When is a sequel not a sequel? Such a query infuses The Sweet Home. Egan has one thing bigger in thoughts, or maybe wider: to write down in the same universe as that of Goon Squad, without necessarily choosing up that novel’s central characters. The result is a e book that feels contemporary and familiar, in the best which means of both phrases. Revealed final 12 months, Jennifer Egan’s sixth novel (another thought the author means to subvert) is a follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Go to from the Goon Squad, but that doesn’t imply it is a spin-off in any traditional sense. Like its predecessor, The Sweet Home is one thing of a seize bag, gathering 14 associated, if not steady, narratives. This article appears in Problem 25 of Alta Journal. But when Goon Squad is, within the phrasing of critic James Poniewozik, “a concept album” (it offers with the music industry), this new e book is a digital collage.

Going down a decade or so into the future, it revolves around the event of a know-how that enables our memories to be uploaded and crowdsourced. Consider an Instagram the place, instead of photographs, one shares bits of consciousness. Know-how as a psychic terrain. “To hell with God.… This, in fact, is how we already dwell, if much less directly; what is our on-line world if not a hive thoughts? “By which you imply an all-seeing, all-figuring out entity,” one other responds, “that could also be predicting and controlling your conduct, even once you think you’re choosing for yourself? I’m frightened concerning the Internet,” one in all Egan’s characters declares. That’s the conundrum: the extra we depend on technology to connect, the extra it undermines our company. And yet, if Egan understands this, she additionally acknowledges its allure. In Goon Squad, she wrote one chapter as a PowerPoint presentation. For me, this is a key directive of artwork, to compel us to encounter the world anew. The Sweet House, too, adapts or appropriates digital strategies-its “Lulu the Spy, 2032,” for example, is formatted as an extended string of tweet-like micro-paragraphs, while “See Below” unfolds through a sequence of interwoven electronic mail threads. It’s more a matter of provocation, a term I’m utilizing in the broadest sense. That doesn’t mean offering solutions; creativity is just not prescriptive, in spite of everything. With each e book, each narrative, we must discover the necessary language for its telling, the required perspective and form. Here we see what Egan has accomplished with The Candy House (https://phuket.thaibounty.com/2022/04/10/phuket-hotels-phuket-resort-phuket-patong-accommodations-club-andaman-seaside-resort/), which, like Goon Squad earlier than it, is neither dystopian nor utopian. More to the point, it is a book of observations, in which people transfer through a social panorama not in contrast to what ours may well turn out to be. Prescient? Maybe, though only time will tell.

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As a substitute, we get something better – not ideas, or classes, but people, locations, and things. Bix’s framework for his invention comes from a textual content of anthropology- something Egan excels in-referred to as Patterns of Affinity, which offers a key to human social interaction. Yet his motivation doesn’t even stem from wanting connection, but from loss: like Sasha, he has never recovered from a primal trauma in A Go to from the Goon Squad, a good friend who drowned, possibly deliberately, despite the attempts to save lots of him. Egan’s engagement with technology strikes me as another feint anyway. The unconscious is, by definition, outdoors of our consciousness, except probed, and even then, it should be carried out with care. In maintaining with the fairy-tale image of the title and Bix’s traumatic motivation, Bix’s/Egan’s Personal Your Unconscious is extra literarily indebted to Sigmund Freud than to Fb, her Collective Consciousness a transparent nod to Carl Jung. Solely the capitalist acquisition mindset would dare to think about proudly owning the unconscious, let alone selling it.

In a rare example of a story narrated nearly completely in the first-individual plural (“we”), the daughters of record producer Lou Kline (also from A Go to from the Goon Squad) understand what really turns into the product once the music is given away: “We contemplated a nationwide billboard marketing campaign to remind folks of the eternal legislation, Nothing is free! Only children anticipate otherwise, even as myths and fairly takes warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. By no means belief a candy house! It was only a matter of time earlier than somebody made them pay for what they thought they have been getting for free.” Hansel and Gretel enter the sweet house for sweets, only to threat being eaten themselves. It is a warning against sharing our music, and later, ourselves. But the second time, Bennie, even later in life but nonetheless enlivened by rock ‘n’ roll, is attempting to plan a concert a lot just like the one that concludes A Visit from the Goon Squad.

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The Russian Formalists noticed story as crucially different from plot, in order to understand not simply what stories say, or what they are about, but how tales work. How stories work is one of the Sweet House’s preoccupations as properly. In a single chapter, “i, the Protagonist”, Chris Salazar (son of A Visit from the Goon Squad’s Bennie) works to create “algebraizations” of every scenario possible, very similar to Vladimir Propp’s 1928 guide Morphology of the Folktale tried to categorise all of the systematic characterizations and workings of people- and fairy tales. What they perceive is merely temptation. But in Egan’s twist, Chris, like Bix, like all of the individuals attempting to show interactions into equations, barely seems to know human motives in any respect. The first time, it’s, predictably, a warning, of treats that conceal threats. And so the phrase “the sweet house” turns up twice. It portends the end of the document business, done in by file sharing, as is, subsequently and relatedly, personal privacy.

1991, before the candy houses of cell phones, social networks, and Own Your Unconscious have been constructed. Comedian George Carlin might have humorously contrasted baseball with football by crying that, unlike football’s “sudden death”, the thing in baseball “is to go house! And so, the narrator concludes with a memory of his childhood, successful the big baseball sport. ”-the wish of a mere child. One of the lessons of the nonlinear novel is that there will be only one first time. However after what Hansel and Gretel went via-after what The Sweet House’s characters have been via as nicely-going house (Going On this site), winning a trophy, and the prospects of what comes after it are luxurious, even in the event that they can’t assist however be diminished by memory and retrospect. But Egan has opened up the potential for a brand new style: not a series, or a set of sequels-there’s definitely no scarcity of those. And so, after i closed the guide, I felt that familiar pang of sadness that the experience, the joy, of reading this novel for the first time, was over. But quite, a set of novels that, like A Go to from the Goon Squad and Candy Home, create a collection of characters and stories that both fill gaps and create them, rabbit holes stuffed with Easter eggs, in order that the data and narrative mic-passing can go on for as long as Egan desires to keep them spinning and singing. Not Russian Formalism, but maybe Russian dolls.