The Circle is a story of technological utopianism run amok. Mae Holland is a new employee at the Circle, a technology company whose products are ubiquitous and whose wealth and power is unmatched and growing. She is dazzled by the wealth and glamor she finds on campus at her new job, and quickly becomes accustomed to her employer’s creepy demand for control and information - especially of the personal variety.

The motivating idea behind this book is a cautionary tale about the power of big business, particularly business whose mission is more than a little maniacal and controlling. Cautionary tales are all to the good, even though some of the dystopian plot arcs are a little over the top. In the real world, after all, each of the big technology companies that dominate online consumer data have in fact stumbled and found it very difficult to achieve the sort of total control that Eggers envisions. And the history of software bears out that fragmentation is an endemic challenge facing the industry, and that the seamless integration he is so worried about is actually quite difficult to achieve. All of that is not to object to the basic point, because I think it’s actually pretty important. Even without total control, big businesses with a technological bent can become abusive and controlling, and because of that the Circle fits right into the history of protest literature like The Jungle.

However, I can’t say much for the writing itself. It is too frenzied, the characters are just too one dimensional, and it is top heavy with didactic diatribes. The prose goes downhill quickly as the book progresses; the first half isn’t so bad, but the second gets very tedious. I stuck through it just to see how it ended, although the ending was rather predictable. I think the sheer lack of believability - the fact that the technology industry Eggers presents in the book is far more mechanical and smoother than the real, human, and fragmented one that actually exists - made the book all that much more difficult to wade through.

I’m glad to see protest literature aimed at the giants of the information age; it’s a welcome break from the breathless tone of the business press. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt for the characters to be a bit more believable, and the writing a little less blunt.