When is a sequel not a sequel? Such a question infuses The Candy House. Published last year, Jennifer Egan’s sixth novel (another idea the author means to subvert) is a follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, but that doesn’t mean it is a spin-off in any traditional sense. Egan has something bigger in mind, or perhaps wider: to write in the same universe as that of Goon Squad, without necessarily picking up that novel’s central characters. The result is a book that feels fresh and familiar, in the best meaning of both words.
This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
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Like its predecessor, The Candy House is something of a grab bag, gathering 14 related, if not continuous, narratives. But if Goon Squad is, in the phrasing of critic James Poniewozik, “a concept album” (it deals with the music industry), this new book is a digital collage. Taking place a decade or so into the future, it revolves around the development of a technology that allows our memories to be uploaded and crowdsourced. Think of an Instagram where, instead of photos, one shares bits of consciousness. Technology as a psychic terrain.
This, of course, is how we already live, if less directly; what is cyberspace if not a hive mind? “To hell with God.… I’m worried about the Internet,” one of Egan’s characters declares. “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity,” another responds, “that may be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you think you’re choosing for yourself?”
That’s the conundrum: the more we rely on technology to connect, the more it undermines our agency. And yet, if Egan understands this, she also recognizes its allure. In Goon Squad, she wrote one chapter as a PowerPoint presentation. The Candy House, too, adapts or appropriates digital strategies—its “Lulu the Spy, 2032,” for instance, is formatted as a long string of tweet-like micro-paragraphs, while “See Below” unfolds via a series of interwoven email threads.
For me, this is a key directive of art, to compel us to encounter the world anew. That doesn’t mean providing solutions; creativity is not prescriptive, after all. It’s more a matter of provocation, a term I’m using in the broadest sense. With each book, each narrative, we must find the necessary language for its telling, the necessary perspective and form.
Here we see what Egan has accomplished with The Candy House, which, like Goon Squad before it, is neither dystopian nor utopian. More to the point, it is a book of observations, in which people move through a social landscape not unlike what ours may well become. Prescient? Maybe, although only time will tell. In the end, however, this is too narrow a word to describe a book that takes as one of its essential functions challenging and reframing the way we think of narrative.•
