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Graeme McMillan

Dave Eggers' The Circle : What the Internet Looks Like if You Don't Understand It

How you react to The Circle -- the new book by McSweeney's founder, novelist and occasional screenwriter Dave Eggers -- will doubtless depend on your own relationship to technology. If you're someone who remains skeptical about the blogging, tweeting, Tumbling and Facebooking that have shaped society in recent years, The Circle may seem like a work of brilliant satire that suggests a chilling potential future for us all. On the other hand, if you're someone who's actually familiar with those online communities -- and since you're on WIRED reading this article, I'm going to guess it's the latter -- The Circle will likely sound more than a little tone-deaf.

Spoilers for the plot of The Circle follow.

The plot of The Circle is simple: In the near future, Mae Holland -- an ambitious college graduate who's unsure about her place in the world -- lands a job at The Circle, a groundbreaking tech company that created an all-in-one password solution and revolutionized the Internet by pushing users to adopt their real names online. One revolution wasn't enough for The Circle, however, and Holland soon becomes involved in the roll-out of an inexpensive, high-quality camera that streams HD video to the Internet and leads to a new golden age of honesty and crime-free living -- all for the low, low cost of individual privacy.

According to The Circle's corporate slogan, "ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN." Or in a more Orwellian turn: "SECRETS ARE LIES, SHARING IS CARING, PRIVACY IS THEFT."

While the book is fiction, the world it presents is similar enough to our own that its notion of how the Internet works seems incongruous and out of touch. Take TruYou, the password product that made The Circle so powerful. "TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year," the book tells us. "Though some sites were resistant at first, and free-internet advocates shouted about the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all meaningful opposition. It started with the commerce sites. Why would any non-porn site want anonymous users when they could know exactly who had come through the door? Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness."

Yes, that's right: In Eggers' world, only trolls and porno fans want the right to remain anonymous on the Internet. When forced to use real names, "all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable" because, as we all know, there's no way that boorish arguments could possibly start between people who know each other's names! That would be ludicrous ! He goes on to explain that, after tying everyone's online accounts, credit cards and bank accounts together, "the era of false identities, identity theft, multiple user names, complicated passwords and payment systems was over." Problem solved, Internet . Except that it only makes sense in a world where it'd be much easier to commit identity theft because you could access all that information in one central location.

Eggers, who has given interviews boasting about the lack of research he engaged in before starting the book, writes about technology and the tech world with the air of a man who's just, like, not sure about what the Internet really means . All throughout the book, there are strange moments that demonstrate his lack of research, like supposedly tech-savvy characters who don't understand that information "in the cloud" doesn't need server storage.

Reece Rogers

David Gilbert

Scott Gilbertson

Andy Greenberg

The problem isn't just that Eggers doesn't understand how technology works; it's that he also doesn't seem to realize how people work, either. At one point midway through the book, we're told that the idea of transparency has become so viral that politicians start wearing cameras that transmit an audio and video feed for every waking moment of their lives. This idea becomes so successful that 90 percent of U.S. politicians -- yes, U.S. politicians -- follow suit within three weeks. (Some politicians balk at the idea, but they quickly fall away from the narrative thanks to political scandals engineered, we're told in an off-hand aside, by The Circle.)

In his desire to create a world where The Circle rules all, Eggers creates so many extremely unlikely or outright impossible scenarios that happen simply because he needs them to happen. As they stack up through the course of the book, it gets harder and harder to take it seriously even as satire until finally it becomes outright fantasy, with only a tenuous connection to reality as we know it.

Eggers' distrust of the digital future is represented by Mae's ex-boyfriend, Mercer, a character who gets to give numerous speeches about the ways in which technology is dehumanizing everyone. "Even when I'm talking to you face-to-face you're telling me what some stranger thinks of me. It's become like we're never alone," he tells her at one point. Later, he is literally * driven off a cliff* by robot drones piloted by social media hordes.

An unsubtle fate, sure, but subtlety is a surprisingly rare commodity in the book. For example, after The Circle is referred to as a shark, there's a moment where Mae -- and millions of people on the Internet -- watch an octopus being torn apart by a shark in an aquarium, because it had nowhere to hide . "We saw every creature in that tank, didn’t we? We saw them devoured by a beast that turned them to ash. Don’t you see that everything that goes into that tank, with that beast, with this beast, will meet the same fate?" someone says after the shark/octopus scene, in case anyone had missed the point. Eggers bludgeons the reader with these moments, as if he's afraid that they wouldn't understand him otherwise.

The book's biggest fault, however, is that it's boring. Unrealistic tech and lack of subtlety can be forgiven if you're invested in the story; just ask anyone who's enjoyed a Dan Brown novel, or a Star Wars movie. For all of Eggers' gifts as a writer, including some lovely prose and surprising humor that surfaces here and there, The Circle lacks anything resembling tension or excitement. Every plot development is telegraphed, every mystery obvious. If you've ever wanted to see what Dave Eggers would sound like channeling Michael Crichton, then The Circle is for you.

It's a shame, because The Circle raises questions that are worth discussing. A theme Eggers returns to throughout the novel is that people aren't inherently good, but become good when others are watching; a benevolent big brother, if you will. Although the book spends a lot of time foreshadowing that The Circle as A Bad Company Up To Bad Things For Humanity, it actually accomplishes a lot of good: eradicating crime, quashing despotic regimes, deterring election fraud and making healthcare more available to Americans. The debate over whether such changes would be worth surrendering some level of privacy, freedom and individual responsibility could have been an interesting one -- if only characters had been allowed to see things in anything other than black and white.

Ironically, The Circle comes across like one of the Internet trolls that Eggers promises no longer exists in his fictional world: Entirely convinced of its righteousness, unafraid to use straw man arguments to "prove" its points, and completely disinterested in dialogue when polemic is easier. It's something that will be gratefully received by those who already agree with the arguments it put forwards, but met with disappointment and disinterest by everyone else. Perhaps the most appropriate response is that favored by many online trolls: The Circle ? Meh.

Jennifer M. Wood

Angela Watercutter

Eric Ravenscraft

Makena Kelly

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Book Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers’ novel about privacy and democracy in the Internet age,  The Circle,  asks, “If you aren’t being transparent with your personal information, what are you hiding?”  Set in the near future, the story revolves around an omniscient tech company called The Circle that wants to digitally record your past, present and future, allegedly in the name of  promoting human rights and democracy. Personal data is volunteered freely by the public, and so populist governments and online communities join the march towards total informational transparency. In The Circle , Eggers portends to expose the soft-totalitarian nightmare that waits at the logical end of such thinking – an extreme metaphor about transparency as a virtue, but maybe not extreme enough.

“All that happens must be known.”

The book follows young Mae Holland at work on the company’s sprawling Californian campus. Mae, accustomed to the drudgery and chicken-coop work of a call-centre, finds The Circle’s amenities and open-plan layout initially enticing – what’s more, the company’s medical benefits cover her sick father. The first part of the novel casually introduces this environment, an increasingly odd synergy between upbeat, blue-sky-thinking creatives and the institutionalisation of suspicion, conformity and mutualised invigilation.

The Circle’s digital tools are dominant, ubiquitous and free. An eager public adopts them voluntarily at first, but soon find that they have become mandatory. Privacy is theft. Secrets are lies. Caring is sharing. The company is managed by “Three Wise Men”: Tom Stenton, “world-striding CEO and self-described  Capitalist Prime ”; Eamon Bailey, the loveable, witty face of the company; and the enigmatic Ty Gospodinov, The Circle’s “boy-wonder visionary” and founder – who himself remains unseen and anonymous. Ty is the brains behind TruYou, a revolutionary system that combines social media profiles, payments, passwords, e-mail addresses and interests into one account. Following TruYou’s success, The Circle develops SeeChange, a surveillance platform where mini-cameras stream footage directly to the company, and then Demoxie, a system making Circle membership and direct democracy compulsory. Mae, along with a number of desperate and popularity-hungry politicians, volunteer to “go transparent”.

Despite flat characterisation and a reliance on overused dystopian tropes, there are many good ideas here on the danger and banality of sharing “intimate trivia”. Eggers is most effective in his critique of contemporary trends through exaggeration: the vapid nexus of social endorsements and the elevation of self-expression as an achievement in its own right. Circlers sound progressive, but this is juxtaposed against an unconscious acceptance of authoritarianism. Their utopianism is delusion: The Circle urges people to share more in order to mine their personal information for commercial and, eventually, political, purposes.

You’re here because your opinions are valued. They’re so valued that the world needs to know them – your opinions on just about everything. Isn’t that flattering?

Do novelists now have to be technologists to write contemporary fiction? Of course not. But intentionally not researching your milieu or inventing more convincing fictional technologies is a failure of craft. For such a contemporary novelist, Eggers’ prose lapses into primness and old-fashioned phrasing that takes some of the edge away from The Circle ’s silicon-gloss. The two main opponents to the closing of The Circle are both fairly unappealing, didactic, moralists who spout Eggers’ anti-modern humanism. As with Jonathan Franzen’s miserablism, The Circle is another example of a major contemporary novelist reacting conservatively to modern developments.

Mae is absurdly passive. There is a suggestion that the attitudes behind her desperation to fit in with the public’s eagerness to embrace The Circle eventually lead to totalitarianism. But nobody is that passive. The idea that society is going to the dogs because people post selfies and food porn belies a reactionary contempt for the public. It’s a basic lack of sympathy that disengages with the potential for real human subjects and instead lapses into moralism.

We don’t yet live in a panopticon of co-opted mass surveillance where somebody watches everything we do. The information mined by the NSA and GCHQ has been user-generated for semi-public viewing. But how much freedom should we have over our own data? How public is private? The Circle will make you think twice about how much you do share. After all, sharing is caring. Right?

About Wes Brown

Wes Brown is a writer based in London. He is a Co-ordinator at the National Association of Writers in Education, administrator at Magma Poetry and Director of Dead Ink Books. He is currently writing a novel based on the Shannon Matthew's kidnap and training as a professional wrestler for a book about masculinity and storytelling. His debut novel, Shark, was published in 2013.

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by Dave Eggers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2013

Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by...

A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers ( A Hologram for the King , 2012, etc.).

Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that’s effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she’s seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the “Circlers” are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae’s workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it’s a polemic that’s thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle’s rapid expansion—the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel’s tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle’s demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that’s terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel,  A Hologram for the King , but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-385-35139-3

Page Count: 504

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION | THRILLER | TECHNICAL & MEDICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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THE SILENT PATIENT

by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.

"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

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The Circle, book review: This way to the dystopia of your dreams

There's a thing that goes on when you're being recruited by a cult called ' love bombing '. Perhaps you're at a crossroads in your life when all sorts of things are scary and confusing, and along come these people who embrace you and fill you with light. Soon you find yourself subsumed in a whirlwind of activities, getting no sleep, barely eating, but part of this wonderful thing with a mission. One day, far along the road, you wake up and realize you're exhausted, starving and cut off from everyone else you know. Plus, they've got all your money. How can you dissent now?

To anyone who knows this, the opening chords of Dave Eggers' novel, The Circle are plenty alarming. Recruited by a friend already working there, Mae Holland, 24, arrives to take up her job at The Circle, a multiply dominant internet company. She will be a lowly 'customer experience' cog, but working at the most important and innovative company on earth has to beat her former boring, hateful job at a utility company, which she took to pay off her student loans.

Ah, life at rich internet companies! This is the beautifully padded cell in which Mae comes to work: game rooms and myriad food-filled kitchens, architecture, revered and impassioned CEOs, parties, on-site dorms — all masking the relentlessness of American corporate life. Like Joanna (played by Jennifer Aniston) in the millennial anthem movie Office Space , Mae is tormented by voluntary-but-mandatory requirements whose exact details no one will specify. Thirty pieces of flair? A hundred thousand 'zinger' likes? The best cults also know this rule: keep them insecure and off-balance, and they will be hooked on desperately trying to please.

Assimilation, with stumbles

Rapidly, Mae is assimilated. We watch nervously as she signs without reading myriad forms on arrival and tech support uploads the contents of her personal laptop and phone onto shiny latest-model replacements and syncs them to The Circle's cloud. She is signed up for the company's fortnightly medical checkups (prevention saves money!), and the medic clasps a high-tech bracelet around her wrist to monitor and report her physical parameters. As her cubicle progressively sprouts four, six, seven screens, her feedback score from customers debuts at 97 — excellent for a beginner, but she'll need to get that up to 100. (A skeptical aside: who are all these customers who not only fill out feedback surveys but answer follow-up questions?)

The best cults also know this rule: keep them insecure and off-balance, and they will be hooked on desperately trying to please.

There are stumbles. Mae's supervisor mediates a complaint by a co-worker she's never met: he's deeply hurt that she didn't attend his Portugal party. Why is she rejecting him? Haltingly, she finds an acceptable explanation. But a few weeks later, she's in trouble again: why is she rejecting the community by disappearing at weekends? Doesn't she realize that thousands of them, like her, go kayaking? And why didn't she tell them about her father's multiple sclerosis and insurance troubles? We can put him on the company plan! Why is she so selfish as not to share these things? Privacy is theft!

The joker in the pack is the cheap, light, ultra-high resolution, all-seeing camera The Circle launches. As they set off a competition among politicians to 'go clear', the novel takes on the aspect of a worked example of David Brin's 1998 book The Transparent Society . Will the day come when Mae longs for that musty, burlap-covered utility company job? Or will the 'filter bubble' of groupthink smother all opposition? This way to the dystopia of your dreams.

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‘The Circle’ by Dave Eggers

When I finished reading Dave Eggers's chilling and caustic novel, "The Circle," I felt like disconnecting from all my online devices and retreating for a while into an unplugged world. I gather that's what he had in mind.

Eggers displayed a scrappy ironic side in "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," his 2000 memoir about raising his younger brother after their parents died of cancer. He has written with finesse and empathy from the perspective of a "Lost Boy" forced to fight in Sudan's civil war ("What Is the What," 2006), a Syrian businessman caught up in a post-Katrina nightmare ("Zeitoun," 2009), and a failing American salesman suspended in a desert limbo, hoping to cut a deal with a Saudi monarch ("A Hologram for the King," 2012). "The Circle" is his most satiric work, with shades of Orwell, Swift, Voltaire, even Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein,'' in his dark vision of an insatiable Internet monopoly that breaches the barrier between public and private.

The novel opens as Mae Holland, 24, begins her first day of work at the Circle, a slightly futuristic amalgam of the social-media and personal-tech companies that have emerged over the past decade, from Google to Facebook, Twitter and Square. Mae is enchanted. "My God, Mae thought. It's heaven. The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands."

The 400-acre Circle campus seems like a mash-up of the Googleplex and Disney World, with a picnic area, tennis courts, clay and grass, organic gardens, and towering brushed steel and glass structures with names like Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Cultural Revolution.

On Dream Fridays Mae gets glimpses of "the Wise Men," the trio at the top of the Circle — avuncular Eamon Bailey, ruthlessly capitalistic CEO Tom Stenton, and, via video, reclusive young founder, Ty Gospodinov, who usually wears an oversized hoodie. Ty devised a unified operating system, which combined all users' needs and tools into one TruYou account — e-mail, social networking, banking, and purchasing. "TruYou changed the Internet, in toto, within a year," Eggers writes.

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The novel unfolds in an ever accelerating narrative flow. On her first day answering online customer questions, Mae is instructed to score 98 to 100 percent satisfaction on follow-up surveys. By her second week she is supervising a group of newbies. Within a month she is staying up all night to post continuously on the company's social networks after being criticized because her Participation Rank was low. She discovers that the community-building after-work and weekend events — concerts, circuses, theme nights, and all-night parties — are obligatory. And there's a dorm for those who don't want to go home.

Like a modern-day Candide, Mae maintains an optimistic front as she submits to the Circle's increasingly invasive demands. But her impulsive side leads her to take surprising risks. A nerdy coworker videotapes their wine-soaked sexual encounter (the Circle does not delete, she learns). And she enters into a clandestine on-campus affair with a mysterious, wiry, grey-haired man who calls himself Kalden. This relationship grows ever odder.

Back home, her high school boyfriend calls Mae's new colleagues "Digital Brownshirts," and her parents struggle with an insurance quagmire as her father is treated for multiple sclerosis. Mae's parents end up on the Circle's health plan. A miracle? Not exactly, as it turns out.

At the novel's midpoint, as Mae sinks deeper into the cult-like culture of the Circle, Bailey and Stenton begin rolling out newly minted Circle inventions, like SeeChange cameras the size of lollipops planted at Tahrir Square, along beachfronts, and in private homes.

A congresswoman goes "transparent," wearing a camera around her neck and allowing a live feed of her workdays to go online. Within weeks, 80 percent of politicians have followed her, leaving the other 20 percent to fight public perception they must have something to hide. Bailey and Stenton suggest that paying taxes, voter registration, even voting, should be woven into each individual's mandatory TruYou identity and constantly monitored. (If you don't vote, your TruYou account is frozen.) The developers get to work.

Like a concerned uncle, the smooth-talking Bailey coaxes Mae into making statements highlighted onscreen during a Dream Friday chat: "SECRETS ARE LIES. CARING IS SHARING. PRIVACY IS THEFT." Then he announces that Mae, "in the interest of all she saw and could offer the world," would be going transparent immediately. Soon she accumulates millions of followers whose opinions she tracks from a wrist-mounted screen in a continuous flow of smiles, frowns, and zings. Closing the Circle, with mass birth-to-death transparency, becomes the new corporate goal.

Exhausted, Mae has a brief "blasphemous flash" that "the volume of information, of data, of judgments, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too many desires of too many people and too many opinions of too many people, and too much pain . . . and having all of it constantly collated, collected, added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more manageable — it was too much." Indeed.

"The Circle'' reads as if it were written in an urgent rush, just barely ahead of the headlines. Its ending comes as abruptly as one character's drive off a bridge. We are, Eggers warns, at a pivot in history. "There used to be the option of opting out. But now that's over.'' It's a "totalitarian nightmare," he writes."Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape."

"The Circle" is biting, even vicious at times. Despite the polemics, Eggers raises timely questions about transparency, privacy, democracy, and the sinister side of the Internet. And he offers a corrective, in Kalden's manifesto, "The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." "Not every human activity can be measured," Eggers writes.

The list ends with a plea: "We must all have the right to disappear."

Jane Ciabattari is vice president/online and former president of the National Book Critics Circle. Reach her at [email protected] .

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The highlight of "The Circle" is producer-costar Tom Hanks ' performance as the CEO of the titular company, a Google- or Apple-styled high-tech octopus that's spreading its tentacles into every nook of our lives. The brilliance of Hanks' performance as Eamon Bailey, founder of The Circle, is that it's not remarkably different from the humble, charming average guy performance he gives as himself whenever he goes on talk shows, accepts awards, or narrates a documentary about the unsung heroes of World War II. For whatever reason, you can't help trusting Tom Hanks. That's why " The Simpsons Movie " cast him in a voice cameo selling "The New Grand Canyon," a name for the hole that would have been left in the ground if the military went through with its plan to bomb the recently contaminated town of Springfield into oblivion. "Hello, I'm Tom Hanks," he says. "The US government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine."

The notion that Tom Hanks, a patriotic emblem right up there with apple pie and the American flag, would be hired to put a smiley face on an American Hiroshima is scarier than a lot of current horror films. You just know that if he ever used his considerable influence for evil rather than good, almost no one would resist him, and the handful that warned against him would not be believed. And yet Hanks has never played a straight-up bad guy who chills you to the bone whenever he shows up onscreen. The closest he's gotten to that sort of character was in "The Road to Perdition," where he played a mob hitman who was more of a morose antihero than a bad guy, and the " The Ladykillers ," a slapstick comedy that cast him as an obnoxious, bumbling Satan with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. His performance in "The Circle" as Evil Tom Hanks is the best thing in the picture.

That isn't saying much. James Ponsoldt's film based on Dave Eggers' same-titled 2013 book has a lot of good ideas and a few engrossing sequences, but it never quite finds a groove, or even a mode, and it ends in an abrupt, unsatisfying way. Emma Watson stars as Mae Holland, a young woman who gets a job at The Circle, a cult-like corporation based in the Bay Area that has a campus with man-made lakes and a sky filled with buzzing drones.

You probably have a good idea of where this story is going even if you've never read Eggers' book or seen an anti-tech warning tale before. Mae is handpicked by Eamon and his right-hand man, company co-founder Tom Stenton ( Patton Oswalt ), to take part in an experiment to glorify a new tiny camera they've invented. She'll wear cameras on herself and plant them all over her apartment and in other significant locations of her life and embrace the idea of "total transparency" hyped by her boss. "Transparency" and "integration" and other multi-syllable words get tossed around a lot by guys like Eamon, who are really interested in getting access to our data so they can monitor our lives, sell us new products, and resell our information to third parties. "The Circle" gets this and uses it to generate low-level paranoia in every scene, and amps it up whenever Eamon strides onstage to give one of his TED-talk styled addresses to the company or to unveil a groundbreaking new product (such as the tiny spherical cameras that Eamon distributes all over the world, giving the resultant Orwellian surveillance network a granola-crunching progressive label: SeeChange).

The problem is, "The Circle" never finds a good way to escalate its paranoia in anything other than a tedious, obvious way. And the meat-and-potatoes manner in which Ponsoldt has adapted and directed this material reveals the limits of his talent. A mad visionary stylist who paints with light and sound might've made a memorable film out of this story, but that's not the kind of director Ponsoldt is. He thrives in a low-key mode, telling stories of ordinary people interacting in ordinary spaces; "Off the Black," " Smashed " and especially " The Spectacular Now " were about as good as intimate character-driven indies could be, and " The End of the Tour " had its moments, too. There's a Hanks-like decency to the way he looks at human beings. 

But this story doesn't have many recognizable human beings in it. They're mostly plot functions with names. Watson's character is The Heroine, really more of a Gullible Ingenue. Glenne Headley and the late Bill Paxton are The Parents (Paxton shakes visibly because his character has multiple sclerosis). Hanks is the Villain, even though he doesn't play him that way, and Oswalt's character is the Scary Right Hand Man, sizing up Mae and pushing her back onto the beaten path whenever she's about to stray. Ellar Coltrane of " Boyhood " plays her ex-boyfriend Mercer, who warns her that The Circle is evil and that she's selling her privacy and her soul. Karen Gillan is The Friend who hires Mae to work for The Circle, only to become jealous and irritated when the founder selects Mae as the company's poster girl, then worried when the extent of Eamon's exploitation becomes apparent.

What I'm describing here is the cast of a horror movie that traffics in archetypal situations, one in which the characters don't have to be plausible human beings to rivet our attention and merit our sympathy. David Cronenberg and David Lynch , both of whom might've done a brilliant job with this same material, are aces at making films fueled by dream logic and filled with archetypal characters and images. (Just imagine what either of them could do with Oswalt, a reliably excellent comic character actor who unexpectedly radiates power and menace here.) Ponsoldt does not appear, on the basis of this film, to be that sort of director, and that sort of director is what "The Circle" needed. This movie might represent the least sensible match of filmmaker and material since Sidney Lumet adapted " The Wiz ."

As you watch the film, the subdued performances, realistic-looking locations and active-but-not-baroque camerawork make you expect a more realistic film about tech, along the lines of " The Social Network " or " Steve Jobs ." When the story turns into something akin to a nightmarish cousin of " The Truman Show " or " Network ," or the kid sister of Cronenbeg's "ExistenZ," you want it to get bigger, wilder, more outrageous, more frightening, and it's too nice and reasonable and conscientious to do that. The result feels undernourished in just about every way, although Hanks's performance, John Boyega's brief role as a founding programmer, and a couple of frightening action sequences break through the tedium. This is one of those movies that has nothing and everything wrong with it. It's frustrating in a singular way.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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The Circle (2017)

Rated PG-13 for a sexual situation, brief strong language and some thematic elements including drug use.

Emma Watson as Mae Holland

Tom Hanks as Eamon Bailey

John Boyega as Kalden

Karen Gillan as Annie Allerton

Ellar Coltrane as Mercer Medeiros

Patton Oswalt as Tom Stenton

Bill Paxton as Mae's Father

Glenne Headly as Mae's Mother

Poorna Jagannathan as Dr. Jessica Villalobos

Ellen Wong as Renata

Nate Corddry as Dan

• James Ponsoldt

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Dave Eggers

Cinematographer

• Matthew Libatique
• Lisa Lassek
• Franklin Peterson
• Danny Elfman

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An Ambitious Novel Takes Flight

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By Lynn Steger Strong

• Published May 2, 2021 Updated May 4, 2021

GREAT CIRCLE By Maggie Shipstead

Within the first 60 pages of Maggie Shipstead’s “Great Circle,” there are two plane crashes, the beginning of a Hollywood rendition of a plane crash and a sunken ship. There’s childhood abuse, adultery and a presumed postpartum suicide. There’s an orphaned 2-year-old and a father sent to Sing Sing as a result of his choice to save his infant twins from the aforementioned sinking ship. There is also a brush with death inside a car that’s rusting in the middle of a rushing stream.

In grad school, I had a professor who used to warn against “starting too high.” She’d hold her arm up in the air and tell us: “If you start here, you have to know that’s where you have to stay.” The start of Shipstead’s book — her third, after “Seating Arrangements” in 2012 and “Astonish Me” in 2014 — is thrilling and complicated, with many different threads laid out and back stories carefully and richly wrought; for the next 500-odd pages, I felt the fear I feel when a student’s work starts strong, when other novels open high — knowing that, more often than not, lofty heights can’t be sustained. But “Great Circle” starts high and maintains altitude. One might say it soars.

Shipstead’s tale follows the story of two women. The first, Marian Graves, is one of the shipwrecked twins. Her decision to devote her life to flying is immediate and unrelenting: A biplane, “abrupt and magnificent,” swoops down so close to her, “it seemed she could have touched the wheels.” This happens when Marian is 12 — “at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage” — and, from that point on, a pilot is all she will ever want to be. It’s one of those novelistic origin stories that do not leave space for questions, but Shipstead manages to pull it off.

[ Read an excerpt from “Great Circle.” ]

The other main character (though her story doesn’t take up the time or space that Marian’s does) is Hadley Baxter, the recently shamed and fired star of a “Twilight”-esque series of movies, who is set to play Marian onscreen. In one of my favorite details, the film is based in part on a journal found floating in its own life preserver in the Arctic, years after Marian’s plane was lost as she attempted to longitudinally circumnavigate the globe.

When we meet her, Hadley is on a path of self-destruction (as many of the best novelistic renditions of Hollywood starlets are). She is profoundly lonely, ill advisedly in love with her former co-star’s (and former boyfriend’s) married agent. She might also have a crush on the movie’s backer. Misdeeds ensue.

Told in the first person — Marian’s sections are told in the third — Hadley’s share of the novel offers an intimate and biting point of view, combining the worn-out, jaded sheen of Hollywood with the vulnerability of a girl attempting to leave her old self behind. Here’s Hadley, describing lying in bed with her then-boyfriend’s agent, while the boyfriend waits for them to join him at a restaurant: “We’d had sex, but we were lying there talking, making those first big careless gleeful excavations when everything about someone is new and unknown, before you have to get out your little picks and brushes, work tediously around the fragile buried stuff.”

Marian’s twin brother, Jamie — a sensitive, vegetarian, animal-loving painter — is another character we care for. So is their ne’er-do-well gambler painter alcoholic uncle, who took them in when their father went to prison and when he decided not to parent after his release. While she’s still a teenager, Marian marries a wealthy bootlegger; their relationship is oppressive and turns violent, prompting her to escape to Alaska, where she joins an all-women’s contingent of pilots during World War II. She will find love there, and it will be more dangerous and risky than the flights. There will also be immense loss.

“Great Circle” can sometimes feel a bit baggy, but that seems to be Shipstead’s intention. This is a book explicitly invested in sweep. Here’s Marian, in her journal: “I wish to measure my life against the dimensions of the planet”; and Jamie, on his art: “I’ve started to think what I really want to paint is the too-bigness.”

It’s a novel filled with the back stories of tangential characters. We have an overlay of Charles Lindbergh’s story; we track some of Amelia Earhart’s life events and voyages. We get “An Incomplete History of Missoula, Montana” that opens with the phrase “Fifteen thousand years ago.” But this far-ranging breadth is as much the project of this novel as any of these individual lives — including all the ways each life exists within the context of so many others, the way the natural world informs and forms us, all the ways we are still only and particularly ourselves.

Novels are about parts, but then the parts have to work together to create a whole. Being perhaps a less ambitious novelist than Shipstead, I kept thinking of all the other novels that might live inside this one. What’s so impressive is how deeply we come to care about each of these people, and how the shape and texture of each of their stories collide to build a story all its own. The ending manages to pull each thread in a way that feels both thrilling and inevitable.

At a moment when so many novels seem invested in subverting form, “Great Circle” follows in a long tradition of Big Sweeping Narratives. I hope we always have literature that forces us to reconsider what the form can hold, but also: One of the many things that novels can offer is an immersive sense of pleasure, a sense that something you’ve seen done before is being done so well that it feels newly and uniquely alive.

“Great Circle” grasps for and ultimately reaches something extraordinary. It pulls off this feat through individual sentences and sensations — by getting each secondary and tertiary character right. In thinking about flight (and ambition and art), there is a suggestion that the larger the reach, the more necessary a stable foundation. Here we have an action-packed book rich with character, but it’s at the level of the sentence and the scene, the small but unforgettable salient detail, that books finally succeed or fail. In that, “Great Circle” is consistently, often breathtakingly, sound.

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of “Want.”

GREAT CIRCLE By Maggie Shipstead 608 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.

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Alert! Meet the cast of The Circle season 6 — including an A.I. catfish

"Entertainment Weekly" has the exclusive first look at the brand new kind of catfish that will keep this #CircleFam on their toes.

Sydney Bucksbaum is a writer at Entertainment Weekly covering all things pop culture – but TV is her one true love. She currently lives in Los Angeles but grew up in Chicago so please don't make fun of her accent when it slips out.

Alert! A new kind of catfish is entering the chat on The Circle .

Entertainment Weekly has your exclusive first look at the season 6 cast of Netflix's social media competition series, and for the first time ever, an Artificial Intelligence bot plays the game as a catfish to keep the #CircleFam on their toes.

Courtesy of Netflix

According to the official season description, the show is moving to a new city, with new twists, but it's still the same game as "catfish, connections, and chaos await as new influencers enter the chat and compete for a huge cash prize."

Check out the full season 6 cast as well as a preview trailer below.

"The Circle" season 6 cast

Brandon catfishing as "olivia", caress catfishing as "paul", jordan a.k.a. big j, quori-tyler a.k.a. qt, a.i. bot catfishing as "max".

Will the A.I. a.k.a. "Max" be the ultimate catfish? Or will all the humans be able to figure out that a literal robot has infiltrated their fake social media platform?

Watch the season 6 trailer below:

The first four episodes of  The Circle  season 6 premiere April 17 on Netflix, with new episodes rolling out every Wednesday leading up to the finale on May 8.

Sign up for  Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter  to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Related content:

• The Circle returning for season 6
• The Circle  season 5 winner Sam Carmona breaks down that shocking ending
• The Circle  season 5's Tom Houghton dishes on episode 12's blocking: 'I stayed loyal'
• Shubham Goel talks returning to  The Circle  season 5 as a catfish

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Book Review: Hampton Sides revisits Captain James Cook, a divisive figure in the South Pacific

In his fateful final Pacific voyage, Captain James Cook failed to find an ocean passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans but he did find Pacific islands, peoples and cultures unknown to Europeans

Captain James Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific in the late 1700s exemplify the law of unintended consequences. He set out to find a westward ocean passage from Europe to Asia but instead, with the maps he created and his reports, Cook revealed the Pacific islands and their people to the world.

In recent decades, Cook has been vilified by some scholars and cultural revisionists for bringing European diseases, guns and colonization. But Hampton Sides' new book, “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook,” details that Polynesian island life and cultures were not always idyllic.

Priests sometimes made human sacrifices. Warriors mutilated enemy corpses. People defeated in battle sometimes were enslaved. King Kamehameha, a revered figure in Hawaii , unified the Hawaii an Islands in 1810 at a cost of thousands of warriors’ lives.

Sides’ book is sure to rile some Indigenous groups in Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific Islands, who contend Cook ushered in the destruction of Pacific Island cultures.

An obelisk in Hawaii marking where Cook was killed in 1779 had been doused with red paint when Sides visited as part of his research for this book. Over Cook’s name was written “You are on native land.”

But Cook, Sides argues, didn’t come to conquer.

Sides draws deeply from Cook’s and other crew members’ diaries and supplements that with his own reporting in the South Pacific.

Cook emerges from the book as an excellent mariner and decent human being, inspiring the crew to want to sail with him. However, on the voyage of the late 1770s, crew members noted that Cook seemed agitated, not his usual self.

What may have ailed Cook on that final voyage we probably never will know, but we do know that his voyages opened the Pacific islands to the world, and as new arrivals always do, life is changed forever.

Was Cook a villain for his explorations?

Sides make a persuasive case in 387 pages of diligent, riveting reporting that Cook came as a navigator and mapmaker and in dramatically opening what was known about our world, made us all richer in knowledge.

When his journals and maps reached England after his death, it was electrifying news. No, an ocean passage across North America to the Pacific did not exist, but Europeans now knew that islands in the Pacific were populated by myriad cultures; Sides’ reporting is clear that Cook treated them all with respect.

He and his fellow British mariners, though, did lack one skill that would seem vital for sailors and would have better connected the British sailors to the peoples of the Pacific, whose cultures and livelihoods were closely connected to the ocean: Neither Cook nor any of his fellow officers could swim.

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The Circle review – love, tears and tender truths when Jane Asher comes to call

Orange Tree, Richmond Strong emotions rule in a candid and well-judged Somerset Maugham comedy twisting romantic fates across generations of squabbling society

E lizabeth (Olivia Vinall), the dissatisfied young wife at the heart of Somerset Maugham’s 1921 drama, enters the drawing room holding a copy of Anna Karenina . It’s the kind of detail in Tom Littler’s deft production that speaks, well, volumes about romantic longings in a prosaic English country house.

Elizabeth is married to Arnold (Pete Ashmore), a stolid MP, and her imagination works overtime as she anticipates their weekend guests. In Arnold’s childhood, his mother, a famed society beauty, scandalously ran off with her lover, yet the ageing renegades disappoint: Jane Asher ’s Lady Kitty gaudily decorated in scarlet, all squawk and clatter, bickering with a querulous Nicholas Le Prevost. It wouldn’t be so dismaying if Elizabeth wasn’t herself contemplating doing a romantic runner.

Maugham – the missing link between Wilde and Coward – was gay, but unhappily married to Syrie, a celebrated interior designer. Does her passion inform Arnold, prone to lecture his neighbours on their decorative missteps? He shows more fondness for furniture than family: fair enough, perhaps, given the family, but discouraging to a young bride.

How do you design a satisfying private life? Arnold’s father (Clive Francis, wonderfully pitched), enjoys “the luxury of assisting financially a succession of dear little things, in a somewhat humble sphere, between the ages of 20 and 25”. When they hit 25 he packs them off with a diamond ring, like the Leonardo DiCaprio of the home counties.

Maugham’s play is consistently candid and surprising, and Littler’s production keeps us guessing about what Elizabeth will, or should, do. Vinall’s wide eyes fix on another breezy visitor: a hearty Englishman, here reimagined as a charming Indian businessman (Chirag Benedict Lobo, limber, flirty and in really good trousers).

Littler’s debut production as artistic director at the Orange Tree is strongly acted and nicely judged (jokes about dentures find a sympathetic audience), but also leans feelingly into the emotion. Asher and Le Prevost retain a seam of tenderness beneath their squabbling, while Ashmore suggests the unhappy toddler within the middle-aged man. Tears and tantrums are always close to the surface: following the heart’s demands is never easy.

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• Orange Tree theatre

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