92 Time April 25/May 2, 2022
PROFILE
Jennifer Egan’s world
without privacy
BY ANDREW R. CHOW
them to upload their memories to a public cloud,
effectively erasing privacy forever.
Egan’s memory machine serves two key pur-
poses. It allows her to plumb more deeply into
the pasts and futures of characters that readers
fell in love with more than a decade ago. It also
allows her to confront a central development of
our time—the escalating integration of technol-
ogy into our lives—and to explore what happens
when social media and immersive tech are taken
to their logical, invasive end. “It’s so incredible
to think of how wrong George Orwell got it: It’s
not that anyone forces screens into every home,”
Egan says. “It’s that we invite them.”Egan’s work is fuElEd by a deep curiosity
about other people—and that impulse is imme-
diately evident. On the sunny March afternoon
we meet, she peppers me with questions about
my Manhattan upbringing and forays into thein 2015, Jennifer egan was deep inTo
revisions of her novel Manhattan Beach when
the memory of a friend from her San Francisco
childhood flitted across her mind. She conjured
images of tetherball games and bloody noses,
but there were cloudy gaps, so she searched the
woman’s name on Facebook, only to find her
profile flooded with condolences. She had died
two days earlier in a car accident.
“That had a huge impact on me,” Egan says,
gazing at the East River from Brooklyn Bridge
Park. “I found myself remembering her child-
hood as I experienced it, and wanting to see it
more clearly. I know it’s all there in my mind—so
why can I see some memories and not others?”
Egan wished for a machine that would allow
her to revisit both her life and those of friends
and family members she had lost too soon. So,
in her next work of fiction, she invented one.
That machine, called Own Your Unconscious, is
the connective tissue of the stories in The Candy
House, her new novel, which arrived April 5.
The Candy House is one of the most antici-
pated books of the year, and not just because
Egan has, for two decades, consistently sold out
book-tour dates across the country and drawn
rave reviews. This new work is a quasi sequel to
her most celebrated book: 2010’s A Visit From
the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize
for fiction and appeared on several best-of-the-
decade lists. Goon Squad was hailed for its kalei-
doscopic structure, which leaped across eras and
literary styles as it unraveled a web of stories fol-
lowing loosely connected characters. One chap-
ter was told in PowerPoint; another took the
form of a scathing celebrity profile.
The Candy House similarly tells 14 stories that
zigzag between the 1960s and the 2030s, incor-
porating emails, teenage diaries, and spy- mission
logs. Many familiar characters are revisited, in-
cluding Sasha, a kleptomaniac turned landscape
artist, and Bennie, a washed-up rocker.
But there’s one significant change: where
Goon Squad was organized primarily around
the music industry, The Candy House shifts its
focus to tech, and the world surrounding the
social media magnate Bix Bouton, who appeared
briefly in the first book as an internet obses-
sive in the early ’90s. In The Candy House, Bix
invents Own Your Unconscious, which allows
people to see into their pasts—but also forces