Dave Eggars' well-written futuristic novel The Circle was lent to me by my friend Sue Maddock and fills up the square in this summer's library challenge bingo labelled "Read a Recommendation from a friend." It's not a very distant future, but eerily close, such that the possibilities raised in the book are uncomfortable (at least I hope so). Mae Holland, with the help of her best friend Annie, is able to leave her dull job in a utility plant to join the fabulous Circle, where she is progressively drawn into a world where she believes she is making a real difference in the world, being noticed and applauded, but of course all at the price of accepting the necessity of being completely transparent to the world. Although there are some places where I felt, in the reader's mind anyway, that Mae had changed in ways that weren't adequately explained, I am left with admiration for Eggars' ability to have constructed arguments (as they appear regularly in the book to justify the eroding privacy in the world) which ring so logical as to be appealing, even to intelligent minds. It reminds me that every individual is acting on what she or he believes to be the best path based on one's individual intelligence and how it is we each construct arguments for what we believe, often difficult to deconstruct and find flaws with. How do you argue with steps in society which guarantee no more child abductions, no more violence without immediate apprehension by authorities, with complete transparency from all elected officials? "Who but a fringe character would try to impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world?" Mae asks herself. She herself engenders such gems of catch phrases (posted on tiles throughout the Circle work campus) as "Secrets are Lies", "Sharing is Caring" and "Privacy is Theft". But the arguments are indeed enticing, even beguiling: "...she thought of that painting of the Constitutional Convention, all those men in powdered wigs and waistcoats, standing stiffly, all of them wealthy white men who were only passable interested in representing their fellow humans. They were purveyors of an innately flawed kind of democracy, where only the wealthy were elected, where their voices were heard loudest, where they passed their seats in Congress to whatever similarly entitled person they deemed appropriate. There had been some incremental improvements in the system since then, maybe, but Demoxie ...was purer, was the only chance at direct democracy the world had ever known." Of course, is forced participation a real democracy? Mae becomes addicted to this world and the efforts to "complete the circle" in spite of two voices of dissent, her former lover Mercer and a shadowy character named Kalden, and she does briefly acknowledge feeling twinges of inexplicable "tearing" inside her. She is wooed by the concept of perfection and calm: "Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected." But are we, as humans, better as messy, sometimes anxious and yet yearning and glorious individuals than as cookie-cutter members of a tightly controlled yet danger-free society?

on the bench on the porch outside the store/pizzeria