Eggers’ Circle follows predictable story path
Dave Eggers is a writer who has exhibited uncommon empathy and a willingness to explore — with an honesty so bald it might be mistaken for showboating — his own particular weakness and folly. He is the most ambitious of novelists, eager to enter the heads of people very unlike himself and a delicate, self-effacing diarist given to involuted examinations of his own motives. His best work — like 2009’s nonfiction Zeitoun, about a Syrian-American painting contractor accused of terrorism amidst the chaos of post-Katrina New Orleans — is charged with intelligence and respect for his fellow human beings.
Unfortunately, his latest novel, The Circle (Knopf/ McSweeney’s, $27.95), is an obvious and at times churlish work that put me in mind of the self-impressed commentators who rail against the moral malleability of “the sheeple.”
That said, The Circle is highly readable, the type of
work that might translate into a strong motion picture or miniseries, though one imagines Hollywood might tamper with its downbeat ending. Maybe they should. This is a book most of us would like better if we didn’t finish it. Once characters are sketched and trajectories plotted, the only thing left to wonder about is how far they might fly before gravity works its inevitable charms. Some crash, some seem to stick the landing, but their various endings hardly matter. We have been cautioned.
It’s not hard to see Eggers’ intention. He wants to write a brave new 1984 for people born a few years either side of the Orwellian date. It might be necessary to remind ourselves villains don’t recognize themselves as such, and, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, the most dangerous trait for a technocrat is a lack of imagination. Commend Eggers for wanting to write a big, important novel, but while I’m aware that some will take this as an endorsement, I’m afraid The Circle put me more in mind of the programmatic “novels” of Ayn Rand than of Swift, Voltaire or Vonnegut.
Ostensibly, this is the story of Mae Holland, a bright American of the relatively near future who, after enduring a few months of Bartleby-style drudgery clerking for a local utility, finds herself — via Annie, an old college connection who has risen high in the organization — working at The Circle, a Googlesque social media company. The company’s campus is a rambling and self-contained showplace, a playground for the bright young things (what Evelyn Waugh might have made of this setup) who have been chosen to connect the world. From the outset, it is clear that being a member of The Circle is more than a job. It’s a calling and even entry-level employees are expected to evangelize and participate in the seemingly endless intramural activities. Mae falters at first, but she’s got Annie (and others) looking out for her. Soon she’s setting records for customer satisfaction and increasing her “participation rank” by sending hundreds of digital “smiles,” “frowns” and “zings” daily.
But she’s having trouble meeting all the company’s expectations because her parents are preoccupied with insurance issues stemming from her father’s multiple sclerosis. They’re still in touch with Mae’s old boyfriend Mercer, a Luddite who makes chandeliers from antlers and doesn’t even maintain much of an Internet presence. Mercer doesn’t like social media and perceives something sinister in the company’s goal of universal connectedness. Mae feels sorry for him when she isn’t repulsed by his hairy back.
On Fridays at The Circle, the company’s founders — Eamon Bailey, a kindly dreamer who views transparency as the answer to all of society’s woes; Tom Stenton, an unabashed capitalist with a genius for monetizing the firm’s innovations; and the elusive Ty Gospodinov, a socially awkward inventor who revolutionized the Internet by inventing a technology (“TruYou”) that consolidated users’ needs into a single account and eliminated online anonymity overnight — appear to present or deliver team-building “dreams” reminiscent of TED talks. While Eamon and Tom have their roles as the public faces of The Circle, the mysterious, creative Ty is rarely seen, except on video, and he usually affects an oversize hoodie.
As Mae begins to fall into the swing of things — she’s gratified to discover her insurance will cover her parents, immediately eliminating all the red tape and out-of-pocket costs — she is drawn into the after-hours social life on campus with nightly concerts and performances. She sometimes avails herself of the on-campus dorm rooms the company makes available. It’s in one of these rooms that she has a drunken one-night stand with a co-worker who records their tryst on videotape (and then instructs Mae that it’s Circle policy to never delete anything). But even though Mae intellectually accepts the cheery blandishments of The Circle as a kind of secular gospel, she’s also drawn into a surreptitious on-campus affair with a white-haired interloper who may or may not belong there.
After a humiliating brush with off-campus wrongdoing, captured on The Circle’s growing network of SeeChange cameras, Mae is led to a public revelation by Eamon during one of the “Dream Friday” chats: “Secrets are lies,” she announces. “Caring is sharing. Privacy is theft.”
She decides to follow the lead of a growing number of politicians and go “transparent,” wearing a camera around her neck and broadcasting a live feed of her daily life to the Internet, where she might be monitored by anyone. She sees the comments of her followers in real time, appearing on a device she wears around her wrist. She quickly becomes not just one of the most famous members of The Circle, but one of the most famous people in the world, and a leading advocate of the corporate goal “closing The Circle” — mandatory birth-to-death transparency for every person on Earth.
Such a structure gives Eggers plenty of opportunity to lecture and instruct, and most of the characters in The Circle come across as either pedantic scolds or neo-hippie dreamers who believe in, if not the perfectibility of the human animal, at least the ability of technology to deter misbehavior. Mae herself, presented initially as an audience surrogate, turns out to be one of the more heavy-handed examples of evil’s banality in modern literature. She’s a stupid woman who believes she’s smart, who’s willing to pledge The Circle like it’s some exclusive sorority. I didn’t get the sense that Eggers liked her much or was interested in her beyond her utility as a symbol. She’s just Eichmann in the dock — a dull, stupid monster.
That’s not to say that Eggers doesn’t light on some interesting ideas — an application such as Ty’s TruYou really could squash the bullying and other nastiness that seems inherent to digital life. But the writer doesn’t seem to credit that we might be engaged by the more subtle questions raised by such a technology. Instead he’s content to make broad, sweeping, table-clearing gestures. The Circle is less the tale of one Candide’s moral education than a slaughter of straw men begrudgingly arranged as a lesson for a group of earnest but dim students.
I don’t doubt Eggers believes in the totalitarian potential of the Internet or that our “right to disappear” is in jeopardy. I just wish he’d written a better book about it.