Books of The Times: ‘The Circle,’ Dave Eggers’s New Novel

This description of life under the totalitarian regime of the all-seeing Big Brother comes from Orwell’s “1984,” published back in 1949: a dystopian classic that shot up the best-seller lists this summer after revelations about the National Security Agency’s far-reaching collection of data from phone and Internet records, and public fears of a new surveillance state.

In Dave Eggers’s new novel, “The Circle,” Big Brother isn’t the government: it’s a Google-like, Facebook-like tech behemoth, called the Circle, that has a billion-odd users, controls 90 percent of the world’s searches and aspires to record and quantify everything that’s happening to everybody, everywhere in the world. The company credo is “ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN.” Some of its

other Orwellian maxims are

“SECRETS ARE LIES,” “SHARING IS CARING” and “PRIVACY IS THEFT.”

Mr. Eggers’s absorbing 2012 novel, “A Hologram for the King,” gave us a story about a middle-aged loser that opened out into a kind of allegory about the besieged American middle class struggling to hold onto its dreams in a recessionary and newly globalized world. The new novel similarly attempts to use the coming-of-age story of a young woman to create a parable about the perils of life in a digital age in which our personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day.

Using his fluent prose and instinctive storytelling gifts, Mr. Eggers does a nimble, and sometimes very funny, job of sending up technophiles’ naïveté, self-interest and misguided idealism. As the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier has done in several groundbreaking nonfiction books (“You Are Not a Gadget,” 2010, and “Who Owns the Future?,” 2013), Mr. Eggers reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of “the hive mind” can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers’s heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja.

Though “The Circle” is never less than entertaining, it can sometimes lumber into the tendentious, with minor characters — like Mae’s former boyfriend Mercer — spouting diatribes that laboriously spell out the dangers of living online or the impossibility of quantifying emotions.

At times, it also seems as if the novel couldn’t make up its mind about whether it wants to be a closely observed satire of a recognizable world today (with members of the Circle proselytizing for Facebook-like sharing, Google-like endeavors to spread democracy around the world and constant Twitter-like updates about their lives), or a more apocalyptic, dystopian look at a near-future in which Circle membership would become mandatory and the company threatens to replace the federal government. Because the narrative vacillates between these two modes, it never really gives the reader the sense of being thoroughly immersed in a coherent, fully imagined universe with rules and an inevitability of its own.

Still, Mr. Eggers is such an engaging, tactile writer that the reader happily follows him wherever he’s going. And whenever his narrative seems on the verge of becoming a little too pat or predictable, he treats us to some wonderfully comic descriptions of Mae’s increasingly absurd life, or concocts a breathlessly bravura scene — one involves a shark in an aquarium, another Mae’s call upon Circle members to help her locate Mercer, who’s gone off the grid — that seizes our attention all over again.

Unlike the sympathetic everyman hero of “A Hologram for the King,” Mae isn’t the most appealing, or intriguing, character. She’s no Winston Smith, the protagonist of “1984,” who has come to deeply question life under Big Brother. She’s not a sharply etched antihero like Alex in Anthony Burgess’s “Clockwork Orange,” or a discontented outsider caught up in institutional politics, like Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim.” No, Mae is an eager-beaver newbie, driven by insecurity and a need to ingratiate, and she is keen to help her hubris-ridden bosses implement their cultural revolution.

If the Circle is a cult, then Mae’s only too happy to comply with its ridiculous demands with Moonie-like devotion, whether it’s keeping her customer-approval score up in the high 90s; boosting her “Participation Rank” (with hundreds of postings and comments and appearances at mandatory and nonmandatory company gatherings); providing some 500 answers (“smile,” “frown” or “meh”) a day to seemingly random questions; and bringing in at least $45,000 a week in sales of products she has recommended.

She even agrees to “going transparent” — a phrase that appears to play upon the Scientology term “going clear” — and starts wearing a camera lens that will give “her watchers” virtually 24/7 access to her life (with occasional three-minute bathroom breaks).

Will Mae wake up to the dangers of the company in time — before “the Circle closes,” and everyone, everywhere “will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape”? Or will her success there and her celebrity around the world keep her on the reservation? Will her romance with a mysterious and possibly sinister man who calls himself Kalden change her view of the company? Will her parents’ detestation of the Circle’s surveillance policies and her growing estrangement from them affect the big decisions she needs to make?

Such questions drive this lumpy novel toward its not terribly unexpected conclusion. It’s not Mr. Eggers’s best work, but it draws upon enough of his prodigious talents to make for a fun and inventive read.