The Candy House
By Jennifer Egan
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
- Publisher
- Scribner (Simon & Schuster)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9781476716763
The Candy House, a companion to Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, imagines a technology that lets people externalize and share their memories. Through interlinked chapters spanning decades and many characters, the novel explores privacy, authenticity and connection in...
What if you could upload your memories and browse everyone else's? Jennifer Egan spins her inventive companion to A Visit from the Goon Squad from that premise, following a tech visionary's 'Own Your Unconscious' as it ripples across dozens of loosely linked lives. As in her earlier book, structure is the argument: chapters arrive as emails, spy capers, second-person confessions and case studies, each formally distinct, together mapping a culture trading privacy for connection. Egan is too subtle to moralize; she is interested in what is gained and lost when experience becomes searchable, and in the human hunger for authenticity that no platform can satisfy. The proliferation of characters rewards attention and, often, a second reading, as figures glimpsed in one chapter return transformed in another. For readers who relish ambition and formal daring, it is exhilarating - a novel that thinks hard about the networked self while remaining, chapter by chapter, a genuine pleasure to read.