Egan’s joyously experimental A Visit From the Goon Squad (which found a rapturous reception on release in 2010, winning a Pulitzer Prize, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award) is one of my favourite books of all time. This new sequel offers an expansion of that roving, playful world, as bit-players from the earlier book take centre stage. As with Goon Squad, each chapter serves as its own standalone short story, with its own trademark style or literary device. The Candy House includes a version of her short story ‘Black Box’ (originally published via the New Yorker’s Twitter feed as a series of 140-character updates ), and a funny epistolary chapter created from a very complicated email chain. These episodes jet back and forth through time—some set in the recognisable past, some in a dystopian near-future—and together loosely form a grander narrative about an algorithm developed by an anthropologist, Miranda Kline ( Goon Squad ‘s Mindy, in her later years), which predicts social behaviour, and the invention of the ‘Collective Consciousness’, in which the memories of individuals have been uploaded into the cloud, building a hive-mind that might now be searched, analysed, and relived. If, like me, you enjoy both speculative fiction and literary fiction, this will be right up your alley. It’s sharp, funny, and very, very clever—a social critique that never lapses into the portentous. You may also enjoy Emily St. John Mandel’s (author of Station Eleven ) very good new time travel novel, Sea of Tranquility , which was also recently released.
"Egan’s joyously experimental A Visit From the Goon Squad (which found a rapturous reception on release in 2010, winning a Pulitzer Prize, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award) is one of my favourite books of all time. This new sequel offers an expansion of that roving, playful world, as bit-players from the earlier book take centre stage. As with Goon Squad, each chapter serves as its own standalone short story, with its own trademark style or literary device. The Candy House includes a version of her short story ‘Black Box’ (originally published via the New Yorker’s Twitter feed as a series of 140-character updates ), and a funny epistolary chapter created from a very complicated email chain. These episodes jet back and forth through time—some set in the recognisable past, some in a dystopian near-future—and together loosely form a grander narrative about an algorithm developed by an anthropologist, Miranda Kline ( Goon Squad ‘s Mindy, in her later years), which predicts social behaviour, and the invention of the ‘Collective Consciousness’, in which the memories of individuals have been uploaded into the cloud, building a hive-mind that might now be searched, analysed, and relived. If, like me, you enjoy both speculative fiction and literary fiction, this will be right up your alley. It’s sharp, funny, and very, very clever—a social critique that never lapses into the portentous. You may also enjoy Emily St. John Mandel’s (author of Station Eleven ) very good new time travel novel, Sea of Tranquility , which was also recently released."
"The 2010s social media hellscape depicted in The Candy House isn’t a mirror image of real life, but it’s eerily similar. In this universe, technology allows users to upload their memories to the “Collective Consciousness” – and, in turn, access those of others. Each of the book’s chapters is told from the perspective of characters whose lives are ruled by the tech, whether they’ve opted in or not. The book’s success hinges on the fact that author Jennifer Egan abstains from judgment about the Collective Consciousness and instead lets her characters (and readers) decide for themselves how they feel."
