[This is the first draft of a review I wrote for a magazine last year: I had misremembered my brief, with respect to the wordage, and over-indulged myself. When I submitted it the books editor gently pointed to the more capsule-sized slot I had to fill, and I chopped it down. It is a good discipline, writing effectively in brief, and my initial over-length version was entirely my fault. But blogs are more forgiving of prolixity, so here we go.]
Dave Eggers, The Every (2021)
Review by Adam Roberts
Those for whom Dave Eggers’ name evokes only his celebrated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) may be surprised at just how much straight fiction he has written. ‘Those for whom’, here, is code for: me. I confess it, the pros and cons of social transparency being one of the themes of the book under review. Though I know his influential literary magazine McSweeney’s, and have read his book-length nonfiction (his 2009 Hurricaine Katrina book Zeitoun is exceptional), I had not realised Eggers had published so much fiction—thirteen lengthy novels.
Here’s one of them: The Circle (2013), a blockbuster satire on the burgeoning power of internet companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google. We follow idealistic Mae Holland as she is hired by ‘The Circle’ (Eggers’ stand-in organisation for those, I suppose, potentially litigious others) through various in-work adventures, sexual as well as technological. She rises through the corporate ranks by wholeheartedly endorsing the company line, a kind of smiley-face Orwellianism: ‘Secrets are lies’; ‘Sharing is caring’; ‘Privacy is theft’. The Circle’s customers purchase a single online identity through the company, called ‘TruYou’, through which they have access to absolutely everything in the digital universe. This has ended all online fraud, an outcome that strikes me as very unlikely, but there you go.
I summarise this older title at some length because Eggers’ latest novel, The Every, is a direct sequel to it, and hard to follow without some sense of what has gone before—so much so, indeed, that in an act of unusual-for-me reviewerish due diligence I went out and bought a copy of The Circle to bring myself up to speed. Why Eggers considered a sequel needful is something of a puzzle. Conceivably he figured a decade was a long time in internet commerce and tech culture, and he wanted to revisit the ground with more up-to-date sensibilities. But the novel he has written doesn’t tread any new ground. It’s like The Circle, but more so. The Every parses the same mix of admiration for the smiley, shiny spaces of these tech giants and disapprobation at their increasingly totalitarian grip on global culture and society. It even has broadly the same shape as the earlier novel: a young woman, here Delaney Wells, joins the world’s biggest tech company and works her way up.
‘The Circle’ has now merged with ‘the world’s largest e-commerce website’, an entity Eggers coyly identifies only as ‘named after the South American jungle’, surely not enough to get him off the libel hook should Amazon take umbrage. The resulting commercial behemoth is ‘the Every’, whose employers are called ‘Everyones’ and whose sunlit, optimistic, rationalising and secrecy-averse tentacles are in every aspect of human life. The first hundred pages of this novel take us through Delaney’s company orientation, clueing-in the reader to the Every’s corporate culture, wandering its amenities-rich campus, dorm-like housing, gyms and recreation activities. We also catch-us up with several key characters from The Circle, including Mae, who is now one of the organisation’s Head Honchos.
But Delaney has a secret: she’s a double agent, a luddite whose hatred of modernity’s internet supersaturation was acquired in her youth, and cemented when her parents texted her news of her beloved grandmother JuJu’s death with sad-faced emojis. She hopes to bring The Every down from the inside. Will she succeed? It’ll take you nearly six hundred meandering pages to find out!
In essence The Every stages the same moral debate as The Circle: we may agree our increasingly internet saturated world is becoming a real-life Brave New World or Black Mirror nightmare and may even feel moved to free ‘the people’ from this false Zuckerbergtopia—but do the people themselves actually want to be free? Perhaps they’re perfectly happy having their data mined, their actions nudged by clever algorithms and a free lifetime’s supply of ‘You Won’t Believe What These Former Celebrities Look Like Now (Number 4 Will Astonish You!)’ clickbaits to pass the time. A potentially interesting dilemma this, though the novel’s satirical focus flattens it, and it’s a little hard to see that a second hefty novel adds much to the drift of the first.
In essence, The Every’s tyranny is an algorithmocracy. Algorithms govern every aspect of Eggers extrapolated future. Workers are continually monitored (‘all the performance measurements, participation points, smiles, ComAnons, step count, sleep hours, frowns’—ComAnon is a separate app that allows employees to register complaints about co-workers) and the data aggregated by a programme called ‘Everything in Order’, which prompts promotions and sackings, or, as the Every prefers to call it, ‘deëmployment’. The company sells an ‘AuthentiFriend’ app by which you can rank your friendships, disburdening yourself of those pals who don’t score highly enough, and ‘U4U’ a personality test so widely adopted it has superseded psychology (‘Freud’s work has the intellectual heft of a streetside astrology’ says Gabriel Chu, the app’s inventor). There are many more. Here’s one: ‘EveryContent’ aggregates all film and novel storylines by their audience/reader ratings, creating a template to perfect all future books and films: no epistolary novels, no unpleasant characters, no outdated moral positions and so on. ‘No book should be over 500 pages,’ is one EveryContent rule, though with a knowing nod we’re also told: ‘if it is over 500, we found the absolute limit to anyone’s tolerance is 577’. The Every is exactly 577 pages long.
If this style of humour is your bag, then there’s stuff in this novel to amuse you, though I found the comedy diffuse and often second hand, and the satire strangely blunt. Having risen through the organisation, Delaney decides to bring it down by putting out apps so absurd that people will revolt against the Every, amongst them ‘Satisfied?’, an app that tells you if you enjoyed the meal you just ate, and ‘Did I?’, which informs the postcoital whether they orgasmed or not, and also rates orgasm intensity via a global database. These releases are all huge hits. No app is too ridiculous for humanity. I was reminded of David Nobbs’ Reginald Perrin who, back in the 70s, set up ‘Grot’ to sell useless rubbish intending it to fail, only for it to become an international success. I’m sure neither Eggers nor his core millennial fanbase have so much as heard of Reggie, though they would have done so if they had downloaded my app ‘NothingNewUnderTheSun’.
The Every grows ever more tyrannical and Maoist (their steering group is even called ‘The Gang of 40’). Having shamed and pressured people out of international travel—to save the environment, you see—they apply sanctions to anyone who commutes anywhere except on foot and by bike, and crash the US market for bananas and pineapples. And so it goes on: ‘millions more became unemployed with every new thing the Every cancelled, but there was always work in the Every warehouses, to work beside robot package-pickers and while monitored by AI and be paid a fair minimum wage.’ ‘This’, Eggers adds, ‘was an orderly system.’ This dystopian whomp-whomp of this increasingly grates. Satire needn’t jettison all nuance, after all.
Not that the ‘ordinary’ people come out of the novel any better: they are all either sheep, pusillanimous conformists, or eager Maoist converts: Eggers tries to strike comic-satirical sparks from various snowflakes and triggerables. Delaney organises a work’s outing, but her coworkers are furious, outraged by the unexceptional play-list she selects for the bus-ride there—hearing an Otis Redding song ‘ruins the day’ (‘woman-hater said [the complaint], supported with a link to an unsigned and evidence-less post hinting that he’d been unkind to an ex-girlfriend he’d met shortly before the bay and the dock and the sitting’). When the Every bans pets as a kind of slavery (‘Everyones will be given a workweek to remove their animal captives from campus’) nobody complains.
There are some interesting smaller-scale think-pieces herein, but they are embedded in a novel with the texture of suet. Every now and again Eggers throws-in a bomb—an actual bomb—to try and liven the narrative. But the novel remains unenlivened, right though to its twist ending, which many readers will see coming an ergonomic mile off. The Every is one not for everyone.
In essence, The Every’s tyranny is an algorithmocracy. Algorithms govern every aspect of Eggers extrapolated future. Workers are continually monitored (‘all the performance measurements, participation points, smiles, ComAnons, step count, sleep hours, frowns’—ComAnon is a separate app that allows employees to register complaints about co-workers) and the data aggregated by a programme called ‘Everything in Order’, which prompts promotions and sackings, or, as the Every prefers to call it, ‘deëmployment’. The company sells an ‘AuthentiFriend’ app by which you can rank your friendships, disburdening yourself of those pals who don’t score highly enough, and ‘U4U’ a personality test so widely adopted it has superseded psychology (‘Freud’s work has the intellectual heft of a streetside astrology’ says Gabriel Chu, the app’s inventor). There are many more. Here’s one: ‘EveryContent’ aggregates all film and novel storylines by their audience/reader ratings, creating a template to perfect all future books and films: no epistolary novels, no unpleasant characters, no outdated moral positions and so on. ‘No book should be over 500 pages,’ is one EveryContent rule, though with a knowing nod we’re also told: ‘if it is over 500, we found the absolute limit to anyone’s tolerance is 577’. The Every is exactly 577 pages long.
If this style of humour is your bag, then there’s stuff in this novel to amuse you, though I found the comedy diffuse and often second hand, and the satire strangely blunt. Having risen through the organisation, Delaney decides to bring it down by putting out apps so absurd that people will revolt against the Every, amongst them ‘Satisfied?’, an app that tells you if you enjoyed the meal you just ate, and ‘Did I?’, which informs the postcoital whether they orgasmed or not, and also rates orgasm intensity via a global database. These releases are all huge hits. No app is too ridiculous for humanity. I was reminded of David Nobbs’ Reginald Perrin who, back in the 70s, set up ‘Grot’ to sell useless rubbish intending it to fail, only for it to become an international success. I’m sure neither Eggers nor his core millennial fanbase have so much as heard of Reggie, though they would have done so if they had downloaded my app ‘NothingNewUnderTheSun’.
The Every grows ever more tyrannical and Maoist (their steering group is even called ‘The Gang of 40’). Having shamed and pressured people out of international travel—to save the environment, you see—they apply sanctions to anyone who commutes anywhere except on foot and by bike, and crash the US market for bananas and pineapples. And so it goes on: ‘millions more became unemployed with every new thing the Every cancelled, but there was always work in the Every warehouses, to work beside robot package-pickers and while monitored by AI and be paid a fair minimum wage.’ ‘This’, Eggers adds, ‘was an orderly system.’ This dystopian whomp-whomp of this increasingly grates. Satire needn’t jettison all nuance, after all.
Not that the ‘ordinary’ people come out of the novel any better: they are all either sheep, pusillanimous conformists, or eager Maoist converts: Eggers tries to strike comic-satirical sparks from various snowflakes and triggerables. Delaney organises a work’s outing, but her coworkers are furious, outraged by the unexceptional play-list she selects for the bus-ride there—hearing an Otis Redding song ‘ruins the day’ (‘woman-hater said [the complaint], supported with a link to an unsigned and evidence-less post hinting that he’d been unkind to an ex-girlfriend he’d met shortly before the bay and the dock and the sitting’). When the Every bans pets as a kind of slavery (‘Everyones will be given a workweek to remove their animal captives from campus’) nobody complains.
There are some interesting smaller-scale think-pieces herein, but they are embedded in a novel with the texture of suet. Every now and again Eggers throws-in a bomb—an actual bomb—to try and liven the narrative. But the novel remains unenlivened, right though to its twist ending, which many readers will see coming an ergonomic mile off. The Every is one not for everyone.
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