A recovering heroin addict considers the redemptive possibility of Dungeons and Dragons. Who could resist the lure of a tangible, search-optimised past? “The collective is like gravity,” Egan writes, “almost no one can withstand it.”Īgainst this backdrop of escalating disclosure – what Egan calls the “Self-Surveillance Era” – The Candy House tells stories of searching. Wondering about the identity of a beautiful stranger, the grisly truth of a murder, or the fate of a long-lost frenemy? Just run a face-match on the CollectiveConsciousness™.

Users who agree to upload their brains will gain access to the anonymised content of every other user, living or dead a great “churning gyre” of memory and thought. In their wake, he will create a household gadget that allows a human mind to be copied (a kind of cortical back-up drive), and a subscription-only spiritus mundi. These night-time debates will vanquish Bix’s great white emptiness. When he looks to the horizon of his mental landscape – the place where inspiration waits – there is nothing. By night, he dons a disguise and sneaks into a discussion group of Columbia University postgrads. By day, he strides about in his trademark leather fedora – his version of Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirt – busy “ubiquitising” his empire. Bix Bouton is a stony-faced “tech demigod”, the founder of social media mega-entity Mandala. It begs to be read alongside its more extroverted sibling, and to consider, in the space between them, the deflations – incremental and otherwise – of the last decade.Įgan begins on the sharp edge of an epiphany. As befits its title, The Candy House is a novel of Easter eggs – of hidden in-joke treats. Minor characters are thrust into the thick of things formerly major characters make Hitchcockian cameos. The Candy House is less a sequel to Goon Squad than a fraternal twin. It’s this sense of paradoxical isolation that Egan revisits in her new book. In an era of screen-curated selfhood, autofiction surged instead.Ī dozen years on, and Egan’s cult novel now feels like the end of something, a kind of techno-optimist elegy: a study in time’s “incremental deflations”, and the loneliness of hyper-connectivity.

But if A Visit from the Goon Squad carried the promise of a grand wave of tech-inflected fiction, that literary trend never quite materialised. And the plot ricocheted like a browsing-addled brain. The cast was a neon collision of kleptomaniacs, philanderers, It girls, autocrats and a guitar band called the Flaming Dildos. One chapter was written entirely in PowerPoint slides another in textspeak (“if thr r children, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?”).

It was a tale as gimmicky and restless as the smartphone era threatened to be.

A visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer-winning rock’n’roll novel, felt like the beginning of something.

The candy house review new yorker