Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

1. If a social media corporation were to achieve a complete monopoly of all public and private information, we'd be in danger of becoming a totalitarian society. 2. People often willingly give up their privacy for convenience, societal benefit, or a needy and self-centered desire for affirmation. If these premises seem facile to you, you might not enjoy Dave Egger's new novel, the Circle. The writing is straight, mainstream, third-person limited narration. You won't find any of the layered themes, complex metaphor, formal experimentalism, stylistic prose or psychological lyricism common in modern literary fiction. Whether you'll consider this a bug or a feature is mainly a matter of taste; but it's worth mentioning, given Eggers' McSweeney's pedigree (this is the first book I've read by Eggers, so I wasn't sure what to expect). The protagonist is Mae Holland, an enthusiastic, naive and downright submissive young woman (surprise) who gets a job in customer service at the Circle, a company which, having subsumed Google, Facebook and Twitter, is on the brink of achieving the complete monopoly mentioned above. Mae does not think deeply or critically about anything that happens to her, and her motivations are often inexplicable. These are qualities that serve Eggers' narrative goals more effectively than they do the reader's enjoyment. Eggers' goals seem to ride directly on the surface of the narrative. Almost every scene reads like a mini-lesson on the deceptive utopianism of the huge dot-coms, the superficiality and false emotional appeal of online "sharing", or the creepiness of voluntary corporate surveillance. Many passages set the narrative baggage mostly aside and are rendered either as polemic dialogues or speeches delivered by one of the characters. There are also many product presentations, designed to bring the creepiness into maximum relief. There's also a little sex and a lot of longing for a man. In an interview, Eggers stated (seemingly with with pride) that he did not research technology or technology companies to write the book. The result is a skewed, pop-cultural vision of the corporate campus (few developers are to be seen, and no one is depicted actually writing code); a cartoonish start-up culture that doesn't mine into the strangeness that can be found in memoirs on the subject; and a few truly wince-inducing concepts about computer technology ("the cloud", for example, somehow does not require physical storage). The lack of focus on the way technology actually works and the way software companies actually think is not a criticism in itself. But it leads to a lack of engagement with the truly complicated moral, social and political issues that arise with online privacy, over-sharing and corporate ethics. The treatment of these issues in the Circle is simplistic and one-sided. And there is little to be found *aside from* the treatment of these issues. Beyond the transparent preachiness, the most disappointing part of the Circle, for me, was Mae herself. Although Eggers sometimes beautifully documents her thoughts (especially her rationalizations and distorted perceptions of others), she is, at bottom, not much more than a vehicle for what Eggers wants to say. There is no real fight - from Mae, the public or the government - against what the Circle is trying to do. If I should rightly be afraid that a company like the Circle will drive us all off a cliff, I'd be better-served by a novel in which the author doesn't simply hand them the keys.