Diner Book Review of "The Circle" by Dave Eggers

Soooo...Dave Eggers has been writing some of the better modern American prose for several years along with running his brilliant literary site Mc Sweeneys. This from Wikipedia:

Nonfiction

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)
• Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers (co-authored with Daniel Moulthrop and Nínive Clements Calegari) (2005)
• Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated (co-compiled with Lola Vollen; with an introduction by Scott Turow) (2005)
• Zeitoun (2009)
• Visitants (2014)

Fiction

• You Shall Know Our Velocity (novel) (2002)
• Sacrament (revised and expanded version of You Shall Know Our Velocity) (2003)
• The Unforbidden is Compulsory; or, Optimism (novella) (2004)
• How We Are Hungry (short stories) (2004)
• Short Short Stories (short stories, part of the Pocket Penguin series) (2005)
• What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (novel) (2006)
• How the Water Feels to the Fishes (short stories; part of One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box) (2007)
• The Wild Things – novel inspired by Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
• A Hologram for the King (2012)
• The Circle (2013)

So lets call him “prolific”. I have always liked his stuff but he seems to write so elegantly that it sometimes seems to easy that it has the dreaded “look no hands” quality.  From the above I could whole heartedly recomend “Zeitoun”, his take on “The Wild Things”, “You Shgall Know Our Velocity” and “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”. His newest book, “The Circle” is a gem and extremely topical in the Google/Snowden/NSA world that we seem to live in now.  

The books narrator and main character is a young women who leaves college, works a little bit with her liberal arts degree at a local water company and lives with her parents who have health problems in her old home town.  But she gets hold of her best friend who is on the rise at “The Circle” which seems to be a thinly disguised substitute for Google (“Don’t Be Evil”).

She arrives on their campus and takes her entry level job but is soon swept up in the culture and the relentless nature of her job.  Clearly jobs at The Circle become much more like a life or a religion.  It is all in a veneer of “goodness”.  The greater good.  The good of the community.  Your own good.

But outliers become apparent even as The Circle extends health care to her ailing father and promotes her and entertains her.  The one thing never mentioned is actual compensation but that definitely seems secondary. A few men enter the picture.  her old boyfriend and two new love interests within The Circle, one of whom is very mysterious and might be a spy..for someone.  The Circle is relentlessly developing new products for the greater good.  Cheap, high resolution blue tooth cameras with audio for one and wrist monitors which monitor your vitals so you can track them and ultimately a plan to implant chips in all children so they will never be “lost”.  Soon there is a quest for everyone, espcially politicians to be “transparent” and have cameras on them all the time so that we, the public can know there are no backroom deals.  When our heroine has a minor abherant incidient with a kayak she comes to Jesus and becomes a transparency experiment and immediately has millions of people following her every word and actvity other than in the bathroom.  “Privacy is theft” and other concepts are introduced and adopted in a creepily believable way.

The Circle also among it’s many products develops a micro submarine allowing them to recover sea creatures from the Marianas Trench which they bring back to their own aquarium and it serves as a brilliant metaphor as novel develops with a particularly sinister shark.  The Circle moves towards its ultimate goal of “completion” wherein we are all connected for our own good and for the good of the community with the final act making it mandatory for all citizens of the US to have Circle accounts so that they can participate in mandatory voting for the ultimate participatory democracy.

He weaves and excellent but obviously evil spell and as the book itself moves towards “completion” there is a chance that are narrator could come to the rescue and… you really should read it.  Dystopia does not just happen, it starts with us voluntarily giving up freedoms for covenience.  A slippery slope indeed and Eggers really did a nice job here.  Buy it.