The Candy House (Goon Squad #2) by Jennifer Egan

 

From the Book Blurb

From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own—featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,” those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.

Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.​ Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.

About the Author - Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection.  Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read.  Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize, and was named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly.  Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine, and she recently completed a term as President of PEN America.  Her new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in April, 2022, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022, as well as one of President Obama’s favorite reads of 2022.

The Candy House

One of the anticipated books of last year, this was stuck in my TBR & my library for most of 2022, started this late last month, took the turn of the year to complete.

The book has a very interesting premise where it examines the changes to society and individuals brought about by social media. We see a future where we can upload our life experiences, including those not available to conscious memory, and then watch not only our own, but those of everyone else like a hive memory. This brings our entire lives into purview and helps learn and understand our past.

What drew me to this book was this particular idea of a collective consciousness.

Here we have Bix a classmate of one of the characters in the earlier novel Goon Squad and here is a social media whiz-kid who makes the next leap in technology with a master play self surveillance cube called "Own your Consciousness" to store consciousness in a cube and "Social Consciousness" where one can upload to a collective where others can access all or the part uploaded as can you.

This innovation jump is explored by Jennifer with the characters whose memories are shared ranging from an ancient pre-internet age to the 2030's. I felt that this was the place from which the book would catch my consciousness not letting go till the end.

It is here that Jennifer loses the thread as the book spins off seemingly into what feels like a collection of short stories all in chapters. The chapters are tied to various different characters and are linked together loosely but like a Spider Verse, multiverse or an Avengers collective the links are very difficult to unravel.

Then again the stories keep changing at pace preventing the reader from developing an affinity or familiarity to the character(s) which makes recollection a chore. This makes the story seem disjointed and for me the biggest ask was that while I like to engage with characters while reading a story, keeping tabs on them at such a minute level is very much like work. The very work that is set aside by a reader to enter the world of books.

This book is very current and plays of the current world scenario when social media and the corresponding artificial online reality has become the new gold standard, and where memories are based on false images fed online on a daily basis. Jennifer's story shows us a mirror which is darkly shaded and projects a very unsavory future.

Jennifer is a great writer and this book definitely brings us pictures which are less than flattering almost like a societal report card but the way the story seems hackneyed is not what one expects from a writer of so high a caliber.

The book also seems caught in the same cycle that it strives to project too much dependency on social media rips the social fabrics. The book thus descend into its own version of the inferno with parts of the story feeling like social media uploads and posts like tweets which more often that not reflects the senders current moods.

The book has been written to be read as a standalone but for me the prequel has to be required reading to be able to see the developing characters as the story progressed from the earlier Goon Squad. The struggle for and against invasive technology which exceeds its set limits is a key part of the story and with the characters brief previous backgrounds projected against their current ones.

I would say that this story is a premise that required better processing and would grow on you probably with more re-reads. It will appeal to meticulous readers. For a Single reading this is probably not the best choice and needs to be avoided by any who are looking for light reading. The book thrills when read the proper way like a course book. Not a disappointment but more of a book that did not reach the potential that its premise projected.

3 stars for me.

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