Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Eggers's uneven follow-up to The Circle, which revolved around a futuristic social network, sparkles with provocative ideas but has trouble keeping itself together. The Every, a conglomerate provider of social media, internet search, and commerce, has subsumed the Circle, the utopian company featured in the previous book, and Delaney, an anti-monopoly-protagonist, seeks to destroy the Every from the inside. Eggers spends much of his time in "setup" mode, with a self-referential style that lands some nice jabs ("There had been a movie made about the Circle... and yet the movie, despite its pedigree, was considered unsuccessful and was seen by few"). More often, though, the work feels subsumed by anxiety over readers' attention spans ("No book should be over 500 pages, and if it is over 500, we found the absolute limit to anyone's tolerance is 577," says Delaney's team leader, Alessandro). And yet, these scenes of dialogue contain some of the best material, particularly when she plays her boss with made-up stories about how she's learned to trust aggregate critical judgments over her own taste, as part of her effort to fill him with bad ideas that would bring down the system. The climax involving Delaney's plot is, like Eggers's vision of the near future, plausible if predictable. This'll be a bit too wooly for many readers' tastes, but there's plenty of sharp apocalyptic satire. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
The Every: it's a globally dominant, immeasurably rich, ominously powerful, yet wildly embraced new company that resulted from the merger of the world's largest search engine/social media company and the top e-commerce site. Former forest ranger Delaney Wells wangles an entry-level job there with a secret purpose: she wants to take down the Every from within. More sharp social commentary from Eggers.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The tech-driven nightmare of The Circle (2013) grows even darker in this sequel. In The Circle, Eggers imagined an unnamed Google- and Facebook-like entity growing ever more invasive in our private lives. Headlines having validated his bleak vision of tech monopolies, he's doubled down for this near-future dystopian yarn. The Circle has bought "an ecommerce behemoth named after a South American jungle," becoming an all but inescapable megacorporation called the Every, though pockets of "trogs" attempt to escape its grip of constant surveillance. Delaney, the novel's hero, is a trog eager to destroy the Every from the inside. Her method is to propose ideas that are outrageous or horridly invasive enough to prompt mass revolt: a resentment-sowing tool to determine how sincere your friends and family are being toward you, a virtual tourism app that dissuades people from eco-unfriendly travel (thus outraging a host of industries), algorithms that whittle away personal choice. The cruel joke, of course, is that society rapidly accepts every surveillance-heavy, technofascist idea she helps introduce. Eggers' outsize caricature of big tech is meant as satire, a bulwark against his assertion that "humor does not easily survive the intense filtering that the twenty-first century made mandatory." But the jokes are mostly relegated to product jargon (AuthentiFriend, OwnSelf, PrefCom, KisKis) or Orwellian lines ("The World Wants to Be Watched"), though a witty set piece attacks algorithmic attempts to defang classic novels. Otherwise, much as in The Circle, Eggers is lecturing behind the thinnest scrim of a plot: The fates of Delaney, the Every, and humanity are never in doubt. The novel's rollout reflects Eggers' anti-monopolist ethos: It was made available exclusively to independent bookstores a month before wide release. But it's a baggy, plodding jeremiad however you acquire it. Further proof that noble values don't guarantee good fiction. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
