A moving story about characters searching for connection and identity in an ultra-digital world. Metro, May 22
When Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for A Visit From The Goon Squad, she was praised for an “inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age.” Because it worked brilliantly as a snapshot of early 21st century American life, a decade on a sequel of sorts feels natural; a chance not just to catch-up with some of her characters but perhaps understand how the world has changed.
The Candy House – which can easily be read as a standalone novel – is just as innovative, wise, funny and confounding as its predecessor. Early on, we find that Bix is teasing out the possibilities of a new app which allows people to access every life memory they’ve ever had – and share them in a cloud in exchange for access to the memories of others.
If that sounds scary, Egan makes it effortlessly plausible. How her characters navigate this tech over the following decades provides the scaffold, but The Candy House is more a moving investigation into how we are always searching for the reasons we act the way we do; why pain, addiction, love – the whole gamut of human existence – is amplified by memory and experience.
Snippets of stories and characters flit in and out of a novel that dispenses with the notion of a chronological or narrative arc – a neat comment on our swipe-right attention spans, perhaps. Not all of her ideas work, but there’s a pleasure in watching Egan play with form and structure. A novel which – a bit like the world in 2022 – doesn’t always know where it’s going, but finds some redemption amid the trauma of the journey.
