Egan’s “The Sweet Home

You’ve entered elite head area of one sort or another. It makes you’re feeling a bit excessive, drugged, and fitted with V.R. Jennifer Egan’s new one, “The Sweet House,” is one of these novels. That ebook tells more than a dozen interrelated tales and absolutely defies neat summarizing. “The Sweet House” is a sequel to “A Go to From the Goon Squad,” Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-profitable 2010 novel. Among its central characters is Bennie Salazar, a flailing record executive, and Sasha, his assistant. You don’t have to have read “Goon Squad” to pick up “The Sweet Home,” nevertheless it helps. Most of the characters are back; many have grown children; all have new, hairy, ingrown issues. The novel is about music, New York’s East Village, journal journalism, San Francisco in the 1970s, Gen-X nostalgia, the digitalization of all the things and the search, in the face of that vitality-sucking digitalization, for types of authenticity. We’re having bother retrieving the article content. All sorts of strings from the earlier e book are picked up and braided, twanged or cauterized. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. In case you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all the Times. Thanks in your persistence while we confirm entry. Thank you for your persistence whereas we confirm access. Already a subscriber? Log in.

In their wake, he will create a household gadget that allows a human thoughts to be copied (a type of cortical back-up drive), and a subscription-only spiritus mundi. Users who conform to upload their brains will acquire access to the anonymised content of every different user, residing or useless; a fantastic “churning gyre” of reminiscence and thought. Questioning concerning the id of a wonderful stranger, the grisly truth of a murder, or the fate of a protracted-lost frenemy? Who might resist the lure of a tangible, search-optimised past? In opposition to this backdrop of escalating disclosure – what Egan calls the “Self-Surveillance Era” – The Sweet House tells stories of looking out. A recovering heroin addict considers the redemptive possibility of Dungeons and Dragons. A lovesick programmer collects trinkets, like a human bowerbird, within the hope they’ll wordlessly convey his affection. Simply run a face-match on the CollectiveConsciousness. A movie-maker begins shrieking on the subway, to jolt his fellow commuters right into a moment of pure sincerity.

It’s this sense of paradoxical isolation that Egan revisits in her new book.

A go to from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer-profitable rock’n’roll novel, felt like the start of something. It was a tale as gimmicky and restless because the smartphone period threatened to be. The forged was a neon collision of kleptomaniacs, philanderers, It girls, autocrats and a guitar band referred to as the Flaming Dildos. One chapter was written solely in PowerPoint slides; one other in textspeak (“if thr r kids, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?”). But when A Go to from the Goon Squad carried the promise of a grand wave of tech-inflected fiction, that literary development by no means quite materialised. And the plot ricocheted like a browsing-addled brain. A dozen years on, and Egan’s cult novel now appears like the tip of something, a form of techno-optimist elegy: a examine in time’s “incremental deflations”, and the loneliness of hyper-connectivity. In an period of display screen-curated selfhood, autofiction surged as a substitute. It’s this sense of paradoxical isolation that Egan revisits in her new book. The Sweet Home is much less a sequel to Goon Squad than a fraternal twin.

A former spy worries that her ideas are no longer her own. Here, once once more, is the novel as community: every component tale – every node – could be traced again to that New York condominium filled with books and huge discuss, the place Bix is waiting for his lightbulb moment. Connectivity is greater than Egan’s theme, it’s her modus operandi. However for all Egan’s kind-elasticity – her inventive peacocking, tech speculation and bricolage – the tales that work greatest within the Candy House are the least flamboyant. When someone threatens our rights, nonetheless, a wider leeway turns into necessary”). What felt playful in Goon Squad now feels just a little stale: a sustained passage of back-and-forth emails is too conveniently expository; a treatise on spycraft is an on-the-nostril wallop (“As Individuals we prize human rights above all else and can’t sanction their violation. Beneath all the glitz and frippery, there’s one thing essentially old style about the Sweet House.