A Go to To ‘The Sweet House’

Jennifer Egan’s formidable new novel – a sequel, of sorts, to 2010’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” – riffs on memory, authenticity and the allure of recent know-how. Whenever you buy an independently reviewed e-book via our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Jennifer Egan’s 2010 “A Visit From the Goon Squad” was, depending whom you requested, a novel, or a set, or a narrative cycle. Following a tangle of characters in and adjacent to the music business across decades, it switched voices and methods in a kaleidoscopic prolonged-family portrait. However you may additionally name it an idea album. “The Sweet House,” which passes the microphone to numerous peripheral “Goon Squad” characters, is analogous in its anti-chronological construction and chameleonic virtuosity. But given its subject matter, it may be better to describe it as a social network, the literary version of the collaborative novel written by your friends and associates of friends on Facebook or Instagram, every hyperlink opening on a new protagonist.

We’ve seen how that type of vision performs out – certainly the more we learn about one another, the higher we’ll perceive one another? Proper? – and so has its creator. Bix, who’s Black, imagined the internet within the ’90s as a “new metaphysical sphere” where “Black individuals would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world.” The concept, he concedes, “looked comically naïve from a 2010 perspective.” Nonetheless, we try, strive again. Contemporary fiction typically treats this type of “Black Mirror” premise (particularly, it has shades of the episode “The Whole History of You”) skeptically; the know-how is an oppressor, or, to the novelist, a competitor. ‘The Candy House (my latest blog post)’ takes its title from a repeated metaphor for temptation: the lures of amusement and nostalgia that Hansel-and-Gretel us right into a spun-sugar edifice upon which we’re invited to gorge and in which we – our needs, our recollections – are also on the menu. See, as an example, Dave Eggers’s “The Circle,” which focused on the passive-aggressive totalitarianism of the imperative to “share.” There’s a component of that right here, with hints of a resistance to the collective unconscious, including “eluders,” individuals who go to extremes to escape the mass thoughts, even vanishing altogether. We’re having bother retrieving the article content material. Thank you for your persistence while we confirm entry. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you to your patience whereas we confirm entry. In case you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of the Times. Already a subscriber? Log in.

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It’s a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes. Tech might not be the brand new rock ’n’ roll, but it serves an analogous perform in “The Sweet House.” It’s the world-shifting phenomenon that defines an period and connects strangers. It’s also, although it wears the superb cloth of idealism, massive business. His next big concept, constructed on an experimental know-how that can digitally capture animal consciousness, permits people to upload a life’s price of memories – even long-forgotten ones – share them in a collective archive and access others’, as if traveling in a cranial time machine. The killer app that defines the choice actuality of “The Sweet House” is dreamed up in 2010 by Bix Bouton, briefly launched as an early-90s internet obsessive in “Goon Squad,” now a social-media mogul. The name of the product, Personal Your Unconscious, suggests a lofty, even spiritual aspiration, as does the name of Bix’s firm, Mandala.

The online. The data superhighway. HAL, the pushy AI in 2001: An area Odyssey, bought ornery with hapless Dave means back in 1968, in a film primarily based on the stories of Arthur C. Clarke written two decades earlier than that. And on the dawn of talkies, as film audiences couldn’t help however feel they were watching life itself unfold, Buster Keaton upped the ante and climbed right into the display screen, in the 1924 traditional Sherlock Jr. Two years earlier than that, James Joyce conjured a lot of life from 800 or so printed pages. The stubborn power of the mind usually eludes literary novelists, in addition to tech moguls. If our “literary culture” has been addled by algorithms and screens, passionate readers may need to look beyond a mere two paths for the novel. Another current tech-topian book observes: “Gaining entry to all of that data turned out to be something of a combined blessing.” That is neither an avant grade meta-narrative nor middlebrow drama, but an unapologetic adventure-Ernest Cline’s Ready Participant One.