How does The Candy House fit into Jennifer Egan’s illustrious body of work? In one sense, the very question seems un-Eganesque: this is an author who defies categorization in her fiction, striking out in new and daring directions, thereby undermining the idea of placement itself. Each of her novels is conspicuously unclassifiable, stylistically distinctive, a leap into the unknown.
The Candy House, published in 2022 and written over a 10-year period, is Egan’s sixth novel and seventh book of fiction. Its most formally inventive chapter, “Lulu the Spy, 2032,” was published in 2012 as a series of 140-character directives issued one by one from the New Yorker’s fiction Twitter account. Lulu first appeared in A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, as did several other characters who feature prominently in The Candy House.
The two novels are closely related in other ways, too. The technical virtuosity and polyphony of The Candy House recalls Goon Squad; like the earlier novel, it eschews straightforward plot in favor of confusing and thrilling disorientation. These two are Egan’s most unconventional novels in form (Goon Squad has a chapter told entirely as a PowerPoint presentation), and both employ a dizzying range of narrators, styles, and points of view.
But Egan has dubbed The Candy House a “sibling,” not a sequel, to Goon Squad. As she’s pointed out in interviews, the word sequel implies a sequence, a chronology, a timeline where one story happens before the other. These novels jump around in time, darting to and fro, back and forth, subverting our expectations of sequence. And neither Goon Squad nor The Candy House depends on the reader knowing the other. While several characters who persist in the later work are promoted or demoted in importance—a Goon Squad aficionado will delight in Easter eggs scattered throughout The Candy House—the backstories provided in the latter are more than sufficient for a neophyte reader. Some critics have referred to The Candy House as a companion novel; one reviewer called it Goon Squad’s “literary soulmate.” These sibling souls are united by their probing focus on the nature of time and space, memory and identity, via an exploration of technological advances and their effects.
While these two books are particularly familial, they also join a cluster of Egan novels centrally concerned with the effects of technology on our personal and professional lives, the appeal and dangers of social media, and the impact of an image-obsessed culture on identity. Look at Me, published in 2002, follows a fashion model who loses her gorgeous face and her stable sense of self in a shattering accident, only to restage the accident for a reality-television show: “I was still the model, after all. I was modeling my life.” In 2007’s The Keep, characters gather at an Eastern European castle turned luxury hotel that promises a tech-free refuge from the cacophony of modern life. In Goon Squad, technological changes in the recording industry both accelerate the dissemination of music and erode its authenticity.
However, The Candy House presents Egan’s boldest vision of a technology-infused and -infested future. Bix Bouton, a New York University grad student in Goon Squad, has become a tech titan after creating a social media company called Mandala and inventing a software called Own Your Unconscious, which enables people to externalize their “consciousness to a Mandala cube.” One of the software’s “ancillary features,” Collective Consciousness, involves “uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online ‘collective,’” which gives you “proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same.” Many of the novel’s characters embrace this opportunity to secure, on a grand scale, the remembrance of things past. They upload memories to preserve spots of charged time and download others’ to gain insight into their loved ones, friends, and enemies. Surprisingly, the technology allows for reconciliation, compassion, healing.
For Bix is not merely a kooky egomaniac or power-mad technocrat. As a young man, he lost a friend in a tragic accident—he wishes now, virtually, to undo the sting of loss, bridge the abyss between past and present. More broadly, the Mandala technology answers yearnings that have been expressed by many previous Egan characters. In her first novel, The Invisible Circus, a bereaved young woman searches for answers about a sister lost to suicide. In 2017’s historical noir Manhattan Beach, Anna Kerrigan is often “trying to recapture an earlier state” and models herself on fictional detectives in her search for her father, Eddie. Egan’s characters are, characteristically, on the hunt for lost time and lost loved ones, clarity about their pasts, forgiveness and absolution for others and themselves. Own Your Unconscious, then, appears as a fulfillment of many of their deepest dreams.
Even more seductively, Bix’s MemoryShop tech offers users the chance to “externalize the portion of [their]…memory” that includes a traumatic event and then “reinternalize it with that part erased.” How many of Egan’s guilt-ridden, grief-haunted characters would find in that technology relief from life’s depredations? The Keep’s cousins scarred by the horrific results of a childhood prank; Goon Squad’s Bennie Salazar, oppressed by “shame memories” so intense they “seemed to engulf whole parts of Bennie’s life and drag them away”; Manhattan Beach’s Eddie Kerrigan, assailed by remorse about abandoning his family—each such wounded soul is beckoned into The Candy House’s promise of sweet forgettings.
The dream of peace, however, obscures lurking dangers. Bix’s technology would also impede those Egan characters who revel in performing roles far from their actual selves and those who seek to discard their past and invent themselves anew. The illimitable reach of Collective Consciousness would terrify those who want to hide, protect their autonomy, press secrets close to their breasts and guard them zealously against the data tracking and quantification performed by “counters.” Would Goon Squad’s Scotty Hausmann survive digital communalism, when he “never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset...[and] was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years”? Where would Manhattan Beach’s Dexter Styles find cover to work his schemes, when his business relies on being in “the shadow world” and when he fiercely resists being pinned down emotionally or economically?
In the world of The Candy House, the outlet for such autonomists is Mondrian, the countermovement that arises to oppose Mandala. As Collective Consciousness extends its reach, “eluding separatists bent upon hoarding their memories and keeping their secrets” reject technology’s lure, apotheosize privacy, and pursue authenticity and “genuine human responses.” One of the most ardent “eluders” is Bix’s own son Gregory, an aspiring novelist who fears that “Own Your Unconscious posed an existential threat to fiction.”
In raising such questions, The Candy House enters deeper than any previous Egan work into the tangled web of technology’s implications for art. The novel’s title refers to the witch’s cottage in “Hansel and Gretel”—in the book, art and autonomy are the innocents enthralled by illusions of perfect security. But even as it presents the most potent threat to art Egan has yet conceived, The Candy House amplifies an argument implicit in all of her work: as she writes here, “knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.” The novel’s most assiduous counter, a “senior empiricist and metrics expert,” is forced to acknowledge the significance of an “ineffable, unpredictable detail” that leads to love and that “tears are impossible to count.”
The Candy House celebrates the power of imagination to evade and escape, elude and surpass algorithms, categories, any attempts to pin down or master our identity or experience in reductive ways. Here, as always in her work, the novelist “roam[s] with absolute freedom through the human collective” and tells stories both “infinite and particular.”•
Join us on October 19 at 5 p.m., when Egan will appear in conversation with a special guest and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss The Candy House. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
