The circle, by Dave Eggers

I wish I had back the hours I spent plowing through this book.  It is just bad – wooden characters, stilted dialog, a female protagonist who is totally unbelievable, and then there’s its needless length, 491 pages to get to a curiously anticlimactic end.  An excerpt from The circle that was the lead article in a recent New York Times Magazine seemed intriguing.  I thought it was probably the first chapter.  However, I discovered after the first few pages of the novel that it takes 180 more to get to point where the NYT abridgement ends and not enough happens in between to justify the verbiage.  The Circle is a Silicon Valley Internet firm that is a mash-up of Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and Apple, controlling access to information, inventing cool new technological gadgets, and led by the charismatic three Wise Men.  Tiny cameras begin tracking everyone.  Wrist bracelets record the wearers’ physical health and their every move.  Everyone spends their waking hours “zinging” (tweeting) or sending “frowns” and “smiles” (likes).  Soon the Circle will control the world.  There’s a clunky device involving a transparent shark, some seahorses, and an octopus kept in an aquarium.  These previously unknown creatures are supposedly brought back from deep undersea in the Marianas Trench by a vessel invented by the Circle – wouldn’t they need major water pressure to survive, not just an aquarium?  A good, or even great, novel about the erosion of privacy and the trivialization of human interactions by “friending” random strangers in the digital age may yet be written.  This isn’t it.  Yes, 491 pp.