Why it’s Best to Read This: ‘The Candy House’

He’s a reasonably good man whose time has come, and he’s good with that. Why shouldn’t he be? For others, nonetheless, that sweet tastes an awful lot like poison, and so they change into “eluders,” or “data defiers” who go to great lengths to maintain their identities, their reminiscences, and their consciousnesses off the grid and out of the mathematical cloud that now hovers over us all, 24/7. It isn’t easy. In a particularly sly second, Egan reveals that some of these superior applications make use of precise individuals-fiction writers, apparently-“who impersonate a number of identities directly.” Sooner or later, fiction writers may be most helpful in releasing us from the continual surveillance and intrusion of expertise by inventing identities that we will use as escape hatches. They, too, need to make use of superior forms of know-how equivalent to “hermit crab programs” to escape the web. Ha ha. Type of. Egan is just too skilled a writer, and too smart a human being to lurch through the same old paces of dystopic fiction.

Egan’s working example is that this novel, a collection of chapters about people figuring out who they’re. As in Goon Squad, Egan rifles by way of an assortment of fictional types and motifs to inform these people’s stories. One bravura chapter, harking back to the well-known PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad, is informed in directives conveyed to an undercover agent through an implant in her mind. There’s a former boy surprise determined for his next brainstorm, a teenage woman agonizing over her social standing, a recovering drug addict whose attempted suicide gives one other man with the prospect to heal an old wound. Better of all is a chapter consisting solely of emails and texts exchanged by over a dozen characters. It begins with one girl searching for a personal dialog with an aging movie star and spreads to almost a dozen participants, every buying and selling favors to get what she or he desires, an online of transactions that ultimately outcomes in the joyous reunion of the Conduits, a rock band that appears in Goon Squad, and a documentary movie.

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Like Goon Squad, The Candy House comes collectively in pieces. Every chapter is advised from a unique perspective chosen from a group of interconnected characters, many of whom also appear in Goon Squad (though you don’t want to remember them effectively to follow this one). The novel is broken up in time, the earliest chapter being set (kind of) in 1965 and the most recent in the 2030s. That “sort of” refers to the abiding presence within the novel of a brand new know-how that allows folks to export all their reminiscences and add them to an online repository, where (if their proprietor so chooses) others can view them too, together with the accompanying ideas and emotions. The person who narrates the 1965 chapter, which describes how 4 younger bankers leapt into the counterculture at a pot farm within the redwoods, is the daughter of one of the males. She’s witnessing a second of liberation in her father’s life but in addition the start of the end of her parents’ suburban marriage.

All of this feels extra at ease than Goon Squad, a novel I’d by no means thought of as betraying any strain until I learn The Sweet House. There was no urgent purpose for the PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad to be written in PowerPoint in addition to proving that Egan may do it, however the e-mail/text chapter, titled “See Under,” could solely be written in this type. Witnessing all these differently motivated agendas steadily coalesce into a creative drive is an exhilarating delight. Expertise, specifically the alluring Collective Consciousness, is the sweet home of the novel’s title. By Jennifer Egan. Scribner. The chapter is an illustration of how human connection works, facilitated by expertise, yet not so totally different from the Brazilian tribe studied by anthropologist Miranda Kline, who is dismayed to see her monograph monetized by Bix into a surveillance platform disguised as a group. Nothing is free! Only youngsters expect otherwise, whilst myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel.