Jennifer Egan made her name with 2011’s Pulitzer-winning A Go to from the Goon Squad, a zig-zagging multigenerational saga centred on a multiplatinum report producer, Bennie Salazar. The quirky title referred to time’s ravages; Bennie, as soon as a part of 1970s outfit the Flaming Dildos, finds himself by the book’s discreetly futuristic end catering mainly to “pointers”, tablet-wielding preschoolers whose tastes are the principle driver of earnings in an trade altered past recognition. The Candy House, Egan’s observe-up, likewise hops round a large cast, this time from the nineties to the 2030s, and as soon as more has its eyes on the web (the title refers back to the seduction of free-to-use on-line services that sneakily flip us into the product, the echo of “the White House” presumably intended as a suggestion of the place true power now lies). Like Goon Squad, it turns reality up a notch: this is an America through which – in an enormous-tech information grab – 21-year-olds are urged to add their memories to guard against mind harm.

There’s a scarcity of the human moments that made Goon Squad fizz; Bennie feeling like a fish out of water at his upstate country club, for instance, or his assistant, Sasha, hiding her kleptomania. Here, motion is seen as if by means of gauze: witness the 2032-set chapter a few “citizen agent” programmed by a shadowy authorities company, advised as 30 two-column pages of bulletpoint-like diktats from her handlers. You sense the novel’s laborious scaffolding when the narrator of a mid-1960s interlude asks: “How can I possibly know all this? ” She’s accessing a rapacious tech giant’s “Collective Consciousness”, it turns out – Google with knobs on, basically – and you suspect Egan only tells us that so she can write this: “Getting hold of that information is arguably extra presumptuous than inventing it would have been. How dare I invent throughout chasms of gender, age, and cultural context? Choose your poison – if imagining isn’t allowed, then we’ll all need to resort to gray grabs” (a whizzy type of memory capture).

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Fertile ground, to make sure, however Egan has concepts to burn, and on this novel that’s what she does: her painstakingly constructed backdrop has barely any influence on the book’s drama, in poor health served by characters decreased to a trait. Remember 13-yr-previous Lincoln, whose obsessive cataloguing of “great rock’n’roll pauses” was recorded by his youthful sister in a series of PowerPoint slides, Goon Squad’s most eye-catching narrative stunt? Lincoln, now in his mid-20s, gets his own chapter, but his hyper-attentiveness (previously the main target of a between-the-strains take on family life) is now only a distinguishing tic, as he longs for a colleague who “wears hair bands 24 % of the time, scrunchies 28 p.c of the time, and her hair free 48 % of the time”. Lincoln works in information mining (after all) and his storyline tees up some background motion involving privateness activists known as “eluders”, who implant the brains of tech employees with “weevils”, electronic thoughts-control bugs that Egan keeps explaining until 20 pages from the top – a mark of how little the book’s gizmos in the end contribute.

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That thought is greater than sufficient by itself to feed the form of topically chewy novel Egan seems to need to jot down. But after a protracted-winded set-up, it’s tossed apart, and the sense grows that the novel’s expository heft demands a lot. By far essentially the most pleasing chapter unfolds as a late exchange of emails between numerous Goon Squad stalwarts out to revive their reputations by piggybacking on the fortunes of an elderly actor in search of a comeback of his personal. Perhaps the book’s largest drawback (and its level, if you’re generous) is that Silicon Valley will never be rock’n’roll. Eventually, the book breathes: not solely do we get the heady backstairs view of movie star that was part of Goon Squad’s allure, but – extra vitally – we chill out right into a uncommon moment of real-time interaction between characters in any other case mired in non-public recapitulation. ’t, you’ll in all probability be left baffled, however maybe a very good deal much less dissatisfied than readers who’ve. Both manner, conundrums of digital-period privateness and authenticity have been higher addressed in novels such because the Circle and Klara and the Solar. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan is printed by Corsair (£20).

Any idea I’ve is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in similar ways, suppose related ideas. What the eluders want to revive, I believe, is the uniqueness they felt earlier than counting like ours revealed that they have been an awful lot like everybody else. The alternative! Mysteries which can be destroyed by measurement have been by no means truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. But where the eluders have it incorrect is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less outstanding, or even (that is counterintuitive, I do know) less mysterious-any more than figuring out the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. They’re like whodunits after you understand who did it. Does anyone reread a murder thriller? Egan stays enjoyable, however some of the chapters feel much less pure than they did in A Go to to the Goon Squad. Lulu’s chapter, written in the form of an aphoristic instruction handbook for a form of concubine spy, proves grating, its columnar format one thing of a chore, and it’s absurd premise a little too distant from anything in the novel to feel necessary, although it’s a precursor to one of the novel’s best chapters, a tangled internet of e mail subterfuge that involves embroil about half of the …

Goon Squad alumni. Thankfully it’s adopted by a delightfully unhinged chapter about Noreen and Jules Jones who’re having a loopy-off which proved hilariously tense in its depiction of people on the brink of a breakdown. Largely there’s a variety of pleasure to be had in reconvening with these characters and seeing how their lives have performed out, however the novel isn’t as robust as its predecessor. He knew what the imaginative and prescient meant: human lives past and current, around him, inside him. “Gregory gazed, transfixed, as snow swarmed down upon him like space junk; like disarranged flocks of birds; like the universe emptying itself. He wished to chortle or shout. He opened his mouth and eyes and arms and drew them into himself, feeling a surge of discovery-of rapture-that appeared to lift him out of the snow. End your e-book! Here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling towards his curiosity. From a distance they light into uniformity, but they have been transferring, each propelled by a singular power that was inexhaustible.