Every generation of writers and readers hears that ceaseless, howling cry: that the death of the novel is near, that its end is much closer than we think. The industrial revolution, the rise of women’s rights, globalization, racial equality, photography, film, television, terrorist attacks, war—all these were thought to spell out the slow demise of the novel.
Take, for instance, the advent of the Information Age in the late 20th century, followed by the quick ascent of the personal computer’s prominence and the internet’s ubiquity. It was believed that the flood of information would not only sap the general public’s attention span but also dethrone the novel, leaving it culturally irrelevant. Why would anyone care to read about made-up people’s lives and their internal conflicts when such a reader could look up anything they wanted about the world within seconds?
However, with seemingly free access to data and information, a few questions emerge: What does all this information even mean? How does this scale of knowledge enrich our lives? Is it even supposed to enrich our lives? How has the liminal, amorphous plane of the internet shaped our sense of self out in the real world?
Every generation has been able to take the anxieties, innovations, and preoccupations of its era to rethink the novel anew. The novel is here to stay; long live the novel. Writers such as Don DeLillo have grappled with these essential questions. It was DeLillo’s work that led scholar Tom LeClair, in 1987, to propose the term the systems novel.
The systems novel seeks to interrogate “accelerating specialization (and alienation) of knowledge and work,” as well as the “tremendous growth in information and communications.” The negotiation between technology—which is often treated as a malevolent force—and the lives of people is its essential narrative conundrum. The primary concern is depicting the intimidating intricacy of the system and the saturation of information. These novels are roving works of art: panoptic, maximalist, dense.
I would argue that Jennifer Egan’s 2022 novel, The Candy House, the California Book Club’s October selection, hews conceptually to the tradition of the systems novel but also departs from the genre in a few key aspects to account for the sociopolitical and cultural shifts of the 21st century, as well as the recent pandemic.
The Candy House first tells the story of Bix Bouton, the founder of tech company Mandala, who creates a new technology, Own Your Unconscious, that allows a user to access their memories and the memories of others. Think something akin to Google but for the purposes of sifting through one’s thoughts, memories, and perspective. Own Your Unconscious is presented as a tool that has solved crimes, reconnected loved ones, aided romantic overtures, and helped persons with failing health.
In The Candy House, Egan is concerned with technology’s ability to stall and stifle life, as well as its overwhelm. In the chapter “Rhyme Scheme,” we witness how a male character attempts to use algorithms, probability, and statistics to get a colleague to fall in love with him. This plot, at first, proves disastrous, but ultimately, his scheme works out and he and his coworker marry; the chapter ends with a happily ever after.
In this way, Egan is invested in depicting not only the potential limits of the system but also what emerges after a limit has been reached: how human connection remains ever-elusive, confounding, sticky yet still, on occasion, prosperous. This, I would argue, marks a major departure from the genre. As one character in The Candy House says, “but my problem is the same one had by everyone who gathers information: What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it? Not every story needs to be told.”
Although The Candy House is not as dense as the traditional systems novel, Egan has decentered mapping the weight of the system in favor of showcasing how Own Your Unconscious affects the interior processes of the characters. Those who oppose Own Your Unconscious lament the destruction of private life. (As the children of the academic Miranda Kline, whose work inspired Bouton, say, “she never once spoke our names in public or acknowledged, even to us, that we’d made a tragedy of her career by perverting her theory to bring about the end of private life.”)
And yet, interiority and private life persist in the world of The Candy House. In fact, the information economy of the novel does not diminish the possibility of narrative but enhances it. Egan is careful not to frame Own Your Unconscious as totally nefarious. In fact, taken as a whole, The Candy House is much less pessimistic than the typical systems novel.
Instead, The Candy House derives its primary narrative tension from the exploration of connection and intimacy within a milieu where one’s memories and oneself can be commodified and reduced to a matter of statistics and probability. What does it mean to be a person, an individual, if your personhood can be easily accessed by anyone?
Crimes may be solved with Own Your Unconscious; memories might be surveyed by many—and yet, that doesn’t necessarily allow one to arrive at closure. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee fulfillment. Then, one might ask, What does?
The Candy House is rhizomatic in structure. Egan takes the minor characters from her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and brings them center stage, employing a series of formally inventive styles and voices. There are intimacies among characters, some more conspicuous, others pulsing with subtextual energy (for instance, the email exchanges featured toward the end of the novel versus the subtle, shared connections between Bouton and Kline’s children, respectively).
On the one hand, The Candy House showcases the perils of a world saturated by hyperpersonal data; on the other, we can rest assured that despite myriad technological advances, the stuff of novels and the concerns of humanity remain abundant. Perhaps for that reason alone, The Candy House is a marvel of literary genius.•
Join us on October 19 at 5 p.m., when Egan will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Ivan Kreilkamp to discuss The Candy House. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
