Why it is Best to Learn This: ‘The Sweet House’

When is a sequel not a sequel? Such a question infuses The Sweet House. Egan has something larger in mind, or perhaps wider: to write down in the same universe as that of Goon Squad, with out necessarily choosing up that novel’s central characters. The result is a book that feels recent and acquainted, in one of the best meaning of both phrases. Published final yr, Jennifer Egan’s sixth novel (another idea the writer means to subvert) is a follow-as much as her Pulitzer Prize-profitable A Go to from the Goon Squad, but that doesn’t imply it is a spin-off in any conventional sense. Like its predecessor, The Candy House is something of a seize bag, gathering 14 associated, if not continuous, narratives. This text appears in Problem 25 of Alta Journal. But if Goon Squad is, within the phrasing of critic James Poniewozik, “a concept album” (it offers with the music trade), this new ebook is a digital collage.

Taking place a decade or so into the future, it revolves around the event of a know-how that allows our reminiscences to be uploaded and crowdsourced. Consider an Instagram the place, instead of photographs, one shares bits of consciousness. Expertise as a psychic terrain. “To hell with God.… This, after all, is how we already stay, if much less immediately; what’s cyberspace if not a hive thoughts? “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-realizing entity,” one other responds, “that could also be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you think you’re choosing for your self? I’m fearful about the Web,” one in every of Egan’s characters declares. That’s the conundrum: the more we depend on expertise to attach, the more it undermines our company. And but, if Egan understands this, she also recognizes its allure. In Goon Squad, she wrote one chapter as a PowerPoint presentation. For me, this is a key directive of art, to compel us to encounter the world anew. The Sweet House, too, adapts or appropriates digital methods-its “Lulu the Spy, 2032,” for example, is formatted as a long string of tweet-like micro-paragraphs, whereas “See Below” unfolds through a sequence of interwoven email threads. It’s extra a matter of provocation, a term I’m utilizing in the broadest sense. That doesn’t imply providing options; creativity is not prescriptive, after all. With every book, every narrative, we should discover the mandatory language for its telling, the mandatory perspective and kind. Here we see what Egan has achieved with The Sweet House, which, like Goon Squad earlier than it, is neither dystopian nor utopian. Extra to the purpose, it’s a book of observations, in which people transfer by means of a social landscape not not like what ours could properly turn into. Prescient? Maybe, though solely time will inform.

Baan Sai Yuan

As an alternative, we get something better – not concepts, or classes, however folks, locations, and things. Bix’s framework for his invention comes from a textual content of anthropology- something Egan excels in-referred to as Patterns of Affinity, which affords a key to human social interaction. But his motivation doesn’t even stem from wanting connection, but from loss: like Sasha, he has by no means recovered from a primal trauma in A Go to from the Goon Squad, a friend who drowned, possibly deliberately, despite the attempts to save lots of him. Egan’s engagement with expertise strikes me as another feint anyway. The unconscious is, by definition, outside of our awareness, except probed, and even then, it must be finished with care. In maintaining with the fairy-tale picture of the title and Bix’s traumatic motivation, Bix’s/Egan’s Own Your Unconscious is extra literarily indebted to Sigmund Freud than to Facebook, her Collective Consciousness a transparent nod to Carl Jung. Solely the capitalist acquisition mindset would dare to think about proudly owning the unconscious, not to mention promoting it.

In a uncommon instance of a story narrated almost fully in the first-person plural (“we”), the daughters of report producer Lou Kline (also from A Go to from the Goon Squad) perceive what really becomes the product as soon as the music is given away: “We contemplated a nationwide billboard marketing campaign to remind individuals of the eternal regulation, Nothing is free! Solely children anticipate in any other case, whilst myths and fairly takes warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. By no means trust a candy home! It was solely a matter of time earlier than someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free.” Hansel and Gretel enter the candy home for sweets, solely to risk 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 attempting to plan a live performance a lot like the one that concludes A Visit from the Goon Squad.

The first time, it’s, predictably, a warning, of treats that conceal threats.

The Russian Formalists saw story as crucially completely different from plot, in order to know not simply what stories say, or what they are about, but how tales work. How tales work is likely one of the Candy House’s preoccupations as properly. In a single chapter, “i, the Protagonist”, Chris Salazar (son of A Visit from the Goon Squad’s Bennie) works to create “algebraizations” of each situation possible, very like Vladimir Propp’s 1928 guide Morphology of the Folktale tried to categorise all of 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 understand human motives at all. The first time, it’s, 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, carried out in by file sharing, as is, subsequently and relatedly, private privacy.

1991, earlier than the sweet homes of cell phones, social networks, and Own Your Unconscious had been built. Comic George Carlin may have humorously contrasted baseball with football by crying that, not like football’s “sudden death”, the article in baseball “is to go home! And so, the narrator concludes with a reminiscence of his childhood, profitable the large baseball game. ”-the wish of a mere little one. One of the lessons of the nonlinear novel is that there will be just one first time. However after what Hansel and Gretel went through-after what The Candy House’s characters have been by as nicely-going dwelling, winning a trophy, and the potentialities of what comes after it are luxurious, even in the event that they can’t help however be diminished by memory and retrospect. However Egan has opened up the potential for a brand new style: not a collection, or a set of sequels-there’s certainly no shortage of those. And so, when i closed the e-book, I felt that acquainted pang of sadness that the expertise, the joy, of reading this novel for the primary time, was over. However reasonably, a set of novels that, like A Go to from the Goon Squad and Sweet House, create a series of characters and stories that both fill gaps and create them, rabbit holes filled with Easter eggs, so that the records and narrative mic-passing can go on for so long as Egan needs to maintain them spinning and singing. Not Russian Formalism, however perhaps Russian dolls.