The Center for Fiction Presents Jennifer Egan on The Sweet House

With a focus on tech­nology and social media, Egan charts how Bix’s aspirational ‘‘Vision’’ to connect folks globally is transformed into something less innocent, much less altruistic. Like many science fiction authors before her, Egan questions whether or not we finally lose our authentic selves if each facet of our lives, including our recollections, is mediated solely via expertise. Actually, on several occasions, she demonstrates the advantages of the ‘‘Collective Unconsciousness,’’ whether or not it’s Christine Kline getting to know her father through his recollections, something she was unable to do when he was alive, or providing Roxy Kline, a recovering drug addict, some consolation that her reminiscences, troubled though they are, will outlast her. Because she’s a terrific writer, at no point does Egan come across as a Luddite or a reactionary. Nevertheless, as Egan writes in the final pages of the novel, ‘‘knowing all the pieces is just too very like realizing nothing; with out a narrative, it’s all simply information.’’ It’s this anxiety, that our lived experiences will be nothing more than simply one other knowledge level within the cloud, that echoes across every chapter.

It’s a rather touching love story with a darker edge as we come to grasp that not everybody has purchased into Bix’s ‘‘Vision’’ of an interconnected and absolutely transparent world. However my favorite piece is The Candy House’s take on the ‘‘PowerPoint’’ chapter from Goon Squad. Informed entirely through a messaging app, ‘‘See Below’’ is that this hilarious and emotionally fraught tale of Lulu Kisarian’s convoluted try to meet her father, a well-known actor who doesn’t know she exists. This story ties collectively multiple threads from each Goon Squad and The Candy Home and is a sheer delight to read. It’s doubtful that Egan will win a second Pulit­zer with The Candy House. However that shouldn’t undersell the excellence of the novel or the very human story it tells about our reminiscences, in regards to the legacy we leave behind, and about our au­thentic selves. Ian Mond loves to speak about books. For eight years he co-hosted a e book podcast, The Author and the Critic, with Kirstyn McDermott. This assessment and more prefer it in the April 2022 subject of Locus. If you are here, please take a second to assist Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. Recently he has revived his weblog, The Hysterical Hamster, and is again posting largely vulgar critiques on an eclectic vary of literary and style novels. We depend on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, however We need YOUR Financial Assist to continue quality protection of the science fiction and fantasy field.

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It’s throughout the discussion, sparked by a point out of lab experiments involving the importing of a cat’s consciousness, that Bix is struck by a new ‘‘Vision.’’ In 2016, Mandala releases ‘‘Own Your Unconscious,’’ a means of downloading your recollections and the emotions associated with these experiences, to be freely shared by Mandala’s ‘‘Collective Consciousness.’’ It’s a technology that leaves an impression on the interconnected tales that follow, threading through the lives of the Hollander and Kline households. Each A Go to from The Goon Squad and The Sweet House are about memory and the passage of time. In A Visit from the Goon Squad, these themes are expressed through music, particularly rock ’n’ roll, which has at all times been symbolic of youth, but also feelings of nostalgia. Central to the novel is Egan’s portrayal of the music business and its transition from being all in regards to the artist to being all about the money. Egan takes the same tack within the Sweet House.

Whereas The Candy Home is branded as a novel, it can also be experienced as a short story col­lection. As such, there are some ‘‘chapters’’ that stand out. I especially beloved ‘‘Case Research: Nobody Got Hurt’’, which centres on Alfred Hollander – son of Ted – who, when he was youthful, grew to become allergic to the ‘‘artifice’’ of Tv. It turned arduous to watch Cheers with Alfred. It became preferable not to observe anything with Alfred, who was apt to holler from the couch, nonetheless with a slight lisp: ‘‘How a lot are they paying her? It grew to become not possible to look at the information with Alfred. ’’ or ‘‘Who does he assume he’s kidding! What starts as a humorous story about an ec­centric young man evolves into this discomforting look at the notion of authenticity – an underly­ing theme of the novel. ’’ It broke the mood. I also adored ‘‘Rhyme Scheme’’, which is instructed from the perspective of Sasha’s neuroatypical son Lincoln, who works for a software firm that appears to clean the inter­net of all the ‘‘proxies’’ and ‘‘eluders’’ that permit a person to cover their true id.

Within the case of A Visit from the Goon Squad, the narrative revolved around Bennie Salazar, a document firm execu­tive, his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha, and the assorted relations, friends and enemies in their orbit. The opening chapter, however, includes Bix Bouton, a nicer equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg, who seems briefly in A Go to from the Goon Squad. With The Sweet House, the main target shifts to those people who played a peripheral function in A Visit from the Goon Squad, particularly the families of Ted Hollander (Sasha’s Uncle) and Lou Kline (Bennie’s mentor). In 1992 Bix had a ‘‘Vision’’ that led him to estab­lish Mandala, a social media platform with the global reach and ubiquity of Facebook. Along with his ‘‘Vision’’ nearly complete, Bix is awaiting his subsequent epiphany, ‘‘but every time he tried to peek beyond that edge, his thoughts went white.’’ Then one evening, wearing a disguise (‘‘he’d purchased a headscarf with dreadlocks rising from the back’’), Bix joins a small group of academics and students led by Ted Hollander to debate the anthropological work of Miranda Kline, whose theories about human nature Bix employed because the foundational algorithms for Mandala.

Because the publishing Gods would have it, Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility is published in the identical month as Jennifer Egan’s The Candy Home. It also occurs that both The Candy Home and Sea of Tranquility are in conversation with these earlier works, with The Sweet House a direct sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad. Moreso than Margaret Atwood, I consider Mandel and Egan to be the mainstream authors who have done essentially the most to blur the synthetic strains between literary and speculative fiction, as evidenced by the recognition and prizes lavished from each sides of the divide on A Go to from the Goon Squad (Egan) and Station Eleven (Mandel). And finally, just like Sea of Tranquility, which is the closest Mandel has come to writing ‘‘core’’ science fiction, The Candy House is Egan at her most speculative. As with its predecessor, The Candy House is cut up into 13 chapters, each informed from a distinct character’s perspective.

Melora Kline recounts the household historical past of her anthropologist mother and absent father Lou. Chris Salazar works complacently for a company that “algebraizes” stories to fundamental tropes. Roxy Kline, a recovering heroin addict, uploads her memories to Mandala and is prepared to start out a new life. On a frustrating trip with a coworker, he finds a brand new course in life. Molly Cooke, a teenager, experience tensions together with her buddies when new girl Lulu arrives. Hannah, Molly’s sister, recounts her mom’s feud with their neighbor Jules Jones. Lulu Kisarian works as a spy for the Citizen Agent program. A sequence of intersecting e-mail threads between the massive solid of the novel’s characters. As a child, Ames Hollander hits a surprise recreation-profitable residence run in a baseball recreation. Gregory Bouton, Bix’s son, mourns his father’s dying. The story rapidly recounts events of his future, then returns to the triumphant moment of his house run.