Excerpt: ‘The Candy House’

Resisting them is easy for a minute-a hundred minutes-even a year. In the thirteen years since Personal Your Unconscious had been launched, certainly one of its ancillary features-the Collective Consciousness-had regularly develop into central. Lastly, I caved and bought Mandala’s Hey, What Ever Happened To… By uploading all or part of your externalized reminiscence to an internet “collective,” you gained proportionate entry to the nameless ideas and memories of everyone on the earth, residing or dead, who had accomplished the same. The process was frictionless, as promised: thirty minutes with electrodes connected to my head as I closed my eyes and pictured my interactions with Damon (thereby releasing these particular recollections to the collective); then a twenty-minute wait while my “content” churned in the collective gyre, looking for facial matches. As I watched the wheel spin on the desktop pc in my studio house, I seen I used to be gritting my teeth; I wanted Damon to have achieved one thing nice!

“I imagine in novels very a lot,” she stated. The rare writer for whom each ebook has been an entirely completely different gambit, Egan has continually labored to stretch what both the novel and the novelist are able to. She’s written a coming-of-age and a gothic novel. “Manhattan Seashore,” the 2017 historic novel that performs it straightest – her uncle liked it; “I have by no means heard from him about other books” – felt like a departure as a result of it was so acquainted. She once described the picture she held in her thoughts while writing her novel “Look at Me,” about a model, a teenager and a terrorist, as a figure eight. However for Egan, it was nonetheless a formal stretch and, she says, the hardest to jot down. Yet it was her 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel-in-tales “A Visit From the Goon Squad” that catapulted an already superb profession into the stratosphere. Perhaps best known (not less than in circles of writers) for its chapter-as-PowerPoint presentation, it felt exciting not as a result of slideshows had been significantly new in 2010 however because the ebook was able to synthesize this oddity of life back into artwork.

Along with fiction, Egan believes in another barely outmoded concept: the human imagination. “I assume we will do anything,” she mentioned. As a type of novelists who has not always had as a lot religion in fiction or in people, I pressed her to clarify. Abashedly, I brought up a podcast I’d been listening to, about Ukraine. She was talking about story but also about vaccines and antibiotics. I’d heard the historian Timothy Snyder talking about the particularity of this second having less to do with impending catastrophe than with the feeling of being doomed to stagnation, unable to think about what else is likely to be potential. “One of the paradoxes that led me into the ‘Candy House’ is the truth that we seem to not be able to foretell anything,” she said. “Despite the amount of knowledge we’ve got, we didn’t know Trump was going to get elected. We didn’t know 9/eleven was going to occur.” The paradox is the glut of information and the dearth of remark.

I’m supposed to notice Jennifer Egan’s age and appearance (59, extremely lovely). We met on a type of March days that supplied that first breath of spring. She’s warm and humorous, deeply charming. We had a tight window – she needed to get residence to her mom who had just flown in – and afterward I worried I’d asked none of the appropriate profile questions. I had no idea how she felt about being the mom of younger adult sons throughout the pandemic. As an alternative, we walked circles round Manhattan’s East Village, speaking about what fiction might be worth. In a moment of cultural wariness of the novel – evident within the proliferation of narrowly constructed autofiction and the supremacy of television – Egan remains a true believer. It’s the factor that struck me, rereading her work. I didn’t ask the place she writes or what she eats when she does. Her books are full of artifice, gadgets, doubles, spies and sinking ships.