When is a sequel not a sequel? Such a question infuses The Candy Home. Egan has one thing larger in thoughts, or perhaps wider: to put in writing in the identical universe as that of Goon Squad, without essentially selecting up that novel’s central characters. The result’s a ebook that feels fresh and acquainted, in the perfect meaning of both words. Published final year, Jennifer Egan’s sixth novel (one other concept the creator means to subvert) is a comply with-as much as her Pulitzer Prize-successful A Go to from the Goon Squad, but that doesn’t mean it’s a spin-off in any conventional sense. Like its predecessor, The Candy Home is something of a grab bag, gathering 14 related, if not steady, narratives. This article seems in Problem 25 of Alta Journal. But when Goon Squad is, within the phrasing of critic James Poniewozik, “a idea album” (it offers with the music industry), this new guide is a digital collage.

Going down a decade or so into the longer term, it revolves around the development of a technology that allows our recollections to be uploaded and crowdsourced. Consider an Instagram where, instead of images, one shares bits of consciousness. Technology as a psychic terrain. “To hell with God.… This, after all, is how we already reside, if less instantly; what is cyberspace if not a hive thoughts? “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity,” one other responds, “that could also be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you assume you’re selecting for your self? I’m anxious concerning the Internet,” one among Egan’s characters declares. That’s the conundrum: the more we depend on know-how to connect, the more it undermines our company. And but, if Egan understands this, she additionally acknowledges its allure. In Goon Squad, she wrote one chapter as a PowerPoint presentation. For me, this can be a key directive of artwork, to compel us to encounter the world anew. The Candy House (https://phuket.thaibounty.com/2022/06/03/ten-issues-to-demystify-jinta-andaman/), too, adapts or appropriates digital strategies-its “Lulu the Spy, 2032,” as an illustration, is formatted as a long string of tweet-like micro-paragraphs, while “See Below” unfolds via a sequence of interwoven electronic mail threads. It’s extra a matter of provocation, a time period I’m utilizing within the broadest sense. That doesn’t mean offering options; creativity shouldn’t be prescriptive, in spite of everything. With every guide, each narrative, we should discover the required language for its telling, the mandatory perspective and kind. Right here we see what Egan has completed with The Sweet Home, which, like Goon Squad before it, is neither dystopian nor utopian. Extra to the point, it is a guide of observations, in which individuals transfer by a social landscape not unlike what ours might effectively change into. Prescient? Maybe, though only time will inform.

Instead, we get something higher – not concepts, or lessons, however folks, places, and issues. Bix’s framework for his invention comes from a text of anthropology- something Egan excels in-known as Patterns of Affinity, which gives a key to human social interplay. 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, possibly deliberately, regardless of the attempts to save lots of him. Egan’s engagement with know-how strikes me as another feint anyway. The unconscious is, by definition, outdoors of our awareness, until probed, and even then, it must be done with care. In holding with the fairy-tale image of the title and Bix’s traumatic motivation, Bix’s/Egan’s Personal Your Unconscious is extra literarily indebted to Sigmund Freud than to Fb, her Collective Consciousness a transparent nod to Carl Jung. Solely the capitalist acquisition mindset would dare to think about proudly owning the unconscious, let alone promoting it.

It’s a warning in opposition to sharing our music, and later, ourselves.

In a rare instance of a narrative narrated virtually solely in the primary-particular person plural (“we”), the daughters of report producer Lou Kline (also from A Visit from the Goon Squad) understand what actually becomes the product as soon as the music is given away: “We contemplated a nationwide billboard marketing campaign to remind people of the eternal law, Nothing is free! Solely kids anticipate in any other case, at the same time as myths and fairly takes warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. By no means trust a sweet house! It was solely a matter of time earlier than somebody made them pay for what they thought they had been getting without spending a dime.” Hansel and Gretel enter the candy home for sweets, only to danger being eaten themselves. It’s a warning in opposition to sharing our music, and later, ourselves. But the second time, Bennie, even later in life however still enlivened by rock ‘n’ roll, is trying to plan a concert a lot like the one which concludes A Visit from the Goon Squad.

The Russian Formalists noticed story as crucially completely different from plot, so as to know not just what stories say, or what they’re about, but how tales work. How stories work is likely one of the Sweet House’s preoccupations as well. In one chapter, “i, the Protagonist”, Chris Salazar (son of A Go to from the Goon Squad’s Bennie) works to create “algebraizations” of each state of affairs conceivable, very similar to Vladimir Propp’s 1928 guide Morphology of the Folktale tried to categorise all the systematic characterizations and workings of folk- and fairy tales. What they understand is merely temptation. But in Egan’s twist, Chris, like Bix, like all of the folks making an attempt to show interactions into equations, barely appears to know human motives in any respect. The primary time, it is, predictably, a warning, of treats that conceal threats. And so the phrase “the sweet house” turns up twice. It portends the end of the record business, finished in by file sharing, as is, subsequently and relatedly, personal privateness.

1991, earlier than the candy homes of cell telephones, social networks, and Personal Your Unconscious have been built. Comic George Carlin may have humorously contrasted baseball with soccer by crying that, in contrast to football’s “sudden death”, the article in baseball “is to go residence! And so, the narrator concludes with a memory of his childhood, winning the big baseball recreation. ”-the want of a mere little one. One of the classes of the nonlinear novel is that there could be only one first time. But after what Hansel and Gretel went by means of-after what The Sweet House’s characters have been via as well-going home, successful a trophy, and the prospects of what comes after it are luxurious, even if they can’t help however be diminished by memory and retrospect. However Egan has opened up the potential for a new style: not a sequence, or a set of sequels-there’s definitely no scarcity of those. And so, after i closed the guide, I felt that familiar pang of sadness that the expertise, the joy, of reading this novel for the first time, was over. But quite, a set of novels that, like A Visit from the Goon Squad and Sweet House, create a sequence of characters and stories that both fill gaps and create them, rabbit holes crammed with Easter eggs, so that the records and narrative mic-passing can go on for so long as Egan wants to maintain them spinning and singing. Not Russian Formalism, but possibly Russian dolls.