It was a long 12 years between 2010, when Jennifer Egan’s groundbreaking A Visit from the Goon Squad landed, and 2022, the year Egan published its dazzling cousin, The Candy House. A technological revolution happened: smartphones, social media, disinformation, deep fakes, the Arab spring (launched on Facebook and Twitter), memes, surveillance capitalism, Donald Trump and his 40,000 public lies, a global pandemic—all this and more exploded into our lives. These things sped up, fractured, and reinvented time and, as a result, our experience of consciousness too.

Egan has always been after what the poet John Ashbery once called “the experience of experience.” In her earlier novels Look at Me and The Keep, she wrote into the changing present like a stylish 21st-century Balzac or Colette, her comédie humaine a study of people desperate for connection but caught by forces—image culture, gaming and its models of human competition—destined to make them ever more isolated. Like novelist Robert Stone, whose scalpel-sharp prose style hers often recalls, Egan wrote so smoothly, and so neatly mapped her tales onto familiar forms (the roman à clef, the gothic), that it was possible to miss how radical her books were at heart.

With A Visit from the Goon Squad, it seemed as if Egan had decided finally to choose a form as tornadic as these forces she was circling—death, desire, the way we build mythologies like rock and roll—to contain our awareness that life ultimately ends. So much has been written of that novel’s virtuosic use of point of view, of new modes of storytelling, of chronicling through old ways of linking—Canterbury Tales–like, it passed narratively through years. What’s less often said is that the book is a profound study of love and regret.

A deep and languid sadness melodizes A Visit from the Good Squad. It lurks in all the crumbled relationships that mushroom from the rocker turned producer Bennie, from the way some of its characters spun out into drug use and mental illness, longing to retrieve the youth they’d spent, the youth they’d burnt. Set between the 1980s and 2010, this was not the if-you-remember-it-you-didn’t-live-through-it era of American life. It was the period that brought us Harvey Weinstein, milk containers with missing kids, crummy casual coke use. You see, to some degree, how much heavy lifting the music has to do. Or maybe that’s just the music industry.

Rather than linked by narrative, the tales that make up A Visit from the Goon Squad are connected by love and regret, at the core of which is time—not time as a mineral or a unit but lived time. Time as marked by tree rings, by carbon decay, by aging, by the zooming in and out of memories that are distorted by that aging. The book is heavily dominated by the actions of Bennie and the way his midlife nostalgia defines, or at least enacts itself onto, the world of the book. Clustered around him like islands in a newly created archipelago, quite a few characters in A Visit from the Goon Squad do things they wish they could undo and experience ruptures—a drowning, an assault in a park, treating a lion like a media op rather than a wild animal—that will mark them for years. Rereading that novel now, it’s hard not to interpret it not only as a morality play about the consequences of time but also as an elegy for the way we lived then, even when that way of life was destructive or, as we now say, toxic.

The Candy House catches up in the wake of these events, the characters who were spoked around Bennie in the earlier book: his assistant of many years, Sasha; his ex-bandmate Scott; Bennie’s ex-wife, Stephanie, and her brother, Jules; and more. The book fans out into their afterlives but also into those of their descendants, those who had no choice in the matter but to be born into a world in which technology is the dominant prosthetic for connection—not music, not sex, not even skin.

The melody here is not love and regret but a cycle of longing and unsuccessful replacement. “I have this craving,” says tech mogul Bix Bouton, lying in bed, exhausted, next to his wife and child, “just to talk.” Anyone who has had a life run away with their time, who has loved ones they want to spend that time with, will relate, but what they may not relate to is, rather than talk, Bix sets out to figure out how to solve his longing with yet more technology, a new invention.

At the center of The Candy House spin a series of inventions Bix’s company, Mandala, has unleashed. All of them depend on externalized consciousness and a total capitulation to the data greed of tech giants. For example, one system, called Own Your Unconscious, allows people to both preserve and extract their memories and upload them to the cloud in exchange for the promise that their grasp of the past will be improved by the unattributed scraping (“gray grabs”) of all the other uploaded memories.

One of the great strengths of The Candy House as a work of speculative fiction is that, as with some of the inventions described in Dave Eggers’s The Circle, this world is so close to ours that we might as well call this genre hyperrealism. Indeed, given how much users post on social media and how much the internet operates like a hive mind owned and manipulated by a few companies, all of them in California, the outsourcing of memory has long since begun.

The Candy House is a terrifying, sometimes very funny study of the destruction that this reliance on outsourcing memory wreaks on the inner lives of its characters. In the book, an anthropologist whose seminal work Patterns of Affinity is the model for this process tries to warn her daughters. “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 somebody made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this?”

Egan’s use of chronology is devastating here. By this point, we are already a third of the way into the book, and most of its characters have exchanged living—of being present and all that entails, whether boredom, terror, or fear—for escape. Wisely, for a book about technology, The Candy House doesn’t always point the finger at technology but instead at the culture, the assumptions that technology promotes. Namely, that pain is intolerable and productivity can be gamed. In one chapter, a man’s life is detonated by a creeping dependence he has on stimulants, as well as the Valium he takes to come down, which leads to more consumption, which nearly puts him on a death spiral.

The structure of The Candy House is even more sped up and elliptical than A Visit from the Goon Squad. We begin with Bix and his new invention and close with them, but in between, there are dozens of characters: a neurodivergent young man trying to game the odds on getting together with a woman who has a boyfriend; a researcher collaborating with a man whose public screaming is a kind of performance art, meant to wake up people from the way they perform their lives; children growing up in the shadow of selfish, chaotic parents and trying to surf the waves of hurt these relationships have spun into their lives; a woman in a kind of video game living her life as a spy. “You are one of hundreds,” the story tells her, “each a potential hero.” Strobing the lives of her characters with technology, Egan beautifully shows how much that technology evolves to provide us things our emotional lives lack.

Perhaps for this reason, addiction is a major force in the lives of so many characters in The Candy House. Theirs are not the rock and roll addictions you can try and glamorize. For every casual pot smoker, there are several heroin addicts, methadone takers, people whose lives become honed to the service of a need. It’s hard not to read a warning in these portraits, that the cycle of retreat and escape, if it becomes dependency, turns into a reflex. One that retrieves less and less from the flight into oblivion, nothing but another trip on the flight.

In technological terms, the difference between drug addiction and tech dependency in The Candy House is in how the culture at large treats these phenomena. In Egan’s world, opting out of the new memory enhancements has made people into, more than Luddites, a tetchy form of resistance. In the book, these resistors unite around a nonprofit called Mondrian and its founder, Chris Salazar. An echo of Bennie Salazar in a scene about the significance of the nonprofit's name is no doubt intentional: Bennie refuses to eat at Chris’s abuela’s house because of the disquiet he feels that she owns an uninsured Mondrian painting, a piece of art she bought with the proceeds of her cryptocurrency speculations. She tries to throw off would-be burglars by serving food on tacky Mondrian-themed plates. “No one who owned a real Mondrian would ever acquire such crap she would say.”

Egan mysteriously and pleasingly strings together these echoes across the several dozen tales of The Candy House. These recurrences feel like life, in which some events are uncanny, some things happen on purpose, and some other incidents just can’t be explained. It is tempting to apply the low-grade tools of pattern recognition we all increasingly rely on to this field of events, but daringly, Egan resists the instinct to make a story that can be gamed in this way. Even when she hands some of the book’s blinking themes to characters who are academics or researchers, the move is more of a feint than a lamp in the thicket of narrative.

There are simply too many moments in The Candy House to make any one of them definitive or to make any character’s life representative. Even Bix is swallowed by his creation. At the beginning of the book, he goes undercover to a meeting of questioning academics, some resistant, and brings with him a prop, a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, so he can appear like what he is not: a questing student, a searcher living under that book’s famous last lines. The move gets him his much-needed quarry, a sense of the idea that will make him rich, all over again. Years later, though, at the end of this bracing and sobering novel, he is estranged from his son, a lifelong resistor who believes in reading. Bix holds up his tattered copy of Ulysses as proof that they have things in common, unaware that by turning the book into a gesture, he has nearly evacuated it of value.

How do we rescue ourselves from this tumult? The question pulses through The Candy House like a siren. For all her narrative technology, there is in Egan a belief in the power of beauty and kinship to the Victorians in their dedication to bringing society to life in their pages. At the core of this novel is, however degraded, however often it fails, love. Toward the book’s end, there is a moving scene—so reminiscent of the end of Wuthering Heights one wants to shout for joy—in which Egan offers the reader a glimpse of how connection isn’t just possible; it is the law of nature, of all we emerged from. That this profoundly disquieting book can also gently argue that honoring this unity in the world is what we are here for is just another reason it dazzles so brightly in a time of darkness.•

Join us on October 19 at 5 p.m., when Egan will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Ivan Kreilkamp to discuss The Candy House. Register for the Zoom conversation here.