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

Sanja Grbic

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

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!

so often we make up conflicts in our heads

cedar winslow

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

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

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.

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.

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

Laura Wilson

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

The Candy House quotes

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