The Candy House
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4.1 • 28 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
A Time Magazine Must-Read
'A complex, compelling read that showcases Egan's masterful storytelling' TIME
'A dazzling feat of literary construction' VOGUE
From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time comes an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own--featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.
It's 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He's forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalising" memory. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, Own Your Unconscious--that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others--has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.
In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game. Egan takes her "deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture" (Vogue) to stunning new heights and delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Egan returns to the fertile territory and characters of A Visit from the Goon Squad with an electrifying and shape-shifting story that one-ups its Pulitzer-winning predecessor. I'll see your PowerPoint chapter, Egan seems to say, and raise you a chapter in tweets, and another in emails and texts. In the near future, a platform called Own Your Unconscious allows memories to be uploaded to the cloud and accessed by anyone. "Counters" seek to ferret out "proxies" that help hide "eluders" who resist merging their "gray grabs" to the collective in order to leave their online personae behind. Not everyone sees this as panacea, and a countermovement called Mondrian arises. Appearances from music producer Bennie Salazar, his mentor Lou Kline, and their lovers and children provide sharp pleasures for Goon Squad fans, and Egan cleverly echoes the ambitious, savvy marketing schemes of real-world tech barons with Own Your Unconscious. It casts its spell on Bennie, whose punk rock days with the Flaming Dildos are long past: "Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them," he writes in an email. Twisting through myriad points of view, narrative styles, and divergent voices, Egan proves herself as perceptive an interpreter of the necessity of human connection as ever, and her vision is as irresistible as the tech she describes. This is Egan's best yet.
Customer Reviews
I want candy
3.5 stars
The author is an American literary darling, who dated Steve Jobs when she was an undergraduate. (He installed a Macintosh computer in her bedroom.) She is the recipient of numerous scholarships and fellowships. Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in all the right places (The New Yorker, Harpers, Zoetrope, Ploughshares). Her first novel, The Invisible Circus (1994) was made into a 2001 movie starring Cameron Diaz. (Is having Cameron Diaz’s name on your CV a good thing or a bad thing? Discuss.) Ms Egan’s sophomore effort, Look At Me (2001) was listed for the National Book Award. According to Wikipedia, her third, The Keep (2006), which I haven’t read, was a national bestseller (I don’t think we’re talking James Patterson here), a New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book, and a Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, and Rocky Mountain News Best Book of the Year. (They know books in the Rockies. Not as well as rocks perhaps, but still.)
Ms Egan is best known for her 2011 novel (I use that term loosely), A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize, among others, and was nominated for many more. Her last novel, Manhattan Beach (2017), won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Since 2018, she has been president of PEN America Center (formerly PEN American Center), a non-profit founded in 1922 and headquartered in New York, which is dedicated to “defending and celebrating free expression in the United States and worldwide through the advancement of literature and human rights.” (Call me a cynic, but truth, justice and the American way flashed into my head when I read that.) Unsurprisingly, her latest offering was eagerly anticipated, to put it mildly. FYI, the title is a reference to the Brothers Grimm.
Candy House is a companion volume to Good Squad, not so much prequel or sequel as both. Whether they constitute novels or collections of related stories is matter of debate. Ms Egan favours the former. You don’t need to have read Goon Squad to understand Candy House. I read it more than 10 years and no longer remember it particularly well. That having been said, a number of characters, or relatives thereof, from the earlier book do appear, although there are an even larger number of new ones. The central theme relates to a computer technology called “Own Your Unconscious” that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share them in exchange for access to the memories of others. It was developed by a black engineer/entrepreneur named Bix Bouton, now 40 and married with kids, who was at college in Good Squad. OYU is wildly successful, but has its sceptics or “eluders,” eager to maintain their privacy while Big searches for the NBT (next big thing to the uninitiated).
As mentioned, there are many characters to keep track of, some developed better than others, none that I could call fully, although that was probably intentional on Ms Egan’s part. You need to keep you thinking cap on. Characters are mentioned in passing in one chapter only to reappear in depth many chapters later. The chapters are more than vignettes but less than novellas. The time frame moves back at forth. As in Goon Squad, Ms Egan gets her David Foster Wallace on with regard to form, offering up both first and second person narration, singular and plural, as well as omniscient narration and epistolary form. Goon Squad included a chapter formatted as a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation. Candy House has one composed entirely of tweets (as Ms Egan first did in a short story ‘Black Box’ published in the The New Yorker in 2012). Despite, or possibly because of, this playfulness, the writing is strong overall, although there are exceptions.
Bottom line: On balance, I liked Candy House better than Goon Squad. I liked Manhattan Beach better than both of them. At least I think I did. I’m not sure any more.
Candy crush
Loved the intricate web of characters and their relationships with each other in this ever evolving landscape of technology and sharing.