Book Discussion schedule: Two sessions: (evening) Wednesday, December 10, 2014, at 7:00 P.M., and (afternoon) Monday, December 15, 2014, at 1:00 P.M.
Set in an undefined future time, The Circle is the story of Mae Holland, a young woman hired to work for the world’s most powerful internet company.... Mae can’t believe her luck, —even as her 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. (McSweeney's)
/* Starred Review */ 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. (Oct.) --Staff
(Reviewed September 16, 2013) (Publishers Weekly, vol 260, issue 37, p)
Kirkus:
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.(Kirkus
Reviews, October 1, 2013)
