93
music industry. A former journalist , she prefers
when the subject is anything but herself. She
used the word curious seven times in our hour-
long walk, stopping often to marvel at each tab-
leau as we pass by: a ballerina posing for a por-
trait atop the dancing waterfront, a tiny woman
patiently walking a dozen large dogs.
Egan often walks and bikes around the city,
including this stretch of esplanade, for inspira-
tion. A key character in Goon Squad drowns in
the East River, and much of Manhattan Beach
takes place around the corner at the Brooklyn
Navy Yard. “New York has been so generative
and enriching to my writing process,” she says.
“I love the anonymity and that I end up in close
proximity to people from every walk of life.”
Goon Squad was born out of Egan’s belief
that “everything is interesting”—that bit play-
ers in your life are the protagonists of their own
equally compelling narratives. Because of the
novel’s unspooling nature, she found herself
wondering about those left lurking in the mar-
gins after it was fi nished. “It felt like it was never
really over for me,” she says. She began writ-
ing more while on tour for Goon Squad, creating
anecdotes that only begat more questions.
Lest she be accused of recycling Goon Squad,
she had to come up with new storytelling mecha-
nisms, new protagonists, and a completely dif-
ferent thematic conceit. After toying with many
diff erent ways in, she landed on the idea of cen-
tering Bix and his rapidly changing technological
innovations as a way to tackle all three require-
ments. “The evolution of telecommunications
technology is the story I have witnessed in my
lifetime, without question,” Egan says. “There’s
this state of constant evolution, and the change
is so enormous.”
There are traces of a real-life tech god in Bou-
ton: Egan briefl y dated Steve Jobs when she was
an undergraduate at the University of Pennsyl-
vania. He was seven years into running Apple.
“Seeing how much people who invent things are
really true believers—I think that some of that
really comes from him, and maybe the awe with
which a tech icon is treated,” she says.
But more so, The Candy House is driven by her
interest in the intersections between old modes
of storytelling, like novels, and new digital ones,
like social media and video-game streaming.
Egan’s children, who are 19 and 21, spend some
of their free time watching gamers navigate fi rst-
person video games via Twitch, a phenomenon
that both fascinates and rankles her. “Watching
a gamer narrate their experience is so much like
being inside another consciousness that it gets
the closest, in a way, to what fi ction does,” she
says. “But it’s also totally performative—there’s a
slight disingenuousness at the core of it, as we’re
only hearing the thoughts they want us to know.”WHILE THE CHARACTERS in The Candy House
get genuine glimpses into one another’s psyches
thanks to Own Your Unconscious, they also lose
their autonomy: Bix’s company, Mandala, now
tracks their every move and can even accurately
predict their future behavior. At the same time,
the government places monitoring devices under
its own employees’ skin. In the novel’s hyper-
connected world, a group of resisters known
as Eluders emerges, scrubbing their digital im-
prints to live off the grid. Egan says she’d proba-
bly be an Eluder herself; a baby boomer, she still
writes her fi rst drafts by hand.
But she doesn’t view the Own Your Uncon-
scious technology as dystopian, because we’ve
lived through similarly seismic technological
changes before. “I read a lot of 19th century fi c-
tion, and hear the same echoes of sadness and
nostalgia when people are looking back at the
time before the railroads, because everything
was suddenly so connected,” she says. She was
initially planning to call the book The Thing That
Changes Everything, a tongue-in-cheek state-
ment about how while big inventions provoke
strong immediate reactions, “it’s so hard to really
know what all of the changes will be.”
More recently, plenty of other writers have
dreamed up mechanisms similar to Own Your
Unconscious: in Black Mirror’s “The Entire His-
tory of You,” for example, and the new series
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, which Walter
Mosley adapted from his 2010 novel. It’s unclear
whether something like Own Your Unconscious
will ever exist; Egan says she did no research into
the techno- futurist aspects of the book, prefer-
ring to let her imagination run wild.
But the focus of the novel isn’t on the tech
itself, anyway; it’s on how these characters—
some of whom have been living in Egan’s mind
for decades —would respond to such changes,
providing evidence of our perseverance and
shortsightedness alike in the face of change.
And until her magic machine is invented, Egan
and other lo-fi storytellers are doing just fi ne
fulfi lling many of its positive powers: in placing
our long, entangled histories into context,
spurring empathy, and satisfying our endless
curiosity about others. “I’m the person who
walks down the street, peeking into lighted
windows,” Egan confesses, “thinking, What kind
of life goes on in there?” □◁ Egan began drafting the follow-up
to her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel
more than a decade ago
The Candy
House revisits
Goon Squad
characters
▽