, the naive main character; she was flat and predictable. For maybe the first time, I'm hoping the movie is nothing like the book. There are, however, some very quote-worthy passages that made me take a closer look at the pitfalls of social media. My favorite:

“Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone..."

I have never read anything like The Circle. I think the concept was scary and ever since reading The Circle, I notice more the hold social media has over everything. Although I enjoyed the book as a whole, there were times when I was waiting for the point, the climax. I feel let down that there really wasn't a satisfying conclusion to the book and I feel that all the description about the main character's "zinging" etc was filler for lack of a comprehensive plot. All in all though, i enjoyed it and the creepy concept still sticks with me.