So That’s what The Candy Home Is

The Sweet House is a novel of characters, a few of whom first appeared in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan develops the characters and lets them loose to do as they please. But she acknowledges that “without a story, it’s all simply data.” And so she tells tales, lots and lots of them. The novel jumps around in time. Their stories never fairly cohere right into a plot however telling a narrative with a traditional plot does not appear to have been Jennifer Egan’s intent. Much of it takes place within the rapid future, though the fictional current includes expertise that does not exist in our temporal actuality. Egan makes use of her characters to discover themes of identity, affinity, authenticity, privacy, and the worth of freedom. Backstories tend to date again to the 1990s with glimpses of recollections formed in the 1960s. Tales also extend into the mid-2030s. She primarily raises these considerations with expertise that Bix Bouton invented in 2016. Own Your Unconscious permits individuals to externalize their consciousness to a Mandala Cube and revisit their reminiscences.

The Mareeya Place Hotel Phuket

An advance in that technology quickly permits memories to be uploaded anonymously to a Collective Consciousness (form of a digital cloud for recollections). Collective recollections are available to everyone who desires them. There may be, after all, nothing anonymous about memory, as faces of individuals performing good or dangerous deeds are recognizable to those that dip into the collective. A part of the story focuses on the thought of a vacant identity – an identification established on the internet and later abandoned, solely to be reinhabited by a proxy (sometimes a bot) that makes use of clues to the originator’s character to impersonate the creator. The expertise allows crimes to be solved and reduces some variations of evil, but it surely additionally creates a brand new type of surveillance society and sparks a higher level of social paranoia. Some people vacate those identities to escape from a society based mostly on data. The escapees are referred to as “eluders” because they attempt to stay invisible to the digital world.

That is likely to be Egan’s function – the number of distinctive stars in the galaxy of human lives, exhibiting how the characters or their tales relate to each other. A number of the tales are so evocative that may trigger, or grow to be embedded within, the reader’s own reminiscences. The kid’s story might be any story of self-delusion or self-confidence, the story of people that don’t let the past cease them from trying. It additionally reminds the reader that successes, like failures, are transitory; that there are always new challenges ahead; that previous performance is no assure of future success or failure. The ebook ends with a wonderful scene in which a child playing baseball is confident that, while he has never hit a pitch in his life, every failure is an explainable aberration from the norm in which he always hits a home run. The lesson I took from The Sweet Home is that the long run retains coming, that each particular person has a unique future and an infinite variety of potential futures, and that we shouldn’t be lost to the possibility of writing our own story.

Bix was of their company until they entered the river. Sasha and Drew’s son Lincoln is a counter. His world is about numbers, statistics, percentages. Outdoors of that realm, he’s socially awkward. His work entails the detection of proxies posing as humans in social media. Lincoln is consultant of individuals who suppose people are much less complicated when they are represented as knowledge. One of the novel’s questions is whether or not it is possible for somebody to be both at the same time. One of many novel’s themes is the difference between impressionists and empiricists, the difference between those that “tend toward the romantic” and people who have a tendency towards scientific detachment. A chapter narrated by Molly offers a funny take on the significance that teen girls place on being “in” with the fitting person, leading to a determined jockeying for social standing. Another chapter seems to be part of a future instruction guide for infiltrating and gathering intelligence about violent men. A chapter written as textual content messages became a bit wearying to learn.

His next undertaking involved screaming every time he believed people had been being phony to impress genuine responses. Rebecca takes a more scholarly strategy, however she is apprehensive that any examine of authenticity will develop into so wrapped up in “phony academic bullshit” that it won’t attain the authenticity she seeks to know. Alfred’s brother Ames has a mysterious connection to the army. His cousin Sasha had a compulsion to steal earlier than turning her life around and made a career by recycling trash into artwork. Visiting Sasha on impulse only accentuates Miles’ sense of failure. His brother Miles messed up his life in numerous methods earlier than ending up in rehab and becoming a drug counselor. Miles describes his story as one in every of redemption because redemption stories have “narrative power.” Lucky for Miles, “America loves a sinner,” so he decides to enter politics. Sasha’s husband Drew, a surgeon, has his own demons, residing the memory of a friend’s drowning for which he holds himself accountable.

Since there is no overriding plot, readers would possibly get of sense of whether The Candy Home is their kind of guide by studying one thing concerning the characters. There are too many to mention, but some stand out greater than others. Miranda abandoned her daughters for a few years to check the “affinities” that make people like and belief each other. She developed “formulas for predicting human inclinations.” Miranda studied a closed, remoted society. She didn’t suppose her predictive formulation would work in a large society as a result of people would be unwilling to produce all of the knowledge that the formulation require. She didn’t anticipate the willingness of individuals to abandon their privacy, to stay their lives in the spotlight of social media. A music producer and an anthropologist named Miranda Kline had two daughters. A couple of years after Bix Bouton commercialized her ideas, a displeased Miranda eluded. Rebecca Amari is obsessed with authenticity. So is Alfred Hollander. Alfred made an extended, tedious documentary about geese because he viewed animal conduct as authentic.