The Circle by Dave Eggers

A coworker recommended The Circle back in the fall. It’s a cautionary tale about a tech company called The Circle that is run by a trio called “The Wise Men” and is growing exponentially, adding newer and more far-reaching applications every week to its near-monopoly on internet searching and commerce. It’s a company wealthy beyond imagining, with thousands of smart, idealistic young people like Mae Holland working there.

Mae is soon consumed with her work, caught up in and even authoring some of its slogans, including “secrets are lies,””sharing is caring,” and “privacy is theft.” To atone for a transgression — not telling her many social circle contacts inside and outside the company that she kayaks, not borrowing a kayak after hours from a rental company without paying, and not sharing any of her experience online — she agrees to become transparent, wearing a camera and being connected to her followers and watchers all the time, except when she’s in the bathroom or in bed.

Slowly the Circle nears “Completion” when the whole world will be a part of it, and no one anywhere will go untracked, unwatched, unknown. Secrets will be a thing of the past. The Circlers believe this will be utopia, with no crime and no unknowns, but there are a few people who seem to think things may be getting out of hand. Mae proposes a new tool that will make democracy “mandatory” and gets increasingly hounded by a mysterious man named Kalden who is trying to warn her off these plans. The higher she rises in the Circle the less contact she has with her family and her friend Annie, who helped her get hired. None of this seems to bother her, as she becomes thoroughly indoctrinated in the Circle’s ways.

Mae is an impossible character to like, and the whole book made me squeamish, but it still seemed like a good read. The story seems improbable, but so did a Trump presidency not long ago. It’s hard to imagine brilliant young people at a technology company making decisions that could impact the world — but then again, look at the way Facebook and Twitter let fake news and trolls proliferate, sure that these things would not matter. The Circle would be good to read with a book group, and to discuss the questions the book raises about the overreach of technology in our lives, and about privacy, freedom, transparency, safety, and the fine line between utopianism and totalitarianism.

 

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Vacation reading

Last week the bookconscious household visited Isle la Motte, Vermont. We rented a cozy cottage on the west side of the island, with copious views of Lake Champlain and its gorgeous sunsets. We walked, biked, ate large breakfasts of fresh local eggs accompanied by many pork products, picked raspberries, visited farm stands, grilled most of our dinners, made s’mores (a first for the Computer Scientist) over a camp fire, kayaked, canoed, looked at the lovely blue moon, sampled local maple creemees, apples, cider donuts, ice ciders, and beers, and relaxed. It was a really perfect end of summer week, and a memorable family vacation.

I took along four books and ended up reading all of those plus three and a half more on my iPad. It was heavenly. Spending long stretches of time lost in a book brought back my childhood summers and the joyful sense of freedom I felt, reading as long and as much as I wanted.

Most of what I brought had been in the “to-read” pile for some time: Dave Eggers‘ novel A Hologram for the King (funny and touching but felt to me like an overgrown short story), Margaret Drabble‘s novel based somewhat on her family history, The Peppered Moth (Wow! An amazing multigenerational story that’s also a kind of social history of women; I want to read everything Drabble has ever written!), Elinor Lipman‘s essay collection I Can’t Complain (sealed my previous view that Lipman is not only someone I’d like to know but also someone I’d like to be), and Paul Harding‘s forthcoming novel Enon (both devastatingly brilliant, as I expected it would be, and just plain devastating).

The three e-books were: Aimee Bender‘s The Color Master (short stories, which I checked out of the NH Downloadable Books website while giving a demo to a patron at the library a few hours before we left for Vermont because I remembered that Ann Kingman recommended it on Books on the Nightstand; I liked some pieces, including the title story, but didn’t like others), Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs. Dalloway (I had somehow managed not to read this yet, and I loved it), and Katharine Britton’s Little Island (which I’ll review in September’s Mindful Reader column).

The book I started on vacation and finished yesterday, also an e-book from the library, is Anthony Marra‘s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Longtime bookconscious fans know I am generally suspicious of “It” books that the literary industrial complex promotes heavily. I tend to be a contrarian about books I’m told I will love. Besides, with works like Mrs. Dalloway still to read, I’m not interested in every hotshot emerging writer that comes along. But in this case, the hype is justified. Marra is so young; like Tea Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife, it’s hard to imagine how with relatively little life experience he managed to tap the emotional range required to conjure his characters, people of various ages living in war torn Chechnya. Which he didn’t even visit until the book was nearly finished. And like Obreht he blew my mind.

Great literature is emotionally evocative and universally relatable — it takes you so richly into the characters’ experience that it doesn’t matter whether it’s set in a place and time and culture you are unfamiliar with. I’m probably never going to live in a war zone, God willing. I knew only a little bit about Chechnya before I read this novel. But I ached to the core for these people, and Marra’s stunningly beautiful writing had me both turning pages and savoring, even the sections full of violence and horror that in lesser hands would have made me skip. It was especially moving to read in light of the conflict in Syria, as I followed the news and tried to imagine what it’s like for ordinary people caught in a civil war.

I’m really fortunate that I get to read so many good books. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is beyond good.

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