PositiveThe New YorkerEven without the searing wit of 1984, the book is capable of landing on point—when it’s at its most irksome. Where 1984 has the vigilant Police Patrol and Thought Police, The Circle has SeeChange and Clarification. Surveillance isn’t a bad word; it’s a gift, even a human right … The Circle is as much Google as it is Facebook (though it officially stands in for neither, as the Circle is supposed to have succeeded them). Google’s motto, ‘Don’t be evil,’ is upended in Eggers’s telling: these companies may not have started out as the clubhouses of moustache-twirling villains, but, he writes, in a return to Orwell, ‘We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare.’
