When is a sequel not a sequel? Such a question infuses The Candy Home. Egan has something greater in mind, or perhaps wider: to write in the same universe as that of Goon Squad, without essentially selecting up that novel’s central characters. The result’s a ebook that feels recent and familiar, in the best meaning of both words. Printed last yr, Jennifer Egan’s sixth novel (another idea the creator means to subvert) is a comply with-as much as her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Go to from the Goon Squad, but that doesn’t mean it is a spin-off in any traditional sense. Like its predecessor, The Sweet House is one thing of a grab bag, gathering 14 related, if not steady, narratives. This article seems in Subject 25 of Alta Journal. But if Goon Squad is, in the phrasing of critic James Poniewozik, “a idea album” (it deals with the music industry), this new guide is a digital collage.

And but, if Egan understands this, she also recognizes its allure.

Happening a decade or so into the longer term, it revolves round the event of a know-how that allows our reminiscences to be uploaded and crowdsourced. Consider an Instagram where, as an alternative of photographs, one shares bits of consciousness. Know-how as a psychic terrain. “To hell with God.… This, after all, is how we already dwell, if much less immediately; what’s our on-line world if not a hive mind? “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity,” another responds, “that could also be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you assume you’re choosing for your self? I’m fearful in regards to the Web,” one among Egan’s characters declares. That’s the conundrum: the more we depend on technology to connect, the more it undermines our company. And but, if Egan understands this, she also recognizes its allure. In Goon Squad, she wrote one chapter as a PowerPoint presentation. For me, this is a key directive of art, to compel us to encounter the world anew. The Candy House, too, adapts or appropriates digital methods-its “Lulu the Spy, 2032,” for example, is formatted as a long string of tweet-like micro-paragraphs, whereas “See Below” unfolds via a collection of interwoven e mail threads. It’s extra a matter of provocation, a term I’m using within the broadest sense. That doesn’t mean providing options; creativity is just not prescriptive, in any case. With every ebook, each narrative, we must find the mandatory language for its telling, the necessary perspective and kind. Right here we see what Egan has accomplished with The Candy House, which, like Goon Squad earlier than it, is neither dystopian nor utopian. Extra to the point, it’s a e-book of observations, in which individuals transfer by a social landscape not in contrast to what ours might properly change into. Prescient? Possibly, although solely time will tell.

As an alternative, we get something better – not concepts, or classes, but individuals, places, and things. Bix’s framework for his invention comes from a text of anthropology- something Egan excels in-known as Patterns of Affinity, which presents a key to human social interaction. But his motivation doesn’t even stem from wanting connection, however from loss: like Sasha, he has by no means recovered from a primal trauma in A Go to from the Goon Squad, a buddy who drowned, probably deliberately, despite the makes an attempt to avoid wasting him. Egan’s engagement with expertise strikes me as one other feint anyway. The unconscious is, by definition, exterior of our consciousness, except probed, and even then, it should be accomplished with care. In holding with the fairy-tale image of the title and Bix’s traumatic motivation, Bix’s/Egan’s Personal Your Unconscious is more literarily indebted to Sigmund Freud than to Facebook, her Collective Consciousness a transparent nod to Carl Jung. Only the capitalist acquisition mindset would dare to think about owning the unconscious, not to mention selling it.

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In a uncommon instance of a narrative narrated virtually completely in the primary-individual plural (“we”), the daughters of file producer Lou Kline (additionally from A Visit from the Goon Squad) perceive what really turns into the product as soon as the music is given away: “We contemplated a nationwide billboard campaign to remind individuals of the eternal legislation, Nothing is free! Only children count on otherwise, at the same time as myths and pretty takes warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a sweet house! It was solely a matter of time before somebody made them pay for what they thought they had been getting totally free.” Hansel and Gretel enter the sweet home for sweets, only to threat being eaten themselves. It is a warning in opposition to sharing our music, and later, ourselves. But the second time, Bennie, even later in life but still enlivened by rock ‘n’ roll, is making an attempt to plan a concert much like the one which concludes A Go to from the Goon Squad.

The Russian Formalists noticed story as crucially completely different from plot, so as to grasp not just what stories say, or what they are about, however how tales work. How stories work is one of the Sweet House’s preoccupations as well. 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 imaginable, much like Vladimir Propp’s 1928 e book Morphology of the Folktale tried to categorise all the systematic characterizations and workings of folks- and fairy tales. What they understand is merely temptation. But in Egan’s twist, Chris, like Bix, like all of the folks attempting to show interactions into equations, barely appears to know human motives at all. The first time, it’s, predictably, a warning, of treats that conceal threats. And so the phrase “the candy house” turns up twice. It portends the end of the document business, completed in by file sharing, as is, subsequently and relatedly, personal privateness.

1991, earlier than the candy houses of cell phones, social networks, and Personal Your Unconscious were built. Comic George Carlin could have humorously contrasted baseball with soccer by crying that, unlike football’s “sudden death”, the item in baseball “is to go home! And so, the narrator concludes with a reminiscence of his childhood, successful the big baseball recreation. ”-the want of a mere youngster. One of the lessons of the nonlinear novel is that there may be only one first time. But after what Hansel and Gretel went via-after what The Candy House – https://phuket.thaibounty.com/2022/07/19/4-factors-by-sheraton-phuket-patong-beach-resort/ – ’s characters have been by way of as properly-going residence, winning a trophy, and the possibilities of what comes after it are luxurious, even if they can’t assist however be diminished by memory and retrospect. But Egan has opened up the potential for a brand new genre: not a sequence, or a set of sequels-there’s actually no scarcity of these. And so, once i closed the guide, I felt that acquainted pang of sadness that the experience, the joy, of reading this novel for the primary time, was over. But somewhat, a set of novels that, like A Visit from the Goon Squad and Candy House, create a sequence of characters and stories that each fill gaps and create them, rabbit holes full of Easter eggs, so that the data and narrative mic-passing can go on for as long as Egan wants to maintain them spinning and singing. Not Russian Formalism, however possibly Russian dolls.