From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

Our protagonist Mae Holland is pretty much the epitome of average (is that an oxymoron?). She’s never been much of a striver, and had resigned herself to a dead end, unfulfilling job at a utility company when suddenly an old friend offers her a job that sounds too good to be true -- Mae has an interview with The Circle, the corporation that began as an internet startup and ballooned into an all-encompassing force. Among other conveniences, it allows members signed up for TrueYou accounts to store all of their passwords, memberships, and account information in one convenient location (no word on how that location remains unhackable, btw). The company is overseen by the Three Wise Men -- Eamon Bailey, everyone’s ideal grandfather (and the most public face of The Circle), Tom Stenton (he seems to be the most power-hungry of the three) and the enigmatic Ty Gospodnidov, the boy genius who created TrueYou and brought Bailey and Stenton on board to run the company. Ty is basically Mark Zuckerberg, hoodie, borderline Asperger's and all. And as we can all guess, The Circle is Google, a few years in the future, and taken to an extreme (although between Google Glass and those freaky contact lenses, it’s not really all that extreme any more).

Mae’s friend Annie is a senior executive at The Circle, and part of the “Gang of 40” a group of bright young minds that pitch ideas to the Three Wise Men. Though Stenton and especially Bailey are frequent sights at these meetings and around campus (of course it’s called a campus!), Ty appears only on video screen, and there only occasionally. Once Mae gets onto campus and Annie gives her the tour, it takes about 8 seconds for Mae to drink the Kool-Aid and decide that this is the most perfect place ever and she can’t wait to rise through the ranks (Annie herself did so awfully quickly -- Mae is 24 and Annie is only two years older, already a senior executive at 26). She begins her days in CE -- Customer Experience, which is as thrilling a job as it sounds like: trouble-shooting customer service issues. Every customer receives a survey after contact with CE, and the goal is to maintain a near-perfect aggregate score on those surveys (100 is nearly impossible of course, but no one considers it unreasonable to expect a 97 or 98 average). Mae starts out with a mere two screens in her office -- a regular computer-sized screen for CE stuff, and a smaller one for messages from her supervisors. It takes almost a week to get her “social feed” screen (#3) set up, and by that time Mae has already unknowingly offended several co workers by not responding to their email or requests. There’s a hilariously absurd scene in which Mae’s supervisor calls her into his office at the request of a co worker named Allistair, who is upset to the point of tears that Mae ignored his invitation to a Portugal-themed brunch. See, apparently in filling out some profile somewhere, Mae happened to mention that she liked Portuguese music, or cooking, or something, and of course all of that information is stored in the cloud, so when Allistair ran a search for fellow Portugal fans, Mae’s name came up and she received an invite. But she “ignored” it because her email wasn’t working yet and now he’s so offended he may die. This actually ends up being something of an early turning point for Mae; though Allistair is hilarious in his over the top offense, this is both the first and last point when Mae seriously questions what she has just gotten herself into. She doesn’t understand (at first) why everyone is taking this damn Portugal brunch so seriously, and why it’s so important that she be socially involved at work. But Mae’s driving motivation is her fierce desire to be liked -- she wants to be important, respected, leave a legacy, all of that, of course, but beyond all of that is the simplest desire. Mae just wants everyone to like her. Later, another pair of supervisors call Mae in to discuss her lack of socialization, and when she mentions how much she likes to kayak. One of them is shocked, shocked that she didn’t search for fellow kayakers on The Circle’s network and go out kayaking with one of them. And the fact that she recently went out kayaking and didn’t post pictures or zings (tweets, essentially)? Gasp! Practically criminal. Everyone seems to understand early on that Mae wants to be liked, and to me it felt like a lot of them were playing her -- appealing to that desire by telling her that not posting pictures of her kayaking experiences was effectively robbing disabled people of the ability to experience such an activity. And Mae buys it, of course, because she simply cannot stand the idea of someone being upset with her, even if she recognizes on some level (at least at first) how absurd the argument is.

This desire takes Mae deeper and deeper into the world of The Circle -- she becomes a rising star at Customer Experience of course, and after a minor public relations snafu (where she’s caught on camera taking a kayak out for a joyride), Mae becomes one of the first at the company to go “transparent,” meaning she will at all times wear a tiny camera that records all of her experiences and broadcasts them live to anyone with an Internet connection. Well of course Mae eats this shit up (at this point I think there are 9 screens in her office and she has three bracelet-wrist-cuff things that monitor her viewers’ comments and reactions plus she’s usually wearing a headset and responding to near constant survey questions, on such important topics as “what are your feelings about high-heeled footwear?”) and becomes an even greater success almost overnight. There are just a few minor issues getting in the way of her happiness -- her father’s deteriorating health (he’s suffering from MS), her ex-boyfriend Mercer (he might be the only sane character in the whole bunch), and the mysterious Kalden, with whom she’s had several clandestine encounters, but about whom she knows almost nothing. (view spoiler)[Let me just say that although I didn’t see it right away, I totally called it that he was Ty. (hide spoiler)] The parents problem is solved briefly when Mae is able to get them both put on her Circle insurance, but the generosity comes at a price: her parents have to have “SeeChange” cameras installed in every room of their house, ostensibly to prevent any medical emergencies. The SeeChange cameras were one of the creepier aspects of The Circle, along with being the one I can see Google coming up with in the near future. They’re tiny cameras, about the size of a DumDum sucker that can be planted anywhere without anyone knowing. They broadcast clear, realtime video (although I don't’ think they come with audio, at least not at first) of any location. Now, I feel like this breaks a million privacy and antitrust laws, but whatever. I suppose someone has to find the camera for it to be a problem, although again the fact that it’s broadcasting video might make it easy to track down...it’s basically live-feed Google Earth. Except Google Earth stuff is (currently) generally pretty visible when it’s happening and the images you find when you search aren’t in realtime or even current (it used to be a favorite computer lab past time for my students to play “find your house”, and they were usually either totally out of season, or featured something dated: a tree that’s been chopped down, a car that was sold a year ago). Anyway. Mae’s parents are grateful for the insurance, but not so much for the cameras. Mae also sets it up so that all of the people sending “smiles” (Facebook likes, essentially. You can also send frowns, of course) and well-wishes can contact her parents directly. There is, of course, an outpouring of support, which her parents find completely overwhelming. But when they ask Mae to make it stop, because people are expecting a personal response to every smile, and getting downright belligerent when they aren’t acknowledged immediately, she’s stunned by their lack of gratitude.

It took me this long to finally get really frustrated with Mae, which I know is the point. Mercer (the ex) points out to her that, in spite of becoming this interesting, powerful person that she fancies herself to be, she’s actually heinously boring. Which is true -- she stares at screens all day, sending zings and smiles and frowns and believes that any of this has an effect on the world. There’s another ridiculous scene where Mae sends a smile to a woman working to denounce the Central Guatemalan Security Forces, meaning she’s effectively sent a frown to the aforementioned Guatemalans. At this moment Mae feels incredibly powerful, and believes she might have made some Guatemalan enemies. As though the Guatemalan army cares about “frowns” from people in another country. But this incident pretty much sums up Mae’s inflated sense of self-importance, which just continues to grow. And again, she’s clearly drinking the Kool-Aid here, so it doesn’t take long, especially once she goes transparent, to believe that everything must be known. She even coins the newest company motto herself (albeit unwittingly): “Privacy is theft.”

Yikes.

Things pretty much spin out of control from here, in fairly predictable fashion. It’s worth noting that there are strong elements of both 1984 and Brave New World at work here. The whole “everything will be known” motto is trotted out at the very beginning, and immediately reminded me of “everyone belongs to everyone” in Brave New World. Privacy isn’t so much a concern for Huxley’s characters, because they’re monitored around the clock anyway, and thanks to being born into castes with no hope of advancement, they really don’t have all that much to hide. The idea of “the greater good” is touted quite a bit here, and of course every dystopia ever was conceived out of hope for that ambiguous concept. Mae’s a bit like Bernard the social climber as well, and she also reminds me a bit of Winston (view spoiler)[ especially in that she’s willing to give up everything to prove her loyalty to The Circle. I suppose her “do it to Julia” moment happens off-page, when she exposes Kalden/Ty to Stenton and Bailey, although those Marianas trench creatures were definitely their own form of room 101. I think that, watching the shark devour everything in that tank, Mae realized that she wanted to be the shark, not stop it. And in the end, just as Winston loves Big Brother, Mae is wondering how to get inside Annie’s comatose head, because it’s killing her that there are thoughts locked in Annie’s brain that can’t be shared with the world. She may as well be doodling 2 + 2 = 5 all over the walls. Shudder. (hide spoiler)]

I’ve seen a few reviews complaining that this is nothing we haven’t seen before (true) and isn’t bringing anything new to the genre (debatable) or the conversation (also debatable). I’ve read a shitload of dystopia in my day and maybe because I’ve read so much YA, I have a higher threshold for the whole “this is the same plot with nothing new” problem. It is a familiar plot, to anyone who’s read much dystopia. And yes, it’s not shining a light anywhere different -- we know Google is creepy, and I’m pretty sure Google knows Google is creepy at this point. We know we’re obsessed with documenting the minutiae of our days, and seeing the minutiae of other people (particularly famous people, although that bar is pretty low these days, when one can apparently become “a big deal on Vine”. Ugh). So yes, Eggers is not telling me anything I’m not already both aware of and slightly freaked out by. But I still enjoyed the story, in spite of all of that, and in spite of the fact that Mae is one of the least likable protagonists I’ve come across in a while (and I say that having just finished The Dinner, which is all but overflowing with terrible people!). There’s sort of a trainwreck quality to the narrative -- you watch Mae getting in deeper and deeper and you know where things are going, but you keep telling yourself she’ll wise up and fight back -- after all, what’s a good dystopia without a resistance? I read a review which lamented that this book is actually written for (and thus marketed to) the wrong audience; adults are pretty aware of all of the above, what with the creepy. What Eggers should have done was write this story to appeal to the young adult market, for whom most of the above could be a revelation. Or possibly dismissed as the fears of some out-of-touch adult who “just doesn’t get it.” Hard to say. I thought it was an entertaining read; it freaked me out, and certainly dampened my desire to visit the Google campus. After reading Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, I was briefly fascinated by the company (especially since I spend so much of my day staring at one of its creations). Now I’m a little paranoid that the camera in the top of my Chromebook is recording me as I type this.