As the book club began, host John Freeman commented that he could think of no writer alive who makes new stories possible or makes old stories new again better than author Jennifer Egan does. Referencing a Proust exhibit at a museum that revealed how he’d edited his book, Freeman asked Egan how she’d kept track of her many characters and their complex relationships in 2010’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, some of whom were revisited in the featured book of the evening, The Candy House, published in 2022. “How do you put a book like this together?” he asked.
Egan responded, “I didn’t worry too much about the connections. I tried in both books to just focus on the thing I was doing, because I felt pretty instinctively that in order for this to work as a big, strong structure, each individual piece would have to be really strong.… One of the things I knew…was that I wanted each chapter to feel like it was part of a different book.” She said that she did, however, keep one color-coded document to remind herself of people’s ages at particular moments and understand what generations they all were in.
Freeman said that he’d first encountered The Candy House when he read the short story “Black Box” in the New Yorker (the story would become, with some changes, the chapter “Lulu the Spy, 2023”). Referencing the story, he asked Egan to talk about to what degree, even though there are differences, everyone is carrying their origin story with them, whether they all have a black box in their story; he also asked whether the factor of generational difference through splintering marriages is a unifying factor of The Candy House.
Egan said that the marriage-and-divorce element of the novel relates to her age. Her parents divorced in the mid-’60s in the first wave of divorces between people who’d gotten married when they were incredibly young. She moved to San Francisco with her mother and little brother when she was seven, and her father stayed in Chicago. “I think, of course, we all do carry our backstory and our black box with us, and to some degree, I feel like it’s the job of any piece of writing that is getting at someone’s interior life, that it will have to push up against that black box or that backstory because that’s what we all carry.… Fiction is the interior-narrative art form. So it is my job as the writer to make intimations of that story come to the reader.”
Freeman noted a remark Egan had once made about wanting a novel to go laterally rather than chronologically. He commented on the strangeness of chronology when first dealing with social media, saying, “When you scramble the chronology of life and suddenly your eighth-grade girlfriend is turning up in your Facebook feed, it’s confusing, to put it mildly.” He wondered whether Egan had experienced that herself at the start of social media or had simply watched its effects on culture—and what the implications of her experiences or observations were for the novel and chronology.
Egan said that she has never been a big social media person and came to it late, but she’s always been so interested in what happens to people. “Whenever I see anyone, I want to know what has happened to every person we know in common because it’s the best story in the world…. Plots unfolding over time, with, at this point, huge changes.… It was super fun when I finally got on Facebook to actually just see what some people looked like, having not seen them since high school.”
When she was working on Goon Squad, she said she didn’t have much experience with social media and didn’t realize things wouldn’t happen chronologically when working on the book. When she read the chapters in the reverse chronology in which they were written, however, the draft of the novel felt flat to her. “Hewing to chronology basically eliminated a lot of fun surprises for the reader, because the time at which we want to know what happened to so-and-so, or what so-and-so used to be like, is when we’ve just seen so-and-so.” Chronology in kaleidoscopic books like Goon Squad and Candy House was too rigid and got in the way of reader satisfaction and fun.
Ivan Kreilkamp joined the conversation and read the first of two epigraphs in The Candy House: a verse by Emily Dickinson that starts, “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—.” He found subtle reminders of Dickinson throughout the book and asked Egan what that poem suggests about the brain and consciousness as a presence in Egan’s novel.
Egan responded that when she discovered the poem, she thought, “Yes, this is exactly what I’m interested in.” But the technology that allowed for externalization of the characters’ consciousness and the ability to share all or part of their consciousness fell into place as the throughline of The Candy House only relatively late in her process. While Goon Squad focused on time, she conceived of The Candy House as being about space. “The window into the strangeness of thinking about space is actually consciousness.… Our brains are so small, and yet our entire relationship to the world is filtered through them.”
Freeman remarked that what really gouges you emotionally when reading The Candy House is the discovery that you cannot retrieve things from time. “That’s where, to me, it feels like I can see the Proustian in you. Proust is always sort of folding back on time and trying to recover things…but there’s a loss there that no matter—like 350,000 words per book of description—can ever retrieve.” Freeman asked Egan whether, in her writing life, this has been “not a theme but something chasing you to some degree?... Perhaps there is some feeling, even if you’re not writing autobiographically, that you are retrieving something even as you’re inventing it. Is this you making peace with that, that you cannot retrieve things?”
Egan said that while she doesn’t write about her own life, she uses places that she knows as part of her process—in that way, there’s a lot of retrieval because she has a good memory for the texture of details and places. “What I’m doing sometimes with regard to place, what I’m doing is retrieving that place and, thereby, the self that I was when I experienced it, even though I’m totally absent from these narratives.… What I try to do is use the richness of that kind of longing to render up the details but then remove myself so they don’t apply to me and I’m just using them to set other stories.”•
Join us on November 16 at 5 p.m., when Deborah A. Miranda will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
