Review: The Circle

The Circle by Dave Eggers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This book is really tough to review. I am a huge fan of Eggers, although I did not enjoy his last book ([b:A Hologram for the King|13722902|A Hologram for the King|Dave Eggers|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1337179987s/13722902.jpg|19355962]). This book had similar problems to the last one - it was working so hard to be a parable and make a point that I think Eggers forgot to build the characters as well as I know he is able to. I did like this more than Hologram but it was nowhere near the quality of his earliest work.

The story follows a young woman named Mae who feels like she won the lottery when her college roommate gets her a job at The Circle, the hottest Silicon Valley company since Facebook/Google. As she gets used to her new job, she realizes it is an all-encompassing community where she is expected to attend events, stay up to date on several queues of social and work-related information, and where her parents' health insurance problems are miraculously solved.

In a particularly funny bit of social commentary, nearly every day someone shows up at her desk with a new monitor - the first for her actual job, then another for her personal social networks, then another for her corporate social networks and so on. With these types of constructs, Eggers accurately portrays a lot of the current issues with modern technology and our interactions with it.

Over Mae's tenure at The Circle, she becomes increasingly more involved in the company's efforts toward transparency. Ultimately, she becomes so committed to these efforts that her engagement with the company eclipses even that of her former roommate and best friend, who had been a "golden child" at The Circle.

While the story kept me reading and the commentary around privacy and technology was well-taken, I actively missed Egger's ability to write great characters. He made the points that he wanted to, but the book would have been much better had he made Mae and her colleagues fully fleshed-out characters rather than just vessels for the point he wanted to make.



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