The Candy House A Novel

Swirling short stories weave characters together to build a broader narrative about identity and modernity. Set over the last 50 years and 20 into the future, chapters bounce between characters entrenched in the world of social media, music, and the military. The scope is immense but themes center on authenticity, the collective vs the individual, family, substance abuse, mental health and belonging. The writing is engaging and the formatting is unique as each chapter has its own voice, font, and style. It's surprising how much depth can be built when individual characters have a relatively short exposure.

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.

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

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

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.

Companion novel did not disappoint.

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.

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.

covid moment LOL really good i love sasha <3

Fantastic!

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.