The Candy Home by Jennifer Egan Overview – information Overload

Jennifer Egan made her name with 2011’s Pulitzer-successful A Visit 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, once a part of 1970s outfit the Flaming Dildos, finds himself by the book’s discreetly futuristic finish catering chiefly to “pointers”, pill-wielding preschoolers whose tastes are the main driver of income in an trade altered past recognition. The Sweet Home, Egan’s observe-up, likewise hops around a big cast, this time from the nineties to the 2030s, and as soon as more has its eyes on the internet (the title refers back to the seduction of free-to-use online companies that sneakily flip us into the product, the echo of “the White House” presumably intended as a suggestion of where true power now lies). Like Goon Squad, it turns reality up a notch: that is an America wherein – in a big-tech knowledge grab – 21-yr-olds are urged to add their recollections to guard towards mind injury.

There’s a scarcity of the human moments that made Goon Squad fizz; Bennie feeling like a fish out of water at his upstate nation club, as an example, or his assistant, Sasha, hiding her kleptomania. Right here, action is seen as if by gauze: witness the 2032-set chapter about a “citizen agent” programmed by a shadowy authorities agency, 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 probably know all this? ” She’s accessing a rapacious tech giant’s “Collective Consciousness”, it seems – Google with knobs on, mainly – and you suspect Egan only tells us that so she can write this: “Getting hold of that data is arguably extra presumptuous than inventing it might have been. How dare I invent across chasms of gender, age, and cultural context? Pick your poison – if imagining isn’t allowed, then we’ll all must resort to grey grabs” (a whizzy type of memory capture).

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Fertile ground, to make sure, however Egan has ideas to burn, and in 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 reduced to a trait. Remember 13-12 months-outdated Lincoln, whose obsessive cataloguing of “great rock’n’roll pauses” was recorded by his younger sister in a sequence of PowerPoint slides, Goon Squad’s most eye-catching narrative stunt? Lincoln, now in his mid-20s, will get his personal chapter, but his hyper-attentiveness (previously the focus of a between-the-lines take on household life) is now only a distinguishing tic, as he longs for a colleague who “wears hair bands 24 % of the time, scrunchies 28 % of the time, and her hair unfastened forty eight percent of the time”. Lincoln works in data mining (after all) and his storyline tees up some background motion involving privateness activists referred to as “eluders”, who implant the brains of tech employees with “weevils”, electronic mind-control bugs that Egan retains explaining until 20 pages from the tip – a mark of how little the book’s gizmos in the end contribute.

That thought is greater than sufficient on its own to feed the sort of topically chewy novel Egan appears to want to write. However after an extended-winded set-up, it’s tossed aside, and the sense grows that the novel’s expository heft demands a lot. By far probably the most gratifying chapter unfolds as a late alternate of emails between various 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 downside (and its point, if you’re generous) is that Silicon Valley will never be rock’n’roll. Eventually, the book breathes: not only can we get the heady backstairs view of movie star that was part of Goon Squad’s allure, but – more vitally – we calm down into a rare moment of real-time interplay between characters otherwise mired in private recapitulation. ’t, you’ll probably be left baffled, however perhaps a good deal much less upset than readers who have. Either manner, conundrums of digital-period privacy and authenticity have been higher addressed in novels such because the Circle and Klara and the Sun. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan is revealed by Corsair (£20).

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Any concept I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic classes. We live in comparable ways, assume related thoughts. What the eluders need to revive, I suspect, is the uniqueness they felt earlier than counting like ours revealed that they have been an terrible lot like everyone else. The alternative! Mysteries which can be destroyed by measurement were never actually mysterious; solely our ignorance made them seem so. However where the eluders have it incorrect is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any much less exceptional, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) much less mysterious-any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. They’re like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anybody reread a homicide mystery? Egan remains enjoyable, however among the chapters really feel less natural than they did in A Visit to the Goon Squad. Lulu’s chapter, written within the type of an aphoristic instruction manual for a type of concubine spy, proves grating, its columnar format one thing of a chore, and it’s absurd premise slightly too distant from the rest within the novel to feel obligatory, although it is a precursor to one of the novel’s finest chapters, a tangled net of email subterfuge that involves embroil about half of the …

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Goon Squad alumni. Fortuitously it’s followed by a delightfully unhinged chapter about Noreen and Jules Jones who are having a loopy-off which proved hilariously tense in its depiction of people on the brink of a breakdown. Principally there’s a variety of pleasure to be had in reconvening with these characters and seeing how their lives have performed out, but the novel isn’t as sturdy as its predecessor. He knew what the imaginative and prescient meant: human lives previous and present, 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 laugh or shout. He opened his mouth and eyes and arms and drew them into himself, feeling a surge of discovery-of rapture-that seemed to carry him out of the snow. Finish your ebook! Right here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity. From a distance they pale into uniformity, but they had been shifting, every propelled by a singular power that was inexhaustible.

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