Jennifer Egan

"The Candy House" opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is "one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis." Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalizing" memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, "Own Your Unconscious"—which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes.

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. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. Intellectually dazzling, "The Candy House" is also a moving testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, family, privacy, and love.

A Novel

The Candy House

Laura Wilson

Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.

cedar winslow

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others.

Had she learned to read... she would have discovered that the exact emotions she experienced after a trip to London with her father, at sixteen, a trip that broke her, had been felt by others. She was not unique, but neither was she alone. Reading might have saved her.

Eventually only we could still see the flickering specter of her young self, flashing and bird-featured, like an antic ghost haunting a tumbledown mansion.

There is nothing original about human behavior. Any idea I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. 

so often we make up conflicts in our heads

Neither gives a shit what I do; I've imagined that entire drama.

Sanja Grbic

Nowadays, a man ill at ease in his surroundings will pull out his phone, request the Wi-Fi password, and rejoin a virtual sphere where his identity is instantly reaffirmed. Let us all take a moment to consider deeply what isolation was customary before these times arrived!

A smile is a door that is both open and closed.

loved a lot of the chapters, got bored when the characters were too interested in numbers. Would read a third novel featuring this constellation of characters.

Jess Rez

Cody Degen

It spends the first half of the book setting up an interesting premise and then just never talks about the most interesting thing or interesting characters in any detail ever again

had no idea what was going on the whole time or what i was supposed to take away from it - a let down because the concept sounded promising

petrina

This is a set of interconnected stories of a speculative world in which you can externalize your memories and upload them in a “cloud” of sorts which is a great premise. It’s written through individual stories which I really enjoy. Most of this book felt like character studies rather than being about the the characters and their interactions with this technology which I wasn’t always as interested in. Some of the stories I really enjoyed and other ones I just couldn’t really get myself into. I liked it, not sure I loved it.

listen, for a collection of short stories (though interconnected), a 3.5 is more like a 4.5 to me. I always struggle with the cohesion and feelings that I take away from books that consistently jump protagonists, but I was in awe of the different writing styles that jennifer egan uses to describe each character. that being said, the book lacked a punch/cohesivity due to the VAST amount of protagonists

This didn't disappoint. At its core, The Candy House grapples with the idea of authenticity — and full of characters who are in disguise to others (sometimes literally) or to themselves (in ways that aren't really obvious even to themselves). And it all plays out against this backdrop of new technology and a way to essentially put your consciousness and memories. The idea is you can access their memories if you want (even total strangers) and they can access yours. Yes, Egan is saying something about social media here, I believe. Maybe even issuing a warning about what is next? Either way, I'll come back to the core message I took away: Authenticity in a world where it is easy to appear to be someone else entirely. And isn't that where we are right now? This isn't a book about the future. It's a book about now. And maybe that is why I will be thinking about it for a long time.

Angela

Beautiful composition, super creative way of world building and showing the different impacts of technologies. Loved the different types of sections and the surprising ways the characters interacted felt really natural. 

Couldn’t always keep track of the web of characters and in the end can’t decide if the point was that there wasn’t a specific point and it’s just a lot of parallel interconnected lives (reflects our world), or whether I feel a bit confused about whether there’s a takeaway. 

Shohini Gupta

Beautiful composition, super creative way of world building and showing the different impacts of technologies. Loved the different types of sections and the surprising ways the characters interacted felt really natural. 

Couldn’t always keep track of the web of characters and in the end can’t decide if the point was that there wasn’t a specific point and it’s just a lot of parallel interconnected lives (reflects our world), or whether I feel a bit confused about whether there’s a takeaway. 

Sarah Erle

Elissa Bowe LeBeau

I considered at many points simply not finishing this book. I despise “collections” of short stories, and this feel far more akin to that than any sort of novel. I finished, regardless, because I’ve read such stellar reviews. And once I did, I wish I had put this down for good 2 hours ago. Not worth it.

Garrett Jansen

An extension of A Visit From the Goon Squad that carries those notes of worry with aging and an additional layer that seeks to make sense of memories, finality, and the idea of a person's story in within the overwhelming scale of the world. A lot of spinning parts that can sometimes be hard to track over more disparate generations yet have delicately interwoven pieces that don't necessarily need to be revelatory. Sometimes it's enough just to be, knowing when to look away and embrace that knowing everything is unnecessary.

Avery Baumel

covid moment LOL
really good i love sasha <3

Fraser Simons

Similar to A Visit From the Goon Squad, and tying in with some of the characters from that novel, short stories interweave in a primarily near-futuristic world (a fairly wide gap from 90s to 30+ years in our current future) in which people can upload their consciousness, literalizing, with technology, the idea of a collective, or general intellect unit. 

“Authenticity” in relation to such a technology is set up with the first couple stories, but then—like just about everything else—it becomes muddled, in favour instead of introducing a multitude of characters for a more complex plotting in how they interrelate and come together. 

There is also some unconventional formatting occurring, as in the prequel. A chapter of two column, second-person thoughts from Lulu. Cyberneticly enhanced, citizen spy, she disassociates from herself as she attempts a mission. But the format doesn’t make that much sense under scrutiny. Nor does another chapter with algebra, only because it lacks detail to explain the significance. But worst of all (for me), was the networking email chain. Characters demonstrate their superficial and transactory natures as they attempt to get what they want. But the writing isn’t engaging at all. It’s boring on the page and far overlong in its point. 

What I did like about it was the reexamination of Lulu as a whole, but it fumbles her overall story as she becomes no more realized and, in fact, only contextualized enough to become the embodiment of trauma. A similar to all the problems, which Goon Squad lacked: characterization, empathy and dignity in depictions, and a sense of time and place with the specificity embedded in the diction chosen. It’s not lost completely. One chapter, twin girls in a cuckoo narrative recounting their childhood with Lou from Goon Squad, and their mother, it exceptional. A perfect chapter, for me. This, by contrast, made the other chapters even worse, because she demonstrably can, and did not, exercise those often revelatory-like skills. Second best is a chapter focusing on Sasha’s son, Lincoln, the best story of the Goon Squad. But here we visit him in later life in a segregated working environment, essentially—atypical and typical workers in tech. While it mostly works, it does actually manage to not acknowledge the breadth of experience atypical thinkers have, lumping then altogether in broad ways. It feels a bit unintentionally cruel, I’m afraid.

That’s a through line when contrasting Goon Squad to Candy House: A lack of empathy toward the characters. It feels like a very large counterpoint, Tonally. All the white space; the interesting questions placed there previously, has more-or-less been coloured in. Sasha in later life. Everyone in later life, really. Music and connection to Sasha, one way or another, in Goon Squad brought them all together and had healing properties. This is pessimistic. There’s no specificity to the lens applied to them. The broad picture is the context, and it has people at their worst, accentuated by the technology… if Egan decides to have the tech make a presence in the chapter at all. More likely than not, it’s a plot point that makes the bringing together of them all a feat. 

But it doesn’t actually manage to say anything that well. The primary success is the plotting, at the expense of developing an attachment to most all of them, and at expense, I think, of the actual themes it purports, outright states, to be About. It’s quite gauzy, in the end.

The Candy House A Novel

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