A Go to To ‘The Candy House’

Jennifer Egan’s bold new novel – a sequel, of types, to 2010’s “A Go to From the Goon Squad” – riffs on memory, authenticity and the allure of latest technology. If you buy an independently reviewed e book by means of our site, we earn an affiliate fee. Jennifer Egan’s 2010 “A Go to From the Goon Squad” was, relying whom you asked, a novel, or a group, or a narrative cycle. Following a tangle of characters in and adjoining to the music business across decades, The Mareeya Place Hotel Phuket it switched voices and methods in a kaleidoscopic prolonged-household portrait. But you would additionally call it an idea album. “The Candy House,” which passes the microphone to numerous peripheral “Goon Squad” characters, is similar in its anti-chronological construction and chameleonic virtuosity. But given its subject matter, it may be better to describe it as a social community, the literary model of the collaborative novel written by your folks and pals of buddies on Facebook or Instagram, each link opening on a new protagonist.

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We’ve seen how that sort of vision plays out – surely the more we know about one another, the higher we’ll understand each other? Proper? – and so has its creator. Bix, who is Black, imagined the web within the ’90s as a “new metaphysical sphere” the place “Black people can be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world.” The idea, he concedes, “looked comically naïve from a 2010 perspective.” Nonetheless, we try, try again. Contemporary fiction typically treats this kind of “Black Mirror” premise (particularly, it has shades of the episode “The Whole History of You”) skeptically; the know-how is an oppressor, or, to the novelist, a competitor. ‘The Sweet House’ takes its title from a repeated metaphor for temptation: the lures of amusement and nostalgia that Hansel-and-Gretel us right into a spun-sugar edifice upon which we’re invited to gorge and during which we – our desires, our recollections – are additionally on the menu. See, as an illustration, Dave Eggers’s “The Circle,” which focused on the passive-aggressive totalitarianism of the crucial to “share.” There’s a component of that right here, with hints of a resistance to the collective unconscious, including “eluders,” people who go to extremes to flee the mass thoughts, even vanishing altogether. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Thank you for your endurance whereas we verify access. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you on your endurance while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Occasions account, or subscribe for all of the Occasions. Already a subscriber? Log in.

Life In + Phuket

It is a spectacular palace constructed out of rabbit holes. Tech is probably not the new rock ’n’ roll, however it serves an analogous perform in “The Sweet House.” It’s the world-shifting phenomenon that defines an era and connects strangers. It’s also, though it wears the tremendous cloth of idealism, large enterprise. His subsequent large concept, constructed on an experimental technology that may digitally capture animal consciousness, permits people to upload a life’s price of reminiscences – even lengthy-forgotten ones – share them in a collective archive and access others’, as if touring in a cranial time machine. The killer app that defines the choice actuality of “The Sweet House” is dreamed up in 2010 by Bix Bouton, briefly launched as an early-90s web obsessive in “Goon Squad,” now a social-media mogul. The title of the product, Own Your Unconscious, suggests a lofty, even spiritual aspiration, as does the identify of Bix’s company, Mandala.

The web. The information superhighway. HAL, the pushy AI in 2001: An area Odyssey, acquired ornery with hapless Dave manner back in 1968, in a film primarily based on the tales of Arthur C. Clarke written two a long time before that. And at the daybreak of talkies, as movie audiences couldn’t help however feel they have been watching life itself unfold, Buster Keaton upped the ante and climbed proper into the display, within the 1924 classic Sherlock Jr. Two years earlier than that, James Joyce conjured much of life from 800 or so printed pages. The stubborn power of the mind usually eludes literary novelists, Metadee Resort Phuket in addition to tech moguls. If our “literary culture” has been addled by algorithms and screens, passionate readers could need to look beyond a mere two paths for the novel. Another recent tech-topian book observes: “Gaining entry to all of that info turned out to be something of a blended blessing.” That is neither an avant grade meta-narrative nor middlebrow drama, but an unapologetic journey-Ernest Cline’s Prepared Participant One.