One character, the junkie daughter of a music producer, makes use of the gadget to relive a dearly remembered trip to London she made together with her dad at age 16, solely to learn that he sometimes regretted bringing her along. “How could revisiting that time in its unfiltered state improve upon the story her reminiscence has made? ” she realizes. Not solely is the notion of finding out precisely what other people think of you pretty terrifying, however the uncooked memories pose a risk to the stories we make of them afterward, tales that construct our lives. That is an inversion of that much-used Joan Didion quote, “We inform ourselves stories with a view to live,” which Didion meant as a pitiless statement of how we cloak the ephemera of expertise in an illusion of which means. Egan thinks in any other case, sustaining that “knowing every little thing is just too very like figuring out nothing; with out a narrative, it’s all just information.” Forming it right into a narrative is residing (even if, as with Didion, the story you tell about yourself is that you’re a neurasthenic cynic above such consolations).

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Chris begins out working for company seeking to show what it calls “stockblocks,” narrative elements from films (“Funny Finest Friend Will get Serious to speak Sense Into Protagonist”; “Crowd Rises to Its Toes in Unexpected Tribute”), into mathematical formulae, although to what finish he can’t tell. As a dungeon grasp, as a substitute of dismantling stories, he makes them, collaboratively with others. Later we discover him working Mondrian behind a nonprofit entrance that organizes Dungeons & Dragons games for recovering addicts. In the Sweet House, D&D represents considered one of several alternatives to the candy home of technology and information. Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, by which what occurred depends on who’s telling the story. Being fabricated from imagination, it gives a portal to a different universe, very similar to each of the chapters in Egan’s novel. A candy home, on the other hand, is just a entice. You assume you’re going to eat it, but it surely finally ends up eating you.

Her radiant new novel explores what position the imagination can still play in a world overwhelmed by technology. Slate has relationships with various on-line retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We replace hyperlinks when possible, however notice that deals can expire and all prices are topic to vary. There’s not a variety of filler in Jennifer Egan’s radiant new novel, The Candy Home, a sequel of kinds to her 2010 Pulitzer-successful bestseller, A Go to From the Goon Squad. However one sentence in the brand new novel’s penultimate chapter does strike me as pointless. All prices were updated on the time of publication. Recalling a personality who’s struggling to finish a novel, an authorial voice-over drops in to clarify that only fiction “lets us roam with absolute freedom by way of the human collective.” Paeans from a novelist to the unique powers of fiction do register as a bit self-serving, however the reason Egan doesn’t need to inform us it is because she’s spent the previous 13 chapters gloriously proving it.

By no means belief a candy home! Never trust a sweet home can also be the advice of Miranda, who turns into an “eluder,” part of a motion of people who set up a robotic proxy in their present digital identity and then vanish into the offline world. It was solely a matter of time before somebody made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Considered one of their leaders, Chris Salazar, is the son of Bennie Salazar, a central character from Goon Squad. Chris calls his organization Mondrian, presumably in tribute to his grandmother, who saved an genuine Mondrian painting in a modest tract home so impossible to secure that no firm would insure it. 4. Are There Limits to What Taylor Swift Can Do? We Might need Found One. Typically the most effective place to conceal the actual is amid the fake, which could be the motto of fiction: the lie that tells a fact.

The Collective Consciousness is the product of an organization named Mandala, founded by Bix Bouton, the protagonist of the primary chapter-a charismatic entrepreneur whose “genius lay in refining, compressing, and mass-producing, as a luscious, irresistible product, technology that already existed in crude type.” He’s a bit Mark Zuckerberg, a bit Steve Jobs, except Bix is Black, first drawn into the world of the internet by the assumption that, when disembodied, “Black folks can be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the bodily world.” Bix’s first big idea-lifted from an obscure anthropology monograph containing algorithms that calculated how belief and affect formed in a Brazilian tribe-was a social media platform that made him rich and famous. Personal Your Unconscious, his second breakthrough, was additionally lifted from an academic’s analysis and allows folks to deposit a replica of their memory to a sexy little bit of tech shaped like a luminous cube. The uploading and sharing part, called the Collective Consciousness, was more of an afterthought, however as is often the best way with new tech, it soon became the primary attraction.

The best of films, Television, books, music, and extra, delivered to your inbox. Thanks for signing up! You’ll be able to handle your newsletter subscriptions at any time. If A Go to from the Goon Squad is about time and music, The Candy Home is about experience and art, though the novel’s four sections (“Build,” “Break,” “Drop,” “Build”) refer again to the musical constructions of Goon Squad. Egan isn’t especially considering spinning out all the potential ramifications of the Collective Consciousness, that are considerable and bit distracting. One chapter mentions that “thousands of abusers have been convicted based on the proof of their victims’ externalized recollections, viewed as film in courtrooms,” leaving the wider influence on criminal justice, among different establishments, a tantalizing thriller. As a substitute, The Candy House contemplates what function the imagination might nonetheless play even when different people’s lives-and the forgotten periods in our own-have develop into simply and completely accessible.