A Go to To ‘The Sweet House’

Jennifer Egan’s formidable new novel – a sequel, of sorts, to 2010’s “A Go to From the Goon Squad” – riffs on memory, authenticity and the allure of new expertise. While you buy an independently reviewed e-book by means of our site, we earn an affiliate fee. Jennifer Egan’s 2010 “A Visit From the Goon Squad” was, relying whom you requested, a novel, or a set, or a story cycle. Following a tangle of characters in and adjoining to the music business across decades, it switched voices and techniques in a kaleidoscopic prolonged-household portrait. However you could possibly additionally name it an idea album. “The Candy Home,” which passes the microphone to a number of peripheral “Goon Squad” characters, is comparable in its anti-chronological structure and chameleonic virtuosity. However given its subject material, it might be better to explain it as a social network, the literary version of the collaborative novel written by your pals and friends of mates on Fb or Instagram, every link opening on a new protagonist.

We’ve seen how that kind of imaginative and prescient plays out – surely the more we know about one another, the better we’ll understand each other? Proper? – and so has its creator. Bix, who is Black, imagined the web within the ’90s as a “new metaphysical sphere” the place “Black individuals would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them within the bodily world.” The thought, he concedes, “looked comically naïve from a 2010 perspective.” Nonetheless, we try, try once more. Contemporary fiction often treats this form of “Black Mirror” premise (specifically, it has shades of the episode “The Complete Historical past of You”) skeptically; the technology is an oppressor, or, to the novelist, a competitor. ‘The Sweet House’ takes its title from a repeated metaphor for temptation: the lures of amusement and nostalgia that Hansel-and-Gretel us into a spun-sugar edifice upon which we’re invited to gorge and wherein we – our needs, Floraville Phuket Resort our memories – are also on the menu. See, for instance, Dave Eggers’s “The Circle,” which centered on the passive-aggressive totalitarianism of the imperative to “share.” There’s a component of that here, with hints of a resistance to the collective unconscious, including “eluders,” individuals who go to extremes to flee the mass mind, even vanishing altogether. We’re having trouble retrieving the article content. Thank you for your patience while we confirm entry. Please allow JavaScript in your browser settings. Thanks in your endurance while we confirm access. In case you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Occasions account, or subscribe for the entire Instances. Already a subscriber? Log in.

It is a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes. Tech will not be the new rock ’n’ roll, but it surely serves an analogous perform in “The Sweet House.” It’s the world-shifting phenomenon that defines an period and connects strangers. Additionally it is, though it wears the high-quality cloth of idealism, massive business. His next huge thought, constructed on an experimental expertise that can digitally capture animal consciousness, allows people to upload a life’s price of reminiscences – even long-forgotten ones – share them in a collective archive and entry others’, as if traveling in a cranial time machine. The killer app that defines the alternative reality of “The Candy 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 title of the product, Own Your Unconscious, suggests a lofty, even spiritual aspiration, as does the title of Bix’s company, Mandala.

The net. The information superhighway. HAL, the pushy AI in 2001: A space Odyssey, got ornery with hapless Dave approach back in 1968, in a film based on the tales of Arthur C. Clarke written two a long time before that. And at the daybreak of talkies, as movie audiences couldn’t assist however feel they were watching life itself unfold, Buster Keaton upped the ante and climbed right into the display screen, within the 1924 traditional Sherlock Jr. Two years earlier than that, James Joyce conjured much of life from 800 or so printed pages. The stubborn power of the brain often eludes literary novelists, as well as tech moguls. If our “literary culture” has been addled by algorithms and screens, passionate readers might wish to look past a mere two paths for the novel. Another current tech-topian ebook observes: “Gaining entry to all of that data turned out to be one thing of a mixed blessing.” That is neither an avant grade meta-narrative nor middlebrow drama, however an unapologetic journey-Ernest Cline’s Ready Participant One.