Reading

The Circle by Dave Eggers

I've been reading Dave Egger's The Circle recently. Last year I read an excerpt of it in the NYT, and thought it would be useful to read the entire book for the POTMOTSP story, which I intend to re-draft for Portfolio 2 or 3. POTMOTSP is story set in a corporate setting, and I wanted to read The Circle to see how Eggers deals with larger social issues within a seemingly sane, though at heart, very dystopian environment.

In the book, Mae is a a newbie to a company called The Circle, which is essentially Google/Facebook -- a huge all-encompassing organisation that wants to be a part of everyone's lives. When she enters 'the campus' -- as the office buildings of The Circle are called -- she is bright-eyed and awed by her surroundings, but as the novel progresses and she gets slowly sucked into the culture, she trades her privacy and her entire life for affirmation and recognition.

What worked

Characterisation -- The close third person POV stays with Mae throughout, and the reader sees The Circle through her eyes. It works because she is a new employee experiencing and adjusting to what is happening, so in a sense it's a bit of a bildungsroman. Mae as a person doesn't really change -- she is insecure, eager to please, wants to be nice to everyone -- and these characteristics are what bring about her 'downfall' as she gets more drawn into the circle. James Wood talked about characterisation as animating the static portrait. In The Circle, Eggers does this through a plot that is constantly moving. Things keep happening, and Mae has to keep reacting. I'm beginning to understand the logic of the toad in the magical garden, where the main character reacts to what is going on, which assumes that well, something has to go on. This brings me to plot.
Plot -- The amazing thing about the plot of The Circle is how fast it moves. Eggers' paragraphs typically start with an adverbial of time ('It was 10 o'clock.' 'Finally') or an action ('Mae nodded.) There is a lot of quick, snappy dialogue as well, which helps with characterisation, as well as with the overall pacing. For e.g.:

"Mae, i have to ask you to --"
"I know, you want me to stop reading you customer comments. Fine."
"No, that's not what I was --"
"You want me to read them to you?"

The dialogue goes on for about a page or so more, and by the end of this quarrel between Mae and her ex-boyfriend Mercer, we get a sense that we have stepped into their world for a bit. I think I want to explore this idea of inserting a long quarrel somewhere, possibly either in the expat story or the cat story.

For a novel on social media, I think the plot succeeds because it succinctly addresses privacy concerns, the possibility of being over-connected and over-networked. We are eased into the plot slowly as Mae undergoes her induction. Critics have panned the book's premise as being too current to feel like the future, which is a strange, yet valid criticism. I guess there is a sense that we want something like this to be 1984 or Brave New World, where the writer stretches the imagination (his and ours) and questions if different possibilities or alternate realities are possible.

Writing -- I've read two of Dave Egger's books and always find his writing easy to read. I think what he does well is push the plot forward, which is something that I find difficult to do. He does setting very well too, painting the background and having the character interact and look at the surrounding, instead of just having description there without purpose.

Reunion by John Cheever 

'Reunion' by John Cheever is an extremely short story told from the POV of a son. In the story, the son recounts his last encounter with his father, which is a key point, because it adds poignancy to the story. Without this fact, the story would be rather frivolous --- a son (who we get no information about, except for the fact that while transiting between countries, he visits his father) goes with his father to various bars, and in each bar, his father is very loud, showy and pompous. The focus of the story is very much on the father, who comes across almost like a one-dimensional comic figure, which probably shows how much the son knows about him. I think I would have appreciated the story more if it explored the son's emotions and reactions a bit more. At present, he just follows his father from bar to bar, taking drinks when he can, but otherwise, letting his father take centrestage. In the rather excellent preface of the short story collection that I read this in (The Granta book of American Short Fiction, edited by Richard Ford. Extract found here), Ford says Cheever's story is a 'model of short-story virtue, focus and conciseness'. Discounting my scepticism that he is merely saying that because of the fame that John Cheever has achieved and the scandals in his life, I must say that the story stayed with me for weeks after I read it. It's the simple poignancy of it I guess, the fact that a father-son relationship could be so callous and superficial.


Wife-Wooing by John Updike

I liked this story because it flowed from one idea of a husband indulging in a bit of fantasy and fancying himself as a hunter-gather, while bringing burgers home for his family from the diner. He then spends the evening looking at his wife and thinking about sleeping with her. She however, is engrossed with her reading, and falls asleep right away. The story works well. It is a monologue, yet the plot moves quite quickly, something that isn't that easy to do, without being self-indulgent and bordering on navel-grazing.

Can we learn about privacy from porn stars? by Stoya 

I read this NYT article as I was midway through the craft essay and thought how real life characters also want to be 'round'. Nobody would say they are one-dimensional, and no one truly is, anyhow, but the tricky thing about characterisation in fiction is presenting the characters as full people, but without revealing everything about them. I tried to do that in the revised Cat Story, but I think I still have some way to go.