Two New Novels That Disappointed

I'm a big Dave Eggers fan. I've read most of his oeuvre, as has my family. It was with a certain amount of excitement and expectation that I started reading The Circle. It's basically a tale of right-around-the-corner  technological totalitarianism. The company seems a thinly-disguised Google. Think about all the ways this company affects your on-line life. Think about how it could control even your off-line life. That's the premise of the book. The main character, Mae, is an enthusiastic new hire at the Circle, a massive California Company that hires the best and the brightest to do its work, not just to make money but to take control of everyone's life, from healthcare to banking to shopping to everything conceivable, all done in the "noble" belief that humans would be happier. Mae becomes a vehicle of this nightmarish scenario.

I found that Mae was a bit of a dolt, which is why she's chosen to implement the plan to close the Circle. The book is so obvious in its plot that instead of being a chilling warning a la Orwell's 1984 minus the the worldwide war, it merely focuses on what we already know: that technology can rule our lives, if we let it.  The Circle was nominated for the National Book Award in Fiction, but didn't win it.

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride won the prize. McBride is the author of The Color of Water, a memoir about growing up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. His father, who lived around the corner from me for a while, was an African-American and his mother was a white Orthodox Jew. This cultural combination seems to produce great writers. I think of Walter Mosely.

Lets get back to The Good Lord Bird. The story is told by a black boy who masquerades as a girl named Onion by the mythic abolitionist John Brown. Onion, who is a 10-year old slave, depicts Brown from a very complicated man. He's the onion, not young slave he frees and takes along on his many forays through pro-slave territory. The major problem I had with the book is that aside from the fact Onion is literate, she uses words and phrases I find hard to believe she knew. She writes in Black/Southern dialect, but using the word "pixi-lated for drunk (It actually is a slang expression, but its first known usage in1848, is only ten or so years prior), and incog-Negro (which is a contemporary phrase) which didn't't ring true, and served to snap me out of the narrative. I recommend you read this book, along with Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks. In my opinion, Bank's is the better historical novel about an incredible man

I love comparative literature. What do you expect of an English major?