The Every
A novel
-
-
3.9 • 59 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Circle comes an exciting new follow-up. When the world’s largest search engine/social media company, the Circle, merges with the planet’s dominant ecommerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous—and, oddly enough, most beloved—monopoly ever known: the Every.
Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire at the Every. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Makazian, they look for the Every's weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free?
Studded with unforgettable characters, outrageous outfits, and lacerating set-pieces, this companion to The Circle blends absurdity and terror, satire and suspense, while keeping the reader in apprehensive excitement about the fate of the company—and the human animal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
A compelling read (warning for spoilers)
There are some parallels to ‘The Circle’ that seems to give you a nicely subverted expectation. Instead, in the protagonist’s friend Wes, we get to witness what Mae’s descent into the rabbit hole of The Circle must have looked like from the outside in the first book. (Spoilers ahead)
By the end, I was surprised that this seemed very much like a modern update of ‘1984’.
The events seemed to parallel, especially near the end. A fake rebellion, hinted at by a man that is, ultimately, in charge of rooting things like this out by whatever means necessary.
In this, “ThoughtCrimes” come in the form of Eye Tracking, secret HereMe recordings and the Friendy app (etc). Departments are given flowery names and given shortened portmanteaus that both describe and mask their true purpose (like how the MinPax was the Ministry of War). Friendy, initially, was only created to expose those who weren’t good friends (and spiraled from there). And all there PC wording and phrasing (unhoused, instead of homeless) was a more subtle way of using words as weapons. While ‘1984’ tried to condense language into as few words as possible (‘bad’ was replaced by ‘ungood’), ‘The Every’ encouraged expanding vocabulary, but couldn’t actually tell if words were used correctly, making it entirely useless.
At the end, much like George in ‘1984’, Delaney gives in. She sympathizes and wants to help Mae just as George wants to confess everything to O’Brien. Del gives Mae her biggest and best ideas (and the final nail in the coffin of any opposition of The Every), even fantasizing that she and Mae could edge out Stenton and run things side-by-side. This is her “I love Big Brother” moment. George’s revelation comes just before his public execution just as Delaney’s comes right before her private, solitary ‘fall’ from a cliff.
It was wonderfully done, seeing her finally starting to succumb to the Stockholm Syndrome of working at The Every just in time for all of her previous actions to come back and bite her.
And, for all of the hate and resentment towards Mae for nearly the entirety of the book, for Del to collapse into her arms and start sobbing the moment that they meet was unexpected. You can tell right away that she’d built Mae up into such a monster that she wasn’t expecting her to be a petite woman that actually looked exactly like she does in all of her appearances. She didn’t expect to be met with someone kind, sympathetic and genuine…an actual person. (Even though it was all just an act…and Del had grossly underestimated how cunning, manipulative and calculating Mae actually is). Still, it’s fascinating that Del didn’t decide to change her stance on The Every until after she met the woman that she’d, essentially, considered her mortal enemy from the very beginning.
Well done.
Fascinating and terrifying
So modern and prophetic. This is the foretold truth of a changing world.