Jennifer Egan’s ambitious new novel – a sequel, of sorts, to 2010’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” – riffs on reminiscence, authenticity and the allure of latest know-how. Once you purchase an independently reviewed book via our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Jennifer Egan’s 2010 “A Go to From the Goon Squad” was, relying whom you asked, a novel, or a collection, or a story cycle. Following a tangle of characters in and adjoining to the music business throughout decades, it switched voices and techniques in a kaleidoscopic extended-household portrait. However you could additionally name it an idea album. “The Sweet House,” which passes the microphone to a lot of peripheral “Goon Squad” characters, is analogous in its anti-chronological structure and chameleonic virtuosity. But given its subject material, it is likely to be higher to explain it as a social network, the literary model of the collaborative novel written by your friends and pals of associates on Facebook or Instagram, every link opening on a new protagonist.

We’ve seen how that kind of imaginative and prescient performs out – absolutely the more we know about each other, the higher we’ll perceive one another? Right? – and so has its creator. Bix, who’s Black, imagined the internet within the ’90s as a “new metaphysical sphere” the place “Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the bodily world.” The concept, he concedes, “looked comically naïve from a 2010 perspective.” Nonetheless, we attempt, attempt again. Contemporary fiction typically treats this sort of “Black Mirror” premise (specifically, it has shades of the episode “The Total Historical past of You”) skeptically; the expertise is an oppressor, or, to the novelist, a competitor. ‘The Candy 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 are invited to gorge and by which we – our needs, our recollections – are additionally on the menu. See, as an illustration, Dave Eggers’s “The Circle,” which centered on the passive-aggressive totalitarianism of the crucial 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 hassle retrieving the article content. Thank you on your persistence while we confirm entry. Please allow JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you in your patience while we confirm entry. If you’re in Reader mode please exit and log into your Occasions account, or subscribe for all of the Occasions. Already a subscriber? Log in.

Grand Orchid Inn

It is a spectacular palace constructed out of rabbit holes. Tech is probably not the new rock ’n’ roll, but it serves an analogous function in “The Candy House.” It’s the world-shifting phenomenon that defines an period and connects strangers. Additionally it is, though it wears the positive cloth of idealism, big enterprise. His next massive thought, constructed on an experimental expertise that may digitally seize animal consciousness, allows people to add a life’s worth of recollections – even long-forgotten ones – share them in a collective archive and entry others’, as if touring in a cranial time machine. The killer app that defines the alternative reality of “The Sweet House” is dreamed up in 2010 by Bix Bouton, briefly introduced as an early-90s internet obsessive in “Goon Squad,” now a social-media mogul. The name of the product, Own Your Unconscious, suggests a lofty, even spiritual aspiration, as does the identify of Bix’s company, Mandala.

The web. The data superhighway. HAL, the pushy AI in 2001: An area Odyssey, got ornery with hapless Dave approach again in 1968, in a film based on the stories of Arthur C. Clarke written two many years before that. And on the daybreak of talkies, as film audiences could not help however feel they had been watching life itself unfold, Buster Keaton upped the ante and climbed right into the display, 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 energy of the brain typically eludes literary novelists, in addition to tech moguls. If our “literary culture” has been addled by algorithms and screens, passionate readers may wish to look past a mere two paths for the novel. One other latest tech-topian e-book observes: “Gaining access to all of that information turned out to be something of a blended blessing.” This is neither an avant grade meta-narrative nor middlebrow drama, but an unapologetic journey-Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.