The Circle: Author's Style

What did you think about Eggers' style and tone throughout the book?

I found the whole book to be pretty message-heavy. I didn't have a lot of expectations, going in, since I have not read anything else by the author -- but I did expect a more literary style, based on what little I knew of the author beforehand. The metaphors were kind of ham-fisted (thinking particularly of the shark, here, though there were other examples).

> 2 Totally agree! I actually wrote in the margins, at the point where they're going forth with the tank merge: "next up, seahorse metaphor—Circle users are the seahorses". I wasn't quite on the nose, but still...

>3 lorannen: I think the Circle users were the tunas.
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I fully expected all the metaphors and the heavy-handed message, from what else I know about the author. I really think the bluntness of it all overshadowed the message.

I found the tone to be hectoring. I think that this was the combined effect of simple language, shallow characters, obvious metaphors, and a very strong simple message.

I found the writing style easy to read. The message was pounded into me with a sledgehammer, despite of me already agreeing with him on many issues. Or perhaps because of it.

I agree that this was an easy style to read. While I enjoyed it, I think it might be more interesting to someone who has not read other books in the same vein. It seems to me that maybe this will cause some younger readers to contemplate more deeply the social media that they use daily, perhaps appeal to people who don't want a huge, convoluted book.

>7 TooBusyReading: I agree! I rarely read books like this; perhaps that's why this one scared me so.

I thought more than once that it would make an excellent young adult book...except for the sex scenes. A Reader's Digest Condensed form for middle school and up? That sounds silly at first, but look at Chasing Lincoln's Killer. That's an excellent book for young readers James Swanson adapted from his book for adults, Manhunt.

There was a lot of listing of things Mae did. I gather Matt didn't like it, but it worked for me. Indeed, on the worse days, a narrative of ten minutes would go:

Wrote a few lines of code. Decided I need to find out the name of that routine that does that thing. Checked Facebook. Saw my friend Justin posted a video of Bjork explaining television sometime in the 90s. Clicked on it. Decided to share it half-way through watching. Wrote a funny title for it to be shared with. Shared it. Decided my title wasn't right. Googled a word I forgot how to spell for the title. Found the right spelling but got distracted by investigating the etymology of the word. Looked up the Germanic language family tree. Returned to code. Forgot what I was looking for. Checked Facebook.

The combination of strong message and easy, entertaining, undemanding style set up an interesting resonance for me. It was a terrifically easy book to consume on a very shallow level, and since it's about the shallowness of consumerism ... it worked for me. Though at times I wanted more depth, more reflection, there seemed to be less and less as the book progressed, and I supect that was deliberate. A bit maddening, but purposefully so.

Though I do understand why it might not work for other readers.

"I meant to do that!" may have worked for Pee Wee Herman, but it's a pretty thin justification for a book, I think.

>9 timspalding: The lists were excellent descriptions of Mae's job, but yeah, I didn't really enjoy them... maybe they were a little too autobiographic.

Found the right spelling but got distracted by investigating the etymology of the word.

SOML.

>11 cpg: High-five. I love this comment.

>12 matthewmason: The entirety of "Book 1" (sidenote: what on earth was up with the "Book" designations? He couldn't be bothered to make reasonable chapter breaks, but dividing it into three progressively smaller chunks makes sense somehow? No.) was incredibly boring, for the most part. I found myself wondering "is it over yet?" a number of times.

>10 bfister: This is basically exactly how I felt about it-- it was a very easy and fast read, but that isn't necessarily a plus. I do think it made me somehow more "in tune" with the world he was trying to create, but it was a bit boring/basic. Even if that happened to be the point, it wasn't as enjoyable as it could have been if I actually grappled with it more.

OK, maybe this is obvious, but it seems like the lack of depth echoes the lack of depth in Mae's smile and frown responses to international politics and other deeper subjects than whether or not to offer more vegies in the lunch room.

I love the part where they're trying to figure out how to get the frowns to the Guatemalan guerillas.

>5 TheoClarke: I found it hectoring too, in a way I've never found Orwell to be.

There isn't enough separation between The Circle's world and our own; it's on a timeline to happen in just a few years, and we all know of concrete reasons why it's simply not going to happen like that in the real world just now. Eggers didn't choose an absurd or exaggerated setting like Animal Farm to signal that we're not talking about the real world here. Without a literary indication that this world is intended as anything but realism, my suspension-of-disbelief shock absorbers are not installed. The story seems to be showing how -we- (our own generation) will destroy our own culture using stuff most of us already use all the time; that it's practically inevitable, OUR DOOM IS ALREADY UPON US, etc. Profoundly not like Orwell. More like Al Gore. And because of glaring inconsistencies with what I know about this world, I just don't buy it.

>17 emmaliminal: My feelings exactly.

> 16 Yes, that cracked me up, too.

#16 -- Yes, and I was reminded of that scene when a friend posted this on Facebook a few days later.

>5 TheoClarke:, 17, 18

I didn't find it hectoring. I'd be expecting it would be, after some initial comments. But the outright speechifying was fairly limited, and put mostly in the mouth of Mercer, who wasn't exactly Howard Roark. That the novel had its point and hit it seems to me only par for the course; it was a dystopian novel of ideas.

My main objection was that it was fairly flat and limited. Mae was--by necessity--not a particularly reflective or perceptive person, and the narration was limited by her perspective. Part of the point of the book was the vapidity of creeping evil--how something dark and disturbing could arise from trivialities (smile, frown, zing!) and trivial people. But vapidity isn't always thrilling to read about.

There isn't enough separation between The Circle's world and our own...

I hear you. He didn't set it 100 years in the future, when our social networks were wired into our brains, or whatever. The technological progressions were restricted--SeaChange Cameras, retinal displays (which didn't figure prominently), etc. I assumed a future 1-20 years out. It might be worth it to see if there are further clues there. (That Mae used Facebook when she was younger--and the Circle bought the Facebook archive—is one such clue, I suppose.)

I dunno, though--a good start to a reasoned literary argument, right? I'm just not as much of a stickler. If it had been tricked out like a techno-thriller, with bullshit technological explanations and invented history, these problems would have ranked. But it wasn't. It signaled again and again that it was dystopian fantasy, and that was good enough for me.

I think that the story seeming to be not far in the future is what made it more powerful that it otherwise would have been. It's not hard to imagine a real world like the fictional one in the book, that it is a possibility, and it seems to me that maybe that is what Eggers was trying to do.

Edit: Typo, as usual.

>22 TooBusyReading: - yup, that was my take. Toto, we're not in the future anymore. I think the things that didn't ring quite right to me (nobody was fickle and gravitating to the next hot platform, which seems to me to be a very real thing today, the absence of a government vacuum cleaner attached to the Circle) were a function of it being in this middle distance between now and soon.

I think we've yet to figure out whether social sites will stabilize, change continually or settle into a skirt-length oscillating pattern. My money is on stabilization based on true identity and a Circle-like link between that and purchasing, Big-Data and social value.

As for government, I'm afraid I've lost my ability to be surprised. Snowden's revelations should have shaken this country to its core. But people have mostly passed on--and all he accomplished was normalizing a new level of unfreedom. So I don't see the government sticking up for online privacy if reasonable reasons can be found for it to prefer it's absence.

>23 bfister:
"...nobody was fickle and gravitating to the next hot platform..."

Yep, lines outside of Best Buy whenever there is a newer greatest, best ever version of anything tech related. I have to admit that hubby's and my cell phones are dumb phones because I'm too cheap to pay for an expensive data plan, and whenever someone sees our phones, you can see them thinking, "those poor old people are so behind the times." Even qualifying people on welfare here get a version of smartphones given to them.

>21 timspalding:. For me, "hectoring" is a good word for Eggers tone, in the sense of feeling badgered and nagged by him about his message. OK, I get it, already. The repetition really got to me, where he would use scene after scene to make essentially the same point without advancing the story. This book should have been at least 1/3 shorter.

If you don't like hectored, how about harassed, tormented, or plagued? Eggers and his plaguy style. Yep.

>17 emmaliminal:. There isn't enough separation between The Circle's world and our own . . . . Without a literary indication that this world is intended as anything but realism, my suspension-of-disbelief shock absorbers are not installed.

Your comment about too little separation nails it for me. I haven't heard this said anywhere else, and I think it's one of the things that was niggling in the back of my brain about this book, especially when comparisons are made of it to books like 1984.

As far as the style is concerned, my take on it is that this is a fast read for a 10-year-old--nothing layered, complex, or the least bit nuanced. I found the book to be almost excruciatingly dull and yet strangely terrifying, which is admittedly an odd juxtaposition of reactions to one book.

>26 labwriter: excruciatingly dull and yet strangely terrifying...

Very similar to my own sentiments as I plugged away at this novel, both, however, mitigated by frequent indignant humor sprinkled onto passages that Eggers had no intention of making so. And then, when he did try to crack a blundering joke.... hilarity.

>26 labwriter:

"OK, I get it, already": That's what I was saying continually with his attempts to frame the Circle as uber-Google/Apple, or as he described each of Mae's new screens/workload assimilation.

I made myself stay with the book because I has heard the book had a plot arc, but there were a few times I was certain that pages of the book would have to run out before he could fit any substantive plot advances in.