Fans of Jennifer Egan’s breakout hit and Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad will be thrilled to know that its “sibling novel,” The Candy House, is here at last. The two books are connected loosely, like wildflowers sown in the same field. You’ll see kleptomaniac Sasha again, who has now transformed her criminality into art. You’ll cross paths with Sasha’s husband, Drew; her son, Lincoln, who falls somewhere on the autism spectrum; and her art history professor uncle, Ted. The music industry pros Bennie Salazar and Lou wander through as well, along with various of their respective children from several marriages. Like Goon Squad, The Candy House is a collage of interconnected characters and stories told in diverse forms that follow their own wayward paths. Egan’s prose is as lithe and knowing as ever, tender toward human folly, but highly aware of how flawed we all are.
However, just as the world itself has become darker and more contentious since 2010, the world of The Candy House is more sober than Goon Squad’s rock and roll heart. Instead of zeroing in on the music business as its hub, The Candy House features the technology industry that now saturates every fiber of our lives. The difference between the two industries partly accounts for the different vibes of these sibling novels. The music biz may be crass, showy, and greedy, but it basically wants people to have a good time. The tech industry is greedy, too, but it wants to get not only into your wallet but also your head, sometimes quite literally.
In Egan’s version of our current, and future, reality, a tech genius named Bix Bouton has invented a product called “Own Your Unconscious,” which has found a way for people to revisit memories they’ve forgotten. As Lincoln, all grown up and deep in the employ of cutting-edge tech, puts it, “Who could resist the chance to revisit our memories, the majority of which we’d forgotten so completely that they seemed to belong to someone else? And having done that, who could resist gaining access to the Collective Consciousness for the small price of making our own anonymously searchable? We all went for it on our twenty-first birthday…just as prior generations went for music sharing and DNA analysis….”
What could possibly go wrong?
For many of the characters in this speculative novel, nothing. In the same way that people thronged to Facebook with every particle of their most personal information; spit merrily into vials without a thought for where their DNA information would be collected; and, in Sweden recently, had microchips with their credit card information inserted into their fingertips so they could wave at items they wanted to buy without the pesky middleman of a cash register and cashier, for some of the folks in The Candy House, the virtual candy tastes great. Lincoln, who has become a “counter,” or a “senior empiricist and metrics expert” (p. 74-75), a man who regards clouds as forms of math, says proudly of his ilk that “the world has come around to us.” He’s not a villain, though. He’s a pretty nice guy whose time has come, and he’s good with that. Why shouldn’t he be?
Jennifer Egan The Candy House
For others, however, that candy tastes an awful lot like poison, and they become “eluders,” or “data defiers” who go to great lengths to keep their identities, their memories, and their consciousnesses off the grid and out of the mathematical cloud that now hovers over us all, 24/7. It isn’t easy. They, too, have to employ advanced forms of technology such as “hermit crab programs” to escape the net. In a particularly sly moment, Egan reveals that some of these advanced programs employ actual people—fiction writers, apparently—“who impersonate multiple identities at once.” In the future, fiction writers may be most useful in releasing us from the continual surveillance and intrusion of technology by inventing identities that we can use as escape hatches.
Ha ha. Sort of. Egan is too skilled a writer, and too wise a human being to lurch through the usual paces of dystopic fiction. There is no war between the eluders and the counters, no analog hero who defies mighty tech and wins. Characters and their passions and discontents rise and fall as the world changes around and through them, sometimes deeply and specifically affected by Bix’s invention and sometimes…not. Or not in any straightforward way. For them, as for us, tech and history are simply the water in which they swim. Bix may have created an astonishing technology, but its effects are not in his control. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, his powers end up exceeding his own, individual power.
In fact, though, Bix didn’t exactly create the technology all on his own, and it is here that Egan asks her deepest, least answerable questions. As the novel makes clear early on, Bix accidentally stumbled onto the work of an anthropologist named Miranda Kline (ex-wife of Lou) who wrote an influential book called Patterns of Affinity. This book, as her daughters later put it, included “formulas for predicting human inclinations.” Those formulas can also be called “algorithms,” and when Bix acquired these algorithms, he radically and forever changed human beings’ relationship to their own consciousness. As with the internet itself, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Miranda’s scholarly book and Bix’s tech invention combine to put something into the world that is very powerful, and very ambiguous, at best. These intellectual parents unintentionally create metaphysical offspring that live on without them, and beyond whatever either of their intentions may have been. Like Lincoln, Bix is a pretty nice guy—smart, loving, creative. Miranda is also smart, very intrepid, and brave. He gets very, very rich. She, along with one of her daughters, becomes an eluder. He dies, eventually, at a late age. So does she. Neither is punished, or rewarded, by the novel that contains them. They’re just people, doing their best.
If there are no entirely bad guys in The Candy House, there are no entirely good guys, either. As Bix’s technology rises and rises, and despite the credit he tries to give her for it, Miranda loudly and publicly defends “the deeply private nature of human experience,” but it’s too late. Privacy is so 20th century. She opened Pandora’s box, and, in a twist of fate she never could have foreseen, a really smart guy found a way to make it into an app that everyone wanted. Egan turns her utterly human characters this way and that, showing the threads that connect them and the choices that bind them, never losing sight of the fact that, like it or not, they are all part of the same vast tapestry. Pull one thread here, and another is affected over there, for better or worse. In the future, no matter their day jobs helping eluders, novelists may still be the ones who will remind us of this interconnectedness so movingly and beautifully, and as Egan does so well in these intricately woven pages.
Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities, which is forthcoming from Algonquin in September.; and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between. She is a former Stegner Fellow in Fiction, the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, and the winner of an Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. She is an associate professor of writing and publishing practices at Fordham University.
