Goon Squad #2
The candy house, jennifer egan.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published April 5, 2022
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...tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer's and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a sharp decline in purist orthodoxies...
...tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer's and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a sharp decline in purist orthodoxies—which, people now knew, having roamed the odd twisting corridors of one another's minds, had always been hypocritical.
It was Athena who first made them aware, in the workshop where Gregory and Dennis met, of word-casings and phrase-casings: gutted language she likened to proxies..."I want words that are still alive, that have a pulse. Hot words, people! Give me the bullet, not the casing—fire it right in my chest. I'll die gladly for some fresh language." She meant their prose, not their conversation, but Gregory and his peers strained for fresh ways to say, in workshop, that a piece of writing was powerful ("coiled," "obsidian," "hegemonic") or flat ("Waxen," "kerneled," "Coffee grounds").
...by age nine, Alfred's intolerance of fakery had jumped the life/art barrier and entered his everyday world. He'd looked behind the curtain and seen the ways people played themselves, or—more insidiously—versions of themselves they'd cribbed from TV: Harried Mom. Sheepish Dad. Stern Teacher. Encouraging Coach. Alfred would not—could not—tolerate these appropriations.
In frantic league, we flailed for ways to end the “sharing” that was dismantling our father’s business and our father. We contemplated a nationwide billboard campaign to remind people of that eternal law, Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this?
The days of losing touch are almost gone ………… Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us ………..I picture it like Judgement Day ….We’ll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in Spirit form. We’ll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it’ll seem strange, and pretty soon it’ll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost
So here we are, conniving once again to bump Scotty’s reputation, along with Bosco’s and—let’s be honest—my own and that of everyone else over 60 striving for cultural relevance in a world that seems to happen in a nonexistent “place” that we can’t even find unless our kids (or grandkids!) show it to us. The only route to relevance at our age is through tongue-in cheek nostalgia, but that is not—let me be very clear— our ultimate ambition. Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.
Even so, there are gaps: holes left by eluding separatists bent upon upon hoarding their memories and keeping their secrets. Only Gregory Bouton’s machine—this one, fiction—lets us roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.
Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this? … But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information .
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In Jennifer Egan’s New Novel, Our Memories Are Available for All to See
Egan’s “The Candy House,” a sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” comes alive in dozens of entwined stories.
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THE CANDY HOUSE By Jennifer Egan 334 pages. Scribner. $28.
Do you have to have a high I.Q. to be a good fiction writer? John Cheever worried about his, which was under 110 — too low to qualify him for the Army’s Officer Candidate School during World War II. Cheever took several I.Q. tests and read a book about how to improve his score, but it remained about the same.
I tend to side with Barry Hannah, who said in his Paris Review interview, “You don’t have to be an intellectual to write, you just have to wonder about things and want to know.” God knows the number of Mensa types who can’t write their way out of a paper bag.
Sometimes, though, you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle — not necessarily because it’s a great novel qua novel, which you can’t know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions. You’ve entered elite head space of one kind or another. Jennifer Egan’s new one, “The Candy House,” is one of these novels. It makes you feel a bit high, drugged , and fitted with V.R. goggles, almost from the start.
“The Candy House” is a sequel to “A Visit From the Goon Squad, ” Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 novel. That book tells more than a dozen interrelated stories and absolutely defies neat summarizing. Among its central characters is Bennie Salazar, a flailing record executive, and Sasha, his assistant. The novel is about music, New York’s East Village, magazine journalism, San Francisco in the 1970s, Gen-X nostalgia, the digitalization of everything and the search, in the face of that vitality-sucking digitalization, for forms of authenticity.
You don’t have to have read “Goon Squad” to pick up “The Candy House,” but it helps. Most of the characters are back; many have grown children; all have new, hairy, ingrown problems. All sorts of strings from the earlier book are picked up and braided, twanged or cauterized.
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Book Reviews
'the candy house' is a brilliant portrait of intersecting lives.
Annalisa Quinn
I drew a character map while reading Jennifer Egan's The Candy House , just for the pleasure of charting the swooping, kaleidoscopic intersections of parents and children (and cousins and tennis partners and drug dealers) of a central set of people first introduced in her 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad .
Mapping people in relation to each other is one of the central activities of characters in these novels — anthropologists, publicists, anxious high schoolers, or employees of social media companies all seem to be asking, What makes people matter to each other? And can you predict or control it, either for love or for profit?
A Visit from the Goon Squad first introduced Mindy, a beautiful 23-year-old anthropology student on safari with the much older record executive Lou Kline and some of his family and hangers-on. In her narration of the safari, she breaks down the group's reactions to her presence with deadpan, diagnostic precision: The "Structural Hatred" of an older woman "who wears high-collared shirts to conceal the already thready sinews of her neck" for an older man's younger girlfriend; or the "Structural Affection," of that man's young son, who "hasn't yet learned to separate his father's loves and desires from his own."
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Jennifer egan does avant-garde fiction — old school.
In The Candy House , Mindy has become Miranda Kline, a reclusive, brilliant anthropologist who after years living among a remote tribe in Brazil developed algorithms predicting "patterns of affinity," that is, "what made people like and trust one another."
To the dismay of Miranda (MK to her tech bro disciples), these algorithms have been weaponized by social media companies — especially Mandala, a company led by Bix Boulton, a minor Goon Squad character, reborn as the mononymous social media mogul "Bix." His biggest innovation is a product called "Own Your Unconscious," which allows you to externalize your mind and revisit your past whenever you want.
But it is one of the "ancillary features" of "Own Your Unconscious" that has upended society in The Candy House . The "Collective Consciousness" works like this: "By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online 'collective,' you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same."
(Sidenote: These fictional products raise obvious and enormous questions about truth and subjectivity in memory, not to mention the brain itself — would watching your past be like a movie? Does your brain retain all the details of everything you've ever seen? Do different people remember the past differently, and if so, which versions are "true"? Hilariously, Egan bypasses these questions entirely and unapologetically.)
These two linked technologies are both inconceivably invasive and basically familiar — our phones are in certain ways already our externalized consciousnesses (philosophers talk about "extended mind theory" — that our cognitive processes increasingly happen externally as well as internally), and the Collective is a kind of exponential internet. The phrase "the candy house" (as in Hansel and Gretel) refers to the (also deeply familiar) Faustian bargain of convenience and connection for loss of privacy.
Egan makes the appeal of the Collective Conscious extravagantly obvious: In addition to the clear benefits (victims of child abuse being able to identify their abusers, missing people easily located), there is eternal appeal of entering someone else's consciousness, a longing threading through human culture from the myth of Tiraseus to the terrible teen movie Freaky Friday to the project of fiction itself.
Mandala's inventions feel especially poignant in Egan's fictional worlds, which are so densely populated by addicts and alcoholics. These are people who don't own their pasts, in either the sense of literally remembering them, or in the sense of feeling any agency in the events of their lives. So often her characters are unable to understand or accept what happened, those crucial, ill-understood moments when everything went awry. Far from being cartoonishly evil, an obvious wrong, "Own Your Unconscious" has deep instinctive appeal. This is characteristic of Egan, who isn't interested in moral problems with obvious answers.
In The Candy House , there is a persistent, lovely countermelody to the corporate project of mapping human experience and using it to predict what people will think and buy. The novel is full of people engaged in a kind of sweeter and more plaintive human algebra. I haven't recently read a gentler or funnier description of longing than in one chapter here in which a "senior empiricist and metrics expert" named Lincoln tries to determine what will make his crush, "M", fall in love with him.
Lincoln (also a Goon Squad character) has already analyzed the roots of M's charm (including "four primary freckles on her nose and approximately twenty-four secondary freckles"), and evaluated the competition (of which "fully half possess at least one possibly-to-likely-disqualifying personal trait"). But what remains elusive is " x: the unknown value required to secure M's love. " Maybe x is a stuffed hippo, or a music box, or "some really long tulips that are actually made of silk." He begins accumulating items.
Lincoln's is perhaps the most literal attempt to predict and control patterns of behavior, but so many characters are engaged in it in one form or another, like Molly, a lonely teenager at a country club trying to identify the elusive quality of cool , which she lacks: "...if you're nice to everyone, then why should people near you feel special and why should people NOT near you WANT to be near you, and why should anyone assume that the Times they are having without you are worse than the Times they would be having with you?"
Another character is working to "algebraize" storytelling, identifying and separating stock elements of a story so that, presumably, they can be assembled without human help: "stockblocks" include " Funny Best Friend Gets Serious to Talk Sense into Protagonist ," " Blurred Faces Lean Over Protagonist, Gradually Sharpening ," " Makeover Montage Followed by Gaping Reaction Shots ," etc.
It's parody, of course, but Egan doesn't discount the power of stockblocks either. Her last chapter is a sepia-tinted description of a young boy's unlikely game-winning homerun, seemingly assembled of the most stock of stock elements ( bases loaded , homerun from underdog, crowd goes wild, proud father claps shoulder ). This is an author endlessly capable of experimentation (Egan shocked readers in 2010 with a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation, quaint as it might sound now). But ending on something so straightforwardly conventional — so formulaic — feels not like a copout but rather like a winking flex, a master pianist infusing unexpected feeling into Chopsticks. It is moving, somehow, both despite and because of its familiarity.
Besides, while chopping stories up into tiny moveable parts sounds like something out of a tech dystopia, folklorists have been doing it for centuries. (In the "Aarne and Thompson Type Index" classification of folk tale elements, the first iteration of which was published in 1910, the Hansel and Gretel formula is "ATU Tale Type 327A"). We tell the same stories again and again; the beauty lies in the details.
It calls to mind something Lincoln, the "senior empiricist and metrics expert" notes, in defense of his attempts to organize the world into comprehensible categories and patterns. Quantifiability, he thinks, "doesn't make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious — any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself."
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‘The Candy House’ Review: A Brilliant Tale Exploring the Human Side of Technology
Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House” tells the story of tech tycoon Bix Bouton and his most revolutionary innovation, “Own Your Unconscious,” which allows one to access every memory they’ve ever had. More than just a cautionary tale about the impact of advancing technology, “The Candy House” is an examination of humanity’s desire for connection, love, and family. An intellectually dazzling puzzle, “The Candy House” is a worthy successor to Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,“A Visit from the Goon Squad.”
The novel jumps through several decades and multiple families, taking the reader through all of the events leading up to and after the creation of “Own Your Unconscious.” Tying together the cultural revolution of the 1960s to cultural turmoil in the 2020s and 2030s, Egan creates a sense of the repetition of history. She skillfully explores a wide variety of narrative styles, not just switching between narrative perspectives, but also structuring chapters in ways as diverse as a series of emails or a set of instructions in the second person. The interlocking stories show how complex humanity’s relationship with technology can really be. Egan’s message shines through in this storytelling format, contrasting human connection with the background of technological innovation.
Egan uses the destruction of familial relationships to portray the unsavory role technology can play. “Own Your Unconscious” is painted in a decidedly negative light as it creates ideological rifts between father and son and drives a mother to the extremes of paranoia. “The Candy House” is a critique not only of rapidly changing technology, but also of the culture that inevitably arises as we get accustomed to technology’s advancements.
A lack of privacy and data monetization as well as authenticity are key themes explored in “The Candy House.” In much the same way that companies harvest data about us from Google searches or Netflix streams, Egan’s “counters” gather information about people’s personalities and feelings through surveillance. The creation of this profession represents how capitalistic greed can invade neutral technology — along with people’s privacy — and monetize it, expertly mirroring the world we live in today. The search for authenticity is depicted with references to “word casings,” or over-used words that have lost their meaning, and the hunt for “the thing itself.”
The variety of narrative styles and narrating characters in “The Candy House” leaves the reader curious and maybe even a little disoriented at the start of every chapter. The uncertainty as to which character will appear next, and how they will fit into Egan’s world, is enthralling. As the book progresses, Egan masterfully unfolds the details to orient the reader, and the puzzle quickly starts to come together.
Overall, “The Candy House” is a sensational novel that depicts the human struggle to find your place in a technologically evolving world. With intricately written prose and nuanced characters, “The Candy House” is an exhilarating and enjoyable read.
—Staff writer Anna Moiseieva can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her on Twitter at @AMoiseieva.
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