by Dave Eggers
When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.
As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO.
Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public.
What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.
As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO.
Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public.
What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
Reviews-
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November 25, 2013
When 20-something Mae Holland is recruited to work at the Circle, a sort of social network on steroids that consolidates its users’ various online identities (personal e-mail, social media, financial services), she’s thrilled at the company’s grand modernity and cutting-edge aesthetic. She delights in the Circle’s exuberance and the grand fetes it throws. But as her role in the company becomes increasingly public, she becomes increasingly wary of the Circle’s role in the lives of Americans. An encounter with Kalden, a shadowy figure who issues ominous pronouncements about the Circle’s contribution to a dystopia, further dampens Mae’s enthusiasm. Dion Graham provides inventive narration in this audio edition—capturing Mae’s breathless enthusiasm at landing the job. Graham also cleanly differentiates between characters, and provides them with simple but unique voices. Despite the longtime audio partnership between Graham and Eggers—the former read A Hologram for the King and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—the narrator seems an odd choice for this title given its female protagonist. Graham has a deep, masculine voice—and at times it can be incongruous to hear him approximate the gasps and anxieties of a young woman. A Knopf hardcover. -
Starred review from September 16, 2013
The latest offering from McSweeney's founder Eggers (A Hologram for the King) is a stunning work of terrifying plausibility, a cautionary tale of subversive power in the digital age suavely packaged as a Silicon Valley social satire. Set in the near future, it examines the inner workings of the Circle, an internet company that is both spiritual and literal successor to Facebook, Google, Twitter and more, as seen through the eyes of Mae Holland, a new hire who starts in customer service. As Mae is absorbed into the Circle's increasingly demanding multi- and social media experience, she plays an ever more pivotal role in the company's plans, which include preventing child abductions through microchips, reducing crime through omnipresent surveillance, and eliminating political corruption through transparency courtesy of personal cameras. Soon, she's not alone in asking what it will mean to "complete the Circle" as its ultimate goal comes into view; even her closest friends and family suspect the Circle is going too far in its desire to make the world a better, safer, more honest place. Eggers presents a Swiftian scenario so absurd in its logic and compelling in its motives that the worst thing possible will be for people to miss the joke. The plot moves at a casual, yet inexorable pace, sneaking up on the reader before delivering its warnings of the future, a worthy and entertaining read despite its slow burn. Agent: Andrew Wylie, The Wylie Agency. -
October 1, 2013
A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers (A Hologram for the King, 2012, etc.). Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that's effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she's seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the "Circlers" are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae's workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it's a polemic that's thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle's rapid expansion--the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel's tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle's demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that's terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel, A Hologram for the King, but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic. Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from October 15, 2013
Most of us imagine totalitarianism as something imposed upon usbut what if we're complicit in our own oppression? That's the scenario in Eggers' ambitious, terrifying, and eerily plausible new novel. When Mae gets a job at the Circle, a Bay Area tech company that's cornered the world market on social media and e-commerce, she's elated, and not just because of the platinum health-care package. The gleaming campus is a wonder, and it seems as though there isn't anything the company can't do (and won't try). But she soon learns that participation in social media is mandatory, not voluntary, and that could soon apply to the general population as well. For a monopoly, it's a short step from sharing to surveillance, to a world without privacy. This isn't a perfect bookthe good guys lecture true-believer Mae, and a key metaphor is laboriously explainedbut it's brave and important and will draw comparisons to Brave New World and 1984. Eggers brilliantly depicts the Internet binges, torrents of information, and endless loops of feedback that increasingly characterize modern life. But perhaps most chilling of all is his notion that our ultimate undoing could be something so petty as our desperate desire for affirmation. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Eggers' reputation as a novelist continues to grow. Expect this title to be talked about, as it has an announced first printing of 200,000 and the New York Times Magazine has first serial rights.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.) - Dennis K. Berman, The Wall Street Journal "A vivid, roaring dissent to the companies that have coaxed us to disgorge every thought and action onto the Web . . . Carries the potential to change how the world views its addicted, compliant thrall to all things digital. If you work in Silicon Valley, or just care about what goes on there, you need to pay attention."
- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "A parable about the perils of life in a digital age in which our personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day. Using his fluent prose and instinctive storytelling gifts, Mr. Eggers does a nimble, and sometimes very funny, job of sending up technophiles' naïveté, self-interest and misguided idealism. As the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier has done in several groundbreaking nonfiction books, Mr. Eggers reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of 'the hive mind' can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers's heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja . . . Never less than entertaining . . . Eggers is such an engaging, tactile writer that the reader happily follows him wherever he's going . . . A fun and inventive read."
- Hugo Lindgren, The New York Times Magazine "The particular charm and power of Eggers's book . . . could be described as 'topical' or 'timely,' though those pedestrian words do not nearly capture its imaginative vision . . . Simply a great story, with a fascinating protagonist, sharply drawn supporting characters and an exciting, unpredictable plot . . . As scary as the story's implications will be to some readers, the reading experience is pure pleasure."
- Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times "Eggers is a literary polymath . . . The Circle is funny in its skewering of Internet culture. Holland obsessively tallies the reach of her Twitter-like Zings and enthuses about a benefit for needy children that raises not money but 2.3 million 'smiles' (think Facebook 'likes'). The Circle's buildings are named for epochs, so at her first party Holland gets her wine from the Industrial Revolution . . . The ideas behind "The Circle" are compelling and deeply contemporary. Holland is an everywoman, a twentysomething believer in Internet culture untroubled by the massive centralization and monetization of information, ubiquitous video surveillance and corporate invasions of privacy. Compare that to A Hologram for the King, in which a middle-aged man thoughtfully but powerlessly observes America's economic decline, realizing that his efforts to participate in globalization led to his own obsolescence. The two books together are saying something foreboding about America's place in the world: We have traded making physical things for a glossy, meaningless online culture that leaves us vulnerable to those who see that information -- in the form of data, video feeds, or our own consumer desires -- is power."
- Lev Grossman, Time "You can't really write a 1984 for our times, because 1984 is still the 1984 of our times. But one could think of Dave Eggers' . . . new novel The Circle as a timely and potent appendix to it. The crux of The Circle is that Big Brother is still haunting us, but in an incarnation that's both more genial and more insidious. We have met Big Brother, and he is us . . . In The Circle Eggers has set his style and pace to technothriller: the writing is brisk and spare and efficient . . . When I finished The Circle I felt a heightened awareness of social media and the way it's remaking our world into a living hell of constant and universal mutual observation."
- John Freeman, O, The Oprah Magazine "You may find yourself so engrossed in Dave Eggers's futuristic novel, The Circle, that you forget about Facebook entirely. And by the last
