The Candy House by Jennifer Egan Evaluate – information Overload

Jennifer Egan made her title with 2011’s Pulitzer-successful A Visit from the Goon Squad, a zig-zagging multigenerational saga centred on a multiplatinum document producer, Bennie Salazar. The quirky title referred to time’s ravages; Bennie, once part of 1970s outfit the Flaming Dildos, finds himself by the book’s discreetly futuristic end catering mainly to “pointers”, tablet-wielding preschoolers whose tastes are the principle driver of revenue in an industry altered past recognition. The Candy Home, Egan’s follow-up, likewise hops around a large solid, this time from the nineteen nineties to the 2030s, and as soon as extra has its eyes on the internet (the title refers back to the seduction of free-to-use on-line services that sneakily flip us into the product, the echo of “the White House” presumably intended as a suggestion of where true power now lies). Like Goon Squad, it turns actuality up a notch: that is an America during which – in an enormous-tech data grab – 21-yr-olds are urged to upload their reminiscences to guard against brain injury.

There’s a scarcity of the human moments that made Goon Squad fizz; Bennie feeling like a fish out of water at his upstate country club, for example, or his assistant, Sasha, hiding her kleptomania. Right here, motion is seen as if through gauze: witness the 2032-set chapter a couple of “citizen agent” programmed by a shadowy government company, told as 30 two-column pages of bulletpoint-like diktats from her handlers. You sense the novel’s laborious scaffolding when the narrator of a mid-1960s interlude asks: “How can I presumably know all this? ” She’s accessing a rapacious tech giant’s “Collective Consciousness”, it seems – Google with knobs on, basically – and also you suspect Egan solely tells us that so she will write this: “Getting hold of that info is arguably extra presumptuous than inventing it would have been. How dare I invent throughout chasms of gender, age, and cultural context? Decide your poison – if imagining isn’t allowed, then we’ll all should resort to gray grabs” (a whizzy form of memory seize).

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Fertile ground, to make certain, but Egan has ideas to burn, and in this novel that’s what she does: her painstakingly constructed backdrop has barely any impression on the book’s drama, ill served by characters decreased to a trait. Remember 13-12 months-old Lincoln, whose obsessive cataloguing of “great rock’n’roll pauses” was recorded by his younger sister in a collection of PowerPoint slides, Goon Squad’s most eye-catching narrative stunt? Lincoln, now in his mid-20s, gets his own chapter, but his hyper-attentiveness (previously the main focus of a between-the-strains take on family life) is now only a distinguishing tic, as he longs for a colleague who “wears hair bands 24 % of the time, scrunchies 28 % of the time, and her hair loose forty eight p.c of the time”. Lincoln works in information mining (of course) and his storyline tees up some background action involving privacy activists known as “eluders”, who implant the brains of tech workers with “weevils”, digital mind-control bugs that Egan keeps explaining until 20 pages from the top – a mark of how little the book’s gizmos ultimately contribute.

That thought is greater than sufficient on its own to feed the form of topically chewy novel Egan appears to need to write. But after a protracted-winded set-up, it’s tossed aside, and the sense grows that the novel’s expository heft calls for too much. By far the most pleasurable chapter unfolds as a late exchange of emails between numerous Goon Squad stalwarts out to revive their reputations by piggybacking on the fortunes of an elderly actor in search of a comeback of his personal. Perhaps the book’s biggest problem (and its point, if you’re generous) is that Silicon Valley will never be rock’n’roll. Ultimately, the ebook breathes: not solely do we get the heady backstairs view of movie star that was part of Goon Squad’s allure, however – more vitally – we calm down right into a uncommon moment of real-time interplay between characters in any other case mired in private recapitulation. ’t, you’ll in all probability be left baffled, however maybe a very good deal less disillusioned than readers who’ve. Both method, conundrums of digital-era privateness and authenticity have been higher addressed in novels such as the Circle and Klara and the Sun. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan is printed by Corsair (£20).

Any concept I’ve is probably going occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in comparable ways, suppose related ideas. What the eluders want to restore, I think, is the uniqueness they felt before counting like ours revealed that they have been an awful lot like everyone else. The other! Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement had been never really mysterious; only our ignorance made them appear so. However where the eluders have it flawed is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, and even (that is counterintuitive, I do know) less mysterious-any more than figuring out the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. They’re like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Egan stays fun, however some of the chapters really feel much less natural than they did in A Go to to the Goon Squad. Lulu’s chapter, written in the form of an aphoristic instruction guide for a type of concubine spy, proves grating, its columnar format something of a chore, and it’s absurd premise a little too distant from anything else in the novel to really feel vital, though it’s a precursor to one of many novel’s greatest chapters, a tangled web of e mail subterfuge that involves embroil about half of the …

Goon Squad alumni. Thankfully it’s adopted by a delightfully unhinged chapter about Noreen and Jules Jones who’re having a crazy-off which proved hilariously tense in its depiction of people on the brink of a breakdown. Principally there’s a number of pleasure to be had in reconvening with these characters and seeing how their lives have performed out, however the novel isn’t as strong as its predecessor. He knew what the vision meant: human lives past and current, around him, inside him. “Gregory gazed, transfixed, as snow swarmed down upon him like space junk; like disarranged flocks of birds; like the universe emptying itself. He wished to snicker or shout. He opened his mouth and eyes and arms and drew them into himself, feeling a surge of discovery-of rapture-that appeared to raise him out of the snow. Finish your e book! Right here was his father’s parting reward: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity. From a distance they pale into uniformity, however they were shifting, each propelled by a singular pressure that was inexhaustible.