The Circle: Book One, part 2 Summary & Analysis

The Circle hosts constant parties and get-togethers, during which the employees are encouraged to meet one another. These parties build a strong sense of community and group solidarity.

Francis is one of the novel’s key characters, and Mae’s initial impression of him is that he seems both mature and immature: simultaneously old and young. Some critics have argued that Francis is the embodiment of the Silicon Valley ethos—in other words, he’s the kind of person tech companies attract. Francis is clearly a smart, savvy Circle employee, but he’s also awkward, and he seems to be uncomfortable around the opposite sex. He strains to say the right things to Mae, but he often comes up short.

In the evening, after Mae says goodbye to Francis and Annie, she’s left with the sense that the Circle is just better than the outside world—it’s so happy, exciting, and innovative that it makes the rest of California seem uninteresting by comparison.

On Mae’s second day of work, she begins to get down to brass tacks, getting set up at her desk, figuring out payment information, etc. Notice that Mae’s desk, while very pretty, is still, at the end of the day, a desk—a subtle metaphor for the fact that the Circle, beneath all the utopian rhetoric, is just a greedy company. Also, the fact that the dividers around Mae’s desk are transparent reflects the Circle’s total commitment to information transparency. For the time being, Mae isn’t asked to surrender any particularly personal information—a birth certificate is normal information for employers. Furthermore, there’s no indication that Jon, Brandon, or Tasha will share Mae’s personal information with other people. Everything seems confidential, at least for the time being. Brandon gives Mae beautiful communication devices, and he seems eager to throw out everything tied to Mae’s old way of life. This, once again, emphasizes the company’s commitment to innovation.

Clearly, Mae is impressed with the Circle so far. She is proud to be working for such a prestigious company, and she must be grateful to have a lucrative job that’ll help her pay off her expensive student loans. While a company showing its commitment to community seems healthy to a certain degree, it’s odd that Mae’s team leader emphasizes community above all else. This suggests that community will be a primary focus of Mae’s work.

First, notice that Jared doesn’t really tell Mae anything about how advertising fits in with the company overall—apparently, Mae’s job is to answer customer questions, and not to think too much about the company as a whole. Second, notice that Mae’s work is mostly meaningless: she’s supposed to solicit ratings from her customers, but, if they don’t give her a high enough rating, she’s supposed to nudge them to give her one. The Circle seems overly concerned with improving ratings that are already high—it’s not clear why a 99 is much better than a 95 (or what these numbers mean to different customers).

Mae may be “kicking ass,” but neither she nor the readers have much of a sense of what role she plays in the company as a whole, or why differences of a single point matter (i.e., why it’s important to bump up a 99 to a 100). Once again, the passage calls into question what, exactly, qualifies Mae (or anyone else) to work at the Circle.

Mae’s job is fun and easy—perhaps too easy. She learns everything she has to know about Customer Experience within a few days, and she gets a very high aggregate rating (although why a 97 is better than a 95 in any non-trivial sense remains a mystery). Notice that the Circle likes to rank its employees in very precise (but still somewhat confusing) ways.

In this strange passage, Mae gets to know Sabine and Josef, who tell her a little more about the Circle and about Francis. Sabine’s secret biochemistry work suggests that the Circle’s goals for the future extend far beyond the Internet. Notice, also, that Francis has told his friends about Mae already. Strangely, the fact that Annie characterizes Francis’s family tragedy as the “worst story ever” minimizes the tragedy (you’d be more likely to use such a phrase to talk about a bad day at school than to discuss anything that’s actually tragic). Annie’s brisk, superficial manner, we’ll quickly see, is characteristic of the Circle in general.

In this symbolically loaded passage, we’re introduced to Eamon Bailey, the charismatic Wise Man who celebrates transparency. The fact that Bailey is speaking in a church-like space is no coincidence: he’s proselytizing on behalf of the “religion” of social networking (and, as we’ll learn, he’s very religious). Mae finds Bailey to be highly eloquent and charismatic, but on paper his words seem clichéd and unremarkable. (The passage pays homage to Steve Jobs’s legendary Apple presentations, during which he, too, wore casual-seeming jeans and addressed a rapturous crowd.)

At this point in the novel, the idea that the Circle should use its technology to monitor people might seem reasonable, especially because Bailey says that the Circle will use its cameras to protect human rights. However, it’s important to note Bailey’s claims that tyrants will no longer be able to hide: later, we will learn that the Circle is concealing its own tyranny through its rhetoric of protecting human rights.

For the time being, Bailey evades accusations of unethical behavior—he actually gets a big laugh when he claims that he snuck into his mother’s home. Nobody in the audience seems to understand how invasive, unethical, and downright creepy Bailey’s ideas are: Mae, Annie, and their peers are seduced by his utopian vision.