The Circle by Dave Eggers
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I couldn’t finish this. I made it through part four of eleven of the audiobook and had to check the review on GoodReads and LibraryThing to see if perhaps I was missing something. But the reviews all seemed to support my decision to bail early. Or, should I say, I bailed early, quicker than you might expect, well before the end. Because Dave Eggers uses two, three, eight adjectives or adverbs where one or even none might suffice. You get the feeling that you’re being bludgeoned by the writer, like he’s afraid you’re not going t get it, not going to get it when he describes the characters’ faces as triangles or ovals, like we’ve wandered into some cubist nightmare of a workplace.
The writing style feels like it’s for someone far younger… but, for the life of me, I can’t figure out who this is. Is it millennials? Surely they don’t like this pandering, Pollyanna-ish tone. Do they?
Anyway, writing style aside, the book is about a woman going to work at a Facebook/Google/Apple amalgam and the giant reach of these companies into our personal lives is the target for Eggers, as he, none too subtly, paints a picture of a company that knows everything about you and to which you willingly surrender all this knowledge with very few questions asked. But I couldn’t see anything, four elevenths of the way into the book, that hadn’t been said a million ways before, or that people hadn’t noticed or questioned a million times before, but the poor characters of his novel seem to take all of the company’s proclamations with bright, starry eyed adoration, eager to dive right in to the company’s vision for them. I get that he’s lampooning the culture at these companies, who have campuses, rather than office buildings, and have adult pep rallies and free beverages and meals and scooters and all that baloney, heck, I worked for one of them for twelve years.
Look, I don’t know, maybe the book turns dark later on and cynicism about the company’s motives grows or we meet employees of the company who are other than brain-washed, simplistic cultists. But there is nothing propelling me to read, no suspense, no journey — I’m just reading some lady’s social feed over her shoulder, watching her set up social media accounts for her work, her work group, her company, herself. She marvels as she gets one screen, then a second, then a third, then a fourth, oh joy! It’s not a novel, it’s an unboxing video, but in text form!
Ugh.