In The Circle, Dave Eggers’s satirical dystopia about an insatiable Google-like conglomerate, there’s a scene in which drones hound a social-media refusenik to his live-streamed doom; the character’s name, Mercer, was a nod to the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose 1841 essay ‘Self-Reliance’ saw Twitter coming.
At least that’s a hunch that looks fairly sound now that Eggers has written a novel about going off-grid in the woods. His fourth book in as many years (apparently he doesn’t have Wi-Fi), it’s another chronicle of post-Dubya America — the object of Eggers’s elegy and polemic ever since he ditched the postmodern frills of his meta-memoir debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, to document the experience of a Sudanese refugee in the true-life novel What is the What.
As tends to be Eggers’s way, Heroes of the Frontier is told from a single point of view.
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