Why is this book typeset in “ragged
right” rather than “justified”? Beats me. Mostly, it’s not
noticeable, but at times, it’s sloppily done, with large gaps on
the right that would easily accommodate the next word, and tremendous
inconsistency with regard to hyphenation. Why mention it? It’s an
odd choice that, to some readers, will stand out; also, in a book so
concerned with technological innovation, the nefarious uses of
technology, and the thoughtlessness with which some changes are
embraced, the typesetting decision looks like what Eggers warns
against: sloppy thinking in service to some ideal.
I hadn’t finished an Eggers novel
before this one; I read perhaps a quarter of A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius before losing interest. This novel does have
a page-turning quality to it—enough of a narrative drive is
generated, once you’re past the slow and uncompelling opening
scenes—so one can move through it pretty quickly. With the
exception of a few scenes in which descriptive writing takes over
(often in ways that feel force-fed with symbolism and significance),
the story is carried by dialogue. It’s not especially good
dialogue. Everyone has the same voice, and only one character ever
asks the questions an intelligent reader would ask. The main
character is not only charmless, she’s a cypher. It’s possible
that that’s what Eggers intends, given how she never makes a single
good decision. (I’m not sure I’ve read another novel of which I
could say that of the main character; I think even Humbert Humbert
probably makes a few good decisions, or at least defensible ones.)
This quality of hers may be why she’s hired, promoted, and
successful.
In short: Mae is brought in, via an old
friend, Annie, to work for The Circle, a Google/Facebook stand-in
that has a cool campus in California and outsized ambitions to change
the world using online technology. Mae quickly learns that one
doesn’t merely work for The Circle; rather, one joins a community—a
community that doesn’t like being snubbed and that wants to know
everything about her. That, of course, becomes the tension-generating
pivot around which the story turns, though Eggers’s handling of the
technology isn’t convincing (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
does a better job of leaping several minutes into the future by way
of Google while also feeling more grounded in tech-type thinking).
There’s an interesting question at the heart of this book about
knowing and being known, but the big moments are telegraphed, the
insights are blunt, and the book’s set-up is so gradual and
surface-level, it felt to me as if Eggers needed to rethink at least
the opening in light of where he was going to take the character,
shaping the narrative more subtly.
Fifty years ago, or even twenty, this
novel would be a satire. For their times, 1984 and Fahrenheit
451 and Brave New World were satires, taking real things
to their next level as a way of critiquing them. This book, at this
time, can’t find anything to satirize. Mostly, Eggers describes
things as they already are. The sole satirical element, to my eyes,
was the proliferation of screens on our protagonist’s desk. “No
one told you about monitoring your third screen? Here,”—and
another computer screen is hauled within view. The way in which
information is thuddingly and incongruously dropped into our
protagonist’s lap seems the stuff of comedy, but it comes across as
flat, especially since Mae simply yields to whatever is thrown at
her.
I did enjoy the novel, but it’s not
an especially well-crafted thing. Fittingly, it seems to be getting
the critical praise it was crowd-designed to earn, but I was happy to
see that citizen reviewers weren’t quite so impressed. It’s light
entertainment with some half-considered ideas and no real surprises.
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