Her performance is tabulated after every interaction, her ratings displayed for all to see. She begins work in lowly Customer Experience, providing boilerplate answers to client questions and complaints. Mae has been introduced to the Circle by her friend and former roommate Annie, who is close to the Three Wise Men. (Oddly, Mae does not lead us through the ranks of programmers - let alone offer a glimpse of a woman programmer - a strange omission in a book purporting to be about technology.) Readers who enter the Circle’s potential Inferno do not have the benefit of Virgil, Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory, but they do have Mae, a naïve girl with the sensibility of a compulsive iPhone FaceTime chatterer. The novel has the flavor of a comic book: light, entertaining, undemanding. His instructors include a Gang of 40, a Transparent Man, a shadowy figure who may be a hero or a villain, a Wise Man with a secret chamber and a smiling legion of true-believing company employees. Eggers reframes the discussion as a fable, a tale meant to be instructive.
“The Circle” adds little of substance to the debate. Books and tweets and blogs are already debating the issues Eggers raises: the tyranny of transparency, personhood defined as perpetual presence in social networks, our strange drive to display ourselves, the voracious information appetites of Google and Facebook, our lives under the constant surveillance of our own government. This potential dystopia should sound familiar. The Circle’s goal is to have all aspects of human existence - from voting to love affairs - flow through its portal, the sole such portal in the world. Anonymity is banished everyone’s past is revealed everyone’s present may be broadcast live in video and sound. The company demands transparency in all things two of its many slogans are SECRETS ARE LIES and PRIVACY IS THEFT. The time is somewhere in the not-too-distant future - the Three Wise Men who own and rule the Circle are recognizable as individuals living today. ‘It’s heaven.’ ”Īnd so we know that the Circle in Dave Eggers’s new novel, “The Circle,” will be a hell. She marvels at the beautiful campus, the fountain, the tennis and volleyball courts, the squeals of children from the day care center “weaving like water.” The first line in the book is: “ ‘My God,’ Mae thought. Mae Holland, a woman in her 20s, arrives for her first day of work at a company called the Circle.
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