FICTION
Johanna
Thomas-Corr
The Candy House
by Jennifer Egan
Corsair £20 pp352
Jennifer Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer
prizewinning novel, A Visit
from the Goon Squad, made
a virtue of being, literally, all
over the place. The action
jumped from 1970s Kenya
to 2020s New York. The
characters included a
washed-up rock star, a bipolar
journalist and a genocidal
dictator. The perspective
leapt from first to second
to third person and included
a famous chapter written as
a PowerPoint presentation.
More than just a formal
accomplishment, the novel
proved to be a bellwether
of technological trends.
“Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll
find. Or they’ll find us,” says
Bix Bouton, a computer
science graduate who makes
a brief appearance to predict
the impact of social media.
Yet it is perhaps a measure
of how rapidly our digital
lives have developed since
then that the first chapter
of Egan’s eagerly awaited
sequel feels rather laboured
and predictable.
Bix, now a 41-year-old tech
titan who comes across like a
black Mark Zuckerberg, learns
from a group of academics
about a device that can
externalise the memories of
small animals. This inspires
him to develop a product
called Own Your Unconscious
that allows users to upload
their memories and access
those of other users.
His innovation effectively
erases privacy for ever. It
also provides Egan with
the through-line for a novel
about artifice, authenticity
Trouble with
technology
The digital world poses a serious threat
to our lives in this sequel to Jennifer
Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad
SHUTTERSTOCKand human connection that
— like Goon Squad — presents
a chocolate box of voices
and styles.
Once this curiously lifeless
opening is out of the way,
Egan shifts most of the novel
into the first person and it
becomes instantly more
engaging as a result. Through
the voices of their children,
spouses and extended family,
we are reunited with the
kleptomaniac-turned-artist
Sasha Blake, her former boss
the music producer Bennie
Salazar and Salazar’s reckless
mentor, Lou Kline. As their
lives intersect, the novel
becomes like a feverish
Vanity Fair feature about the
messed-up rich.
Egan has a particular
talent for portraying extreme
personalities. Miles, a highly
strung lawyer and father of
three, gets hooked on opioids
and takes up risky sex with
his wife’s friend, whom he
ends up killing. Noreen, a
homemaker, becomes hellbent
on moving a neighbour’s
fence five inches. The
anthropologist Miranda Kline
leaves her two daughters to
live with a tribe in the
Brazilian rainforest. It is
Miranda’s ideas about human
affinities that provide the
subsoil in which Bix’s vision
takes root.
Curiously Egan never
makes full use of the product’s
functions. We learn littleLike in Goon
Squad, the
book presents
a chocolate
box of voices
and styles
about what it’s actually like
to enter another person’s
consciousness. We are told
that this technology has
changed the world, but rarely
see any characters behaving
differently as a result.
One of the only chapters
that truly explores its
implications is Lulu the Spy:
2032. It’s an account of a
dangerous mission to steal
data from the heavily guarded
home of a powerful criminal,
only it’s relayed in the form
of tweet-length aphorisms,
such as: “At high velocity, a
speedboat slams along the
tops of waves./ Fear and
excitement are sometimes
indistinguishable.” Are these
Lulu’s thoughts or the
directives of a weevil
implanted in her brain? Like
the PowerPoint presentation,
this narrative gimmick is used
to dark, comic effect.
Otherwise The Candy
House is not a novel that
provokes many new insightsPrizewinner
Jennifer Eganabout the mediated lives
we now lead. It also has a
tendency to capture
characters through their
weirdest tics and
compulsions. Yet it has a good
humanist heart. In Egan’s
books the human urge for
authenticity is always
“problematized” by our
digital lives. She suggests
that only good old-fashioned
fiction — ie the novel — will
let us “roam with absolute
freedom through the
human collective”.
At its best it reads as if
AM Homes, George Saunders
and David Foster Wallace
took turns in rewriting
Middlemarch for our modern
age. It’s full of melancholic
commentary about the
human need for redemption,
reinvention and
reconciliation. But I’m just
not sure it contains much
genuine wisdom. c24 April 2022 35