Many of the characters within the novel have grown into this iteration of the internet, using it to entry memories of their traumas, mother and father (whether or not lifeless or alive), minor associates they identify with, to rail towards, and even to do their research. The internet, for most of them (and as far as Egan is concerned), is a topological characteristic of their lives-a spot. They stay plugged in to the units for hours on finish, utilizing varied new attachments that may carry the consciousness closer to the collective. The country’s geography is reproduced by means of so many perspective shifts that it can’t assist however turn out to be an object of the reader’s investment. The primary setting of the novel, however, is America itself, with city alleys and rural landscapes showing via lush descriptions. These different locales are rather a lot like the web; they are placeholders the place characters go to lose their (American) identification. Lulu, a personality returned from A Visit from the Goon Squad, brings these geographies into dialog with one another.
She’s even better at sympathetically narrating the impulses of technocrats who assume they will innovate their way out of world disaster by alleviating their private alienation. On this, The Candy House isn’t fairly the trendy “internet novel,” but neither is it science fiction-until, after all, we think science fiction is simply narrative stretched via the attention of hypothetical gadgetry-or if, extra controversially, we expect all novels about cybernetics are “internet novels.” They’re not. However the place Oyler, Laing, or Lockwood have taken on the web as an aesthetic project, Egan doesn’t fairly know where the universality of such expertise lies. Novels resembling Snow Crash (1992) or Neuromancer (1984) identified the nature of the web not merely as an area of cultural evolution, however one determined by the extraction of capital. Even because it informed stories of heists and cons and tricking the machine, the social spaces of the novels weren’t built from the comingling narratives of many minds, however through navigating a plethora of promoting and commerce.
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Even earlier than The Sweet House, she was a character on the web, a part of Egan’s experiment at writing a Twitter fiction known as “Black Field,” with a narrative arc unfold over 140-character tweets. This brief story is included in the novel (for some purpose with the even more infantilizing chapter title, “Lulu the Spy, 2023”) as a collection of aphoristic statements in second person, which the reader is to assume is the impact of the invasive applied sciences with which Lulu has been outfitted to fulfil a patriotic spying mission. For this chapter, Lulu is a set of embodied directions akin to “Giggling is generally higher than answering” or “Always filter your observations and experience by the lens of their didactic worth.” All through the novel thereafter, Lulu is a paranoid woman who believes that she is being surveilled from inside her personal body, and that her thoughts are now not her own.
There are thematic sections in both the novels, and while A Go to from the Goon Squad’s contents resembled an album and its B-sides, The Sweet House is a riff off of the supposedly standard genre of digital dance music, with sections titled “Build,” “Break,” “Drop,” and “Build” once more. The characters we met in A Go to from the Goon Squad, like Bennie Salazar, Sasha, Drew, or Bix, are now older, judged by their youngsters and sought out by admirers. Both novels comprise over a dozen interconnected stories told by characters who have analog relationships to one another, and every chapter uses a varying-perspective model. The Sweet Home, once more like A Visit from the Goon Squad, is mostly narrated in third individual, but it also consists of chapters the place seemingly novel formal experiments take place. There’s the third-individual narrative a few book, a chapter about breaking down character motivations right into a calculus of tropes, chapters where some characters are solely narrated by other characters; there’s even an instantaneous-messaging alternate, which, considering the variety of members, seems to be like it has been collected by an information gathering firm with a watch towards narrative coherence.
Jennifer Egan’s The Candy Home is a novel concerning the web. It publicizes itself as part of the canon of a current literary phenomenon referred to as the “new internet novel,” exemplified by works like Patricia Lockwood’s Nobody Is Speaking About This (2021), Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), and Lauren Oyler’s Pretend Accounts (2021). 1000’s of words have been written in defining this phenomenon: it is a representation of social media or of the fragmented subjectivity of social media users, it is the literary market’s darling “auto fiction” making new strides, it is a brand new mode of formal experimentation, and so forth. For Egan, the new internet novel is a “sibling” to an earlier novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), whose form somewhat produced the polyphonous, informationally crammed, loosely related threads that we are able to, if we strive, already associate with the internet. The Candy House (phuket.thaibounty.com), printed greater than a decade after A Go to from the Goon Squad, is quite similarly structured.
Egan could not have thought by way of what cybernetic science fiction has already pronounced: the internet could appear like a spot, however ultimately, it’s knowledge and it can’t be occupied. But nonetheless, the need for id, authenticity, and community are linked to supply a determinedly American and contemporary topic in Egan’s novels. Egan presumes to supply a narrative of the gaze. Look at Me presents various photos of the self as it is duly refracted by means of many mediums, rendered inside specified contexts and external to it. The collective whirrs and watches. In the Sweet Home, these discourses of notion are present, and further sophisticated by means of their presence as facets of memory on the internet. The characters are consistently perceived and their past is out there on demand, for revenue, with the touch of a button. If there is authenticity it is just that of the commodified topic; if there’s to be neighborhood, it is one in every of watchers.
