Defying the tech giants: The Every, by Dave Eggers, reviewed

Those for whom Dave Eggers’s name evokes only his much praised memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) may be surprised at just how much straight fiction he has written. ‘Those for whom’, here, is code for me. I confess it, the pros and cons of transparency being one of the themes of the book under review. In addition to McSweeney’s, his influential literary magazine, and other book-length nonfiction (his 2009 Hurricane Katrina book Zeitoun is exceptional), Eggers has published 13 lengthy novels.

Here’s one of them: The Circle (2013), a blockbuster satire on the burgeoning power of internet companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google. We follow the idealistic Mae Holland, hired by ‘The Circle’, through her various in-work adventures, sexual as well as technological. She rises through the corporate ranks by endorsing the company line, which is a kind of smiley-face Orwellianism: ‘Secrets are lies’; ‘Sharing is caring’; ‘Privacy is theft’. The Circle’s customers purchase a single online identity called ‘TruYou’, through which they have access to absolutely everything in the digital universe. This has ended all online fraud, an outcome that strikes me as unlikely, frankly, but there you go.

I summarise this older title at some length because Eggers’s latest novel, The Every, is a direct sequel to it, and hard to follow without some sense of what has gone before. Why Eggers considered a sequel needful is a bit of a puzzle. Perhaps he thought a decade was a long time in internet terms and wanted to revisit his tech-industry material with more up-to-date sensibilities. But the novel doesn’t tread any new ground. It’s like The Circle, but more so, parsing the same mix of admiration for the smiley, shiny spaces of these tech giants and disapprobation at their increasingly totalitarian grip on global culture and society.