Dave Eggers: "The Circle"

Tremendous satire:

"Mae hesitated briefly, knowing the gravity of what she was about to do - to come out against these rapists and murderers - but she needed to make a stand. An auto response thanked her, noting that she was the 24,726th person to send a smile to Ana Maria and the 19,282nd to send a frown to the paramilitaries."

 

That was not meant as a rebuttal to watery tart.

 

My last engagement on a literary thread involved JR charging in mad at the world, not realizing I was snarking someone else.

 

Some of the oddest criticism I've seen of the novel, and it comes from a lot of tech blogs and techies writing otherwise, is that Eggers didn't get the Internet or tech companies "right," as if this undermines his overall vision. That, for example, the Circle's "Unified Operating System" wouldn't work in real life for this, that, or the other reason. That we don't see programmers writing code.

To me, this is akin to criticizing Woody Allen in "Midnight in Paris" or Stephen King in "11/22/63" for not sufficiently exploring the physics of time travel. In all three instances, the conceit is established and is really not relevant to the piece's larger explorations. It's a credit to Herman Melville that he got whaling right, I suppose. But I think it's a silly standard to hold a novel like this to. An tech conglomerate has become massive and indispensable. Period. End of story. The rest is details. In fact, I think even critiquing the novel as some futurist vision is the wrong approach. This is a satire of how we live today, not a specific warning about where we are headed, other than the very general observations about rampant multi-tasking, diminishing privacy and increasing neediness.

 

Here is Slate's Jessica Winter making that exact and inane criticism:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/books/2013/10/dave_eggers_tech_novel_the_circle_reviewed.html

 

I read that name and pictured this:

 

Has anyone else read it yet or started?

Here is a positive review on a tech site:

http://mashable.com/2013/10/18/tech-fiction-reading/

I finished it. The ending is a little rushed - it gets kind of hyper-dystopian. Eggers clearly wanted to take his set-up to its logical conclusion. I don't think he had to, but I don't think it was a terrible decision, either.

I'm really glad I took the time to read it. The book hits almost every criticism of the social media age that a lot of us probably wrestle with or feel uneasy about, but can't quite put our finger on.

 

Had you said to me "Dave Eggers wrote a book skewering social media" I might have considered it.

But reading the third-grade level, connect-the-dots writing in the first post made me sad that Eggers' name is on it and happy that I saved the money. I pictured him with a brick, hitting me over the head, as I read it.

 

That's certainly one of the criticisms against it, yes. The Mercer character is the Greek chorus. If he makes that same speech in a movie, I'd get awful irritated.

I do think that the passage is palatable until he gets to, "It's like snack food."

"Less words," as my wife likes to remind me sometimes.

 

The Big Ragu's wife is married to you, too?

 

Edit:

So, I took it back to the library after about 120 pages or so. It's an exhausting read to me. I got tired of reading all the rambling paragraphs about how the main character had to go through a week worth of missed posts, and as she responded all it did was generate even more posts to read. And on and on and on. Yes, I get that was the point. He showed me that she spent so much time catching up to that crap that it was all she accomplished for a few hours. I didn't think I could finish the book, no matter how good the story may turn out after the set up. I'm not into social media much. I have a Facebook that's mostly for communicating with family. A Twitter handle left over from work that I emptied and never use but keep because it's in my name. This place, and I mostly bitch about wrestling here. That's it. So I didn't want to read a book about people doing all that inane crap when I try not to be that way in my own life. I'm just going to go back and finish "The Shining."