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, nevertheless, that sweet tastes an terrible lot like poison, they usually develop into “eluders,” or “data defiers” who go to great lengths to maintain their identities, their recollections, and their consciousnesses off the grid and out of the mathematical cloud that now hovers over us all, 24/7. It isn’t simple. In a particularly sly moment, Egan reveals that a few of these superior programs make use of precise individuals-fiction writers, apparently-“who impersonate multiple identities at once.” In the future, fiction writers could also be most helpful in releasing us from the continual surveillance and intrusion of know-how by inventing identities that we will use as escape hatches. They, too, should employ superior forms of know-how equivalent to “hermit crab programs” to escape the online. Ha ha. Type of. Egan is simply too expert a author, and too smart a human being to lurch through the usual paces of dystopic fiction.

Egan’s case in point is this novel, a set of chapters about people determining who they’re. As in Goon Squad, Egan rifles by way of an assortment of fictional types and motifs to tell these people’s tales. One bravura chapter, paying homage to the famous PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad, is informed in directives conveyed to an undercover agent by an implant in her mind. There’s a former boy surprise determined for his next brainstorm, a teenage girl agonizing over her social status, a recovering drug addict whose tried suicide supplies another man with the prospect to heal an outdated wound. Better of all is a chapter consisting solely of emails and texts exchanged by over a dozen characters. It begins with one woman seeking a private dialog with an aging movie star and spreads to nearly a dozen contributors, each trading favors to get what she or he wants, an internet of transactions that finally outcomes within the joyous reunion of the Conduits, a rock band that seems in Goon Squad, and a documentary film.

Like Goon Squad, The Candy Home comes collectively in items. Every chapter is advised from a distinct perspective selected from a bunch of interconnected characters, a lot of whom additionally seem in Goon Squad (although you don’t need to recollect them well to follow this one). The novel is broken up in time, the earliest chapter being set (kind of) in 1965 and the most recent within the 2030s. That “sort of” refers back to the abiding presence in the novel of a new expertise that enables people to export all their memories and add them to a web based repository, the place (if their proprietor so chooses) others can view them too, along with the accompanying thoughts and emotions. The one that narrates the 1965 chapter, which describes how four younger bankers leapt into the counterculture at a pot farm within the redwoods, is the daughter of one of many males. She’s witnessing a moment of liberation in her father’s life but in addition the start of the top of her parents’ suburban marriage.

All of this feels more at ease than Goon Squad, a novel I’d by no means regarded as betraying any pressure till I learn The Candy House. There was no urgent motive for the PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad to be written in PowerPoint moreover proving that Egan might do it, however the email/textual content chapter, titled “See Under,” could solely be written in this type. Witnessing all these in another way motivated agendas regularly coalesce right into a creative force is an exhilarating delight. Technology, specifically the alluring Collective Consciousness, joes downstairs phuket 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 know-how, but not so different from the Brazilian tribe studied by anthropologist Miranda Kline, who’s dismayed to see her monograph monetized by Bix right into a surveillance platform disguised as a neighborhood. Nothing is free! Solely children count on in any other case, at the same time as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel.