Jennifer Egan prefers to do the unexpected. In her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won both a 2011 Pulitzer Prize and a 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award, she did away with linearity in favor of a collage structure involving a variety of characters and narratives. A dozen years later, Egan returned to this landscape with The Candy House, which is less a sequel than a revisiting. Here, as in Goon Squad—where one chapter, famously, was constructed using PowerPoint—she plays with formats and perspectives. Recently, Egan and I spoke over Zoom about her writing.
This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
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The Candy House is a companion novel to A Visit from the Goon Squad. When did you realize you wanted to return to that territory?
I think I knew immediately. On my book tour, I wrote the first draft of [what became the chapter] “Lulu the Spy, 2032.” I didn’t know that I would write another book; these ensemble books are hard to pull off. But I knew I wasn’t finished with that world.
One chapter is written as a sequence of emails, which recalls Goon Squad’s PowerPoint.
I have to take many cracks to get these chapters. PowerPoint has some major strikes against it as a fiction-writing tool. It’s totally atomized, so there’s no way to portray action, and it has a cold, corporate vibe. It wasn’t until I landed on having a kid narrate a rather sappy family story that I found something that worked. In The Candy House, there’s a chapter called “The Mystery of Our Mother,” which is narrated in first-person plural. I had a hard time finding the right way to do it. It takes so much trial and error to arrive at a story that must be told in nontraditional ways.
In a book that traces the crowdsourced nature of contemporary life, such strategies seem essential. The same is true of technology.
The technology came into focus very late. I didn’t see it because of the improvisational way I create my material. The timetable of Goon Squad forced me to write into the future, which was not something I ever wanted to do. By necessity, I had to continue this in The Candy House. One benefit is that if I have a problem, I can solve it in ways that are not possible. That happened with technology. The idea that we’re in a world where a data gatherer can invade someone else’s private thoughts developed spontaneously. I followed the clues to the reality that underlay them. I don’t care much about technology, frankly, and I’m not very good at it. I’m the person who needs a tutorial on how to use the new iPhone. But I’m interested in it as a cultural phenomenon. In a certain sense, the internet is a collective consciousness, in ways The Candy House comments on.
The technology in the novel is not dissimilar, on some level, to ChatGPT. People upload their memories both to collectivize and to gain access.
When ChatGPT came along, I did feel a chill of recognition. But we’re all responding to the same forces, whether we’re fiction writers or inventors. The other thing, and the real reason I think I gravitated to the technology, was that it worked. In the chapter “What the Forest Remembers,” I recall feeling this absolute explosion of possibility when I realized I was telling a story in third person and first person. I was in multiple points of view at the same time. That’s hard to justify narratively. The technology gave me blanket justification. This is what fiction does. What I love is that it puts me into the mind of someone who isn’t me. So fiction is already operating as this kind of device.
You grew up, in part, in California. How has that affected your work?
I’m from the Midwest originally. I was transplanted to California with my mother and stepfather. So much of what happened next, although a lot was painful, has made me who I am. So I think California has been critical atmospherically to my work.
Why do you write?
For me, writing is a practice that completes my experience of reality. It makes me feel needed in the world. I approach it with playfulness and curiosity, but I need it in a fundamental way. If it’s not present, I feel the absence. I must do it to thrive.•
