Why it’s Best to Read This: ‘The Sweet House’
When is a sequel not a sequel? Such a question infuses The Sweet Home. Egan has something greater in thoughts, or perhaps wider: to write in the identical universe as that of Goon Squad, without essentially picking up that novel’s central characters. The result’s a ebook that feels fresh and acquainted, in the best that means of each phrases. Published final yr, Jennifer Egan’s sixth novel (one other idea the writer means to subvert) is a follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, however that doesn’t imply it’s a spin-off in any traditional sense. Like its predecessor, The Candy Home is something of a grab bag, gathering 14 related, if not continuous, narratives. This text appears in Difficulty 25 of Alta Journal. But when Goon Squad is, within the phrasing of critic James Poniewozik, “a concept album” (it deals with the music industry), this new guide is a digital collage.
Happening a decade or so into the longer term, it revolves around the development of a know-how that enables our recollections to be uploaded and crowdsourced. Think of an Instagram the place, as a substitute of photos, one shares bits of consciousness. Technology as a psychic terrain. “To hell with God.… This, in fact, is how we already stay, if much less immediately; what’s our on-line world if not a hive thoughts? “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-understanding entity,” one other responds, “that may be predicting and controlling your conduct, even once you assume you’re selecting for yourself? I’m anxious concerning the Internet,” one of Egan’s characters declares. That’s the conundrum: the extra we rely on expertise to attach, the extra it undermines our agency. And but, if Egan understands this, she additionally acknowledges its allure. In Goon Squad, she wrote one chapter as a PowerPoint presentation. For me, it is a key directive of art, to compel us to encounter the world anew. The Candy Home, too, adapts or appropriates digital strategies-its “Lulu the Spy, 2032,” for instance, is formatted as an extended string of tweet-like micro-paragraphs, while “See Below” unfolds by way of a sequence of interwoven e mail threads. It’s extra a matter of provocation, a term I’m using in the broadest sense. That doesn’t mean offering solutions; creativity is just not prescriptive, in spite of everything. With each e book, every narrative, we should discover the necessary language for its telling, the required perspective and form. Here we see what Egan has completed with The Candy Home, which, like Goon Squad earlier than it, is neither dystopian nor utopian. Extra to the point, it is a book of observations, in which people transfer via a social panorama not not like what ours could properly become. Prescient? Possibly, though solely time will inform.
Egan’s engagement with know-how strikes me as one other feint anyway.
As an alternative, we get one thing higher – not concepts, or lessons, but folks, locations, and things. Bix’s framework for his invention comes from a text of anthropology- one thing Egan excels in-referred to as Patterns of Affinity, which provides 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 good friend who drowned, probably intentionally, regardless of the attempts to avoid wasting him. Egan’s engagement with know-how strikes me as one other feint anyway. The unconscious is, by definition, exterior of our awareness, unless probed, and even then, it have to be carried out with care. In keeping with the fairy-tale picture of the title and Bix’s traumatic motivation, Bix’s/Egan’s Personal Your Unconscious is more literarily indebted to Sigmund Freud than to Fb, her Collective Consciousness a transparent nod to Carl Jung. Only the capitalist acquisition mindset would dare to think about proudly owning the unconscious, let alone selling it.
Gay Hostal Puerta Del Sol Phuket
In a rare example of a narrative narrated almost totally in the primary-person plural (“we”), the daughters of document producer Lou Kline (also from A Go to from the Goon Squad) perceive what really turns into the product as soon as the music is given away: “We contemplated a nationwide billboard marketing campaign to remind individuals of the eternal regulation, Nothing is free! Solely kids anticipate otherwise, even as myths and fairly takes warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never belief a sweet home! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they have been getting at no cost.” Hansel and Gretel enter the candy house – click through the up coming page – for sweets, solely to risk being eaten themselves. It is a warning towards sharing our music, and later, ourselves. However the second time, Bennie, even later in life however still enlivened by rock ‘n’ roll, is trying to plan a live performance a lot just like the one which concludes A Visit from the Goon Squad.
1991, before the sweet homes of cell telephones, social networks, and Personal Your Unconscious had been constructed. Comedian George Carlin might have humorously contrasted baseball with football by crying that, unlike football’s “sudden death”, the article in baseball “is to go home! And so, the narrator concludes with a memory of his childhood, winning the large baseball recreation. ”-the wish of a mere little one. One of many classes of the nonlinear novel is that there can be only one first time. But after what Hansel and Gretel went by means of-after what The Sweet House’s characters have been by as nicely-going residence, profitable a trophy, and the potentialities of what comes after it are luxurious, even if they can’t help however be diminished by reminiscence and retrospect. But Egan has opened up the potential for a new style: not a series, or a set of sequels-there’s definitely no shortage of these. And so, after i closed the e-book, I felt that familiar pang of sadness that the expertise, the joy, of studying this novel for the primary time, was over. But quite, a set of novels that, like A Visit from the Goon Squad and Candy Home, create a collection of characters and tales that each fill gaps and create them, rabbit holes stuffed with Easter eggs, so that the information and narrative mic-passing can go on for so long as Egan needs to maintain them spinning and singing. Not Russian Formalism, but possibly Russian dolls.
