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’.