How It All Goes Down
Buckle down, folks—this is a long one.
Book I
The Circle opens on a bright, sunny day in June, as 24-year-old Mae Holland tours campus on her very first day of work at the Circle. The Circle is an innovative and intensely popular web company that has taken the world by storm in its short six years of existence, and Mae is thrilled to have been given the ultra-desirable opportunity of becoming one of its thousands of employees.
Mae's first weeks at the Circle are full of ups and downs. She meets a new love interest—Francis Garaventa—at a party during her very first night on campus, but she isn't entirely sure what to make of him. Francis has a bad habit of putting his foot in his mouth, and of insulting or demeaning Mae in the process.
Mae finds that she's a great Customer Experience representative, but she also gets a couple of scoldings from her supervisors early on—scoldings for missing repeated invitations to a coworker's party and then missing the party altogether, scoldings for spending weekends off-campus visiting her stressed-out parents, scoldings for not being active enough on the Circle's various social feeds, and, eventually, scoldings for keeping certain interests and experiences (like her fondness for kayaking) all to herself.
A second love interest introduces himself during this period, too, and as with Francis, Mae isn't 100 percent sure what to make of him. Unlike Francis, new boy Kalden is mysterious, inaccessible, and aloof. He's also really good at hanky-panky—another major difference between him and Francis—and Mae can't stop thinking about him…even though she can't help but wonder if he's a corporate spy.
As Mae adjusts to life at the Circle, she puts aside more and more of her old habits, opinions, and values in order to conform to the ideologies and expectations that hold sway at her new workplace. Her parents and her ex-boyfriend Mercer Medeiros notice the changes, but Mae lashes out when Mercer tries to intervene.
Despite the anger and scorn that Mae feels for Mercer and his Jurassic-era thoughts about technology, the truth is that Mae's adjustment to life at the Circle isn't always pleasant or pretty. After Francis Garaventa uses her as a test subject during a live demonstration of one of the Circle's new dating apps, Mae feels humiliated and furious. She doesn't like the feeling of being exposed without her knowledge or consent, but she soon finds herself back in Francis' arms.
Then, after Francis records their first sexual encounter and uploads it into the company's cloud—again without Mae's knowledge or consent—Mae feels even more furious than she did the last time Francis exposed her without her permission. Even so, despite her anger and her certainty that she's been wronged, it doesn't take long before the Circle's ideologues convince Mae that personal privacy isn't just an outdated concept but a criminal concept that she ought to get rid of right away.
Mae's most pivotal turning point comes after a late-night experience out on San Francisco Bay. After stealing a kayak so that she can get out onto the water and blow off steam after a major blowout with Mercer, Mae returns to work the next morning and finds that the Circle knows all about her subsequent run-in with the law.
After an inspirational meeting with Eamon Bailey—one of the Circle's Three Wise Men, and the one with the most radical notions about the criminality of secrets and personal privacy—Mae gives herself over to the Circle's commitment to complete and utter transparency. At a fateful Friday-morning presentation in front of thousands of onlookers, Mae allows Eamon Bailey to announce that she's going to "go transparent" immediately.
From now on, Mae will wear a video camera on her at all times, and every aspect of her life (other than brief moments of privacy in the bathroom and in bed) will be recorded in full, accessible to millions, and saved for posterity, forever and ever.
Now things are getting interesting, huh?
Book II
Things really rev up in Book II. By now, Mae Holland has been wearing a video camera for about a month and a half, and she's become one of the most highly visible people working at the Circle.
Although Mae loves the new sense of power and responsibility that going transparent has given her, things in her life aren't all peaches and cream. Her best friend, Annie Allerton—the same friend who got her an interview at the Circle in the first place—seems increasingly distant. Kalden seems to have fallen off the radar. Mae's parents are doing their best to withdraw from the Circle's increasingly intense supervision of their lives—the price they were asked to pay for being added to the company's health plan—and Mercer is more obnoxious than ever.
When Mae is given an opportunity to sit in on a meeting between the Circle's top executives and innovators, she makes a suggestion that propels the company in a radical new direction. As Eamon Bailey thinks out loud about the things that the Circle could do to increase voter participation in America, Mae suggests that Circle membership should be mandatory for all American citizens who are old enough to vote.
Not only that, but Mae suggests that the Circle should take over all of the organizational and record-keeping matters related to voting, licensing, and registration in America—in short, all of the bureaucratic matters that are currently managed by state and federal governments.
Mae is sure that she's helping to create a utopia, and to bring about a more wonderful, pure, and transparent form of participatory democracy. To her annoyance, bothersome men like Kalden and Mercer aren't so sure. Both of them try to tell her that what she is really promoting is a form of totalitarianism, but filled with scorn for the both of them, Mae refuses to listen.
Mae's obstinacy and slavish devotion to the Circle's worldview soon force her parents to sever ties with her. Mercer does the same for the most part, but he continues to reach out to her now and again as he tries to help her see the light.
Things with Mercer come to a head when Mae decides to use him as the test subject in a live demonstration that she's giving of one of the Circle's new search technologies. Even though Mercer has done his best to go off the grid and live in isolation from the constant surveillance of the Circle and its devotees, under Mae's direction, the Circle's search tools find him almost instantly.
When Mercer flees from the Circle users who are chasing him—recording his movements on their web devices and feeding them back to the Circle's databases—Mae gets caught up in the excitement and spectacle of the chase, and she tells herself that Mercer is sure to come around to her point of view once the full power of the Circle has been shown to him.
She's wrong. Instead of giving Mae the acknowledgment she craves, Mercer drives his pickup truck off a steep mountain highway and into the gorge below, choosing death rather than surrendering to the insanity of Mae and her ilk.
Whoa.
It doesn't take long before things come to a head with Kalden, too. After she discovers Kalden's true identity—that Kalden is actually Ty Gospodinov, one of the Circle's Three Wise Men, and the man who created the Circle's very first technologies—Mae can't wrap her head around his insistence that the Circle is becoming a terrible, tyrannical force that needs to be dismantled.
Ty, alias Kalden, asks Mae for her help in denouncing the Circle publicly and initiating the process of dismantling it. After considering his proposition, Mae tells him that she understands what needs to be done.
Book III
By the time Book III rolls around, there's nothing left to slow the onset of the dystopian world that Mae Holland has helped to create.
Mae has exposed Ty Gospodinov's plans and ruined his chances of dismantling the Circle, and there's no one left who could—or would wish to—engineer the Circle's downfall.
As Mae sits in the Circle's clinic and keeps vigil by the bedside of her best friend, Annie—who is lying in a coma brought about by the physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion that resulted from her life at the Circle—Mae finds it annoying that she has no way of knowing the thoughts and dreams that are passing through Annie's unconscious mind.
Mae decides that she'll raise the issue with the Circle's heavy hitters at their next meeting. After all, she tells herself, she deserves to know what's going on in her friend's mind. In fact, the world deserves to know, and it shouldn't have to wait.