The Every by Dave Eggers

People in book groups tend to be garrulous but the recent selection of The Every by Dave Eggers brought a moment of reserve. Participants lowered their voices to posit whether their Google Echo was listening in; if Amazon, the company, was tracking their page turns on the Kindle and whether they had signed out of Facebook social media that evening. 

The Every has been described as both a modern satire and a sequel to Orwell’s 1984. It is the eighth novel from Bay Area, Boston-born writer Dave Eggers.  In this novel, a young hire named Delaney Wells seeks to restore sanity and, as an insider, bring down The Every, a firm. This monolithic Silicon Valley company, is a not-so-distant montage of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Eggers’ first introduced us to this firm in a prequel called The Circle, and it was made into a movie starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks.

In the current book we follow Delaney Wells as she interns across different functions and departments at The Every. Employees of the company generally like working there, and appreciate the corporate values of social equity, environmental stewardship, and inclusion. Yet they are naïve and genuinely swayed by the outlandish ideas that Delaney and her boyfriend propose to undermine the status quo. For example, there is a jokey moment in the company cafeteria that leads to a total ban on bananas and other fruit, as they are unsustainably grown in third-world countries, not locally sourced.  In another episode, many employees come to reside on campus 24/7 so that they reduce their carbon footprint. Eggers skillfully paints the slippery slope where good intentions melt into sinking cascades and end in moral cesspools. Eggers brings a bird’s eye view: through Delaney we witness the decline in our rational, independent selves. Yet this company seems to genuinely try to provide more efficiency and better technology to improve daily lives. 

For book group readers, The Every is noteworthy. With subtlety, Eggers traces the decline of the publishing industry. The Every and popular culture hollows out newspapers, journalism, and bookstores. They diminish our appreciation for reading, writing, and reveling in the printed word — something of note to book groups everywhere.

And on that note, the book group got a surprise follow-up to their January meeting from the author. He was contacted through the mail with a question about the surprise ending to the book, and the publishing industry. Eggers responded a personal hand-written letter thanking the Esplanade book club for reading The Every and also responding to “what-if” questions about the plot.

Final word: The Every is appropriately named, because it should be read, in this time and age, by Everyone. 

 Jane Gould