San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
After ‘Goon Squad,’ a compelling companion
The Booksmith presents Jennifer Egan: In person. 7 p.m. April 18. $31, includes signed book. 1727 Haight St., S.F. 415-866-8688. www.booksmith.com/event/jennifer-egan
In Jennifer Egan’s new novel, “The Candy House,” an ominous yet omnipresent technology takes its inspiration from an obscure academic text called “Patterns of Affinity.” Written by anthropologist Miranda Kline about an isolated tribe, the work introduces formulas for predicting human inclinations. Kline speculates that her formulas’ predictive powers could, theoretically, “be applied to people living in a complex, mobile environment … but doing so would require exhaustive personal information that would be impossible to acquire in a modern setting without posing an array of intrusive questions whose answers few people, if any, would be willing to supply.”
Tech mogul Bix Bouton foresees what Kline did not — that people would willingly reveal the most personal information almost without hesitation. Bouton adopts Kline’s observations to create Own Your Unconscious, a technology platform that offers its users the option of “uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online ‘collective.’ ” As one user explains, in doing so “you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same.” Unsurprisingly, Kline deplores what her theory has wrought.
Egan calls “The Candy House” a “companion novel” to her 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” While it’s not necessary to have read the first to understand the second, it helps. In the earlier book, Bouton was a minor character; now 41, he is mostly just worried about how he’ll come up with his next big thing. We meet him as he’s sneaking out of his New York apartment in the night, not in his decidedly un-tech CEO-y “trademark deconstructed Zoot suit and small leather fedora,” in search of the deep and meaningful conversations of the sort he remembers from his youth as a graduate student in computer science.
Bouton is seeking connection — to others, but mostly to a past that may or may not have been as good as he remembers it. This desire to return to a happier, less complicated time is something most of the people in the book have in common. Many look to Own Your Unconscious and are mostly disappointed. There’s Miles, who, instead of spending time with them, scrolls through photos of his wife and children to remind himself that he’s happy. And Lincoln, who uses data to predict the likelihood that the object of his crush might date him. Roxy eagerly awaits her Mandala Consciousness Cube to make sense of her past. Then there’s Alfred, who began “on occasion to scream in public: on the L train; in Times Square; at Whole Foods; at the Whitney.” Why? “I put up with negative attention in exchange for something else that matters more,” he explains, “... authenticity.”
I hesitate to introduce too many characters in this review because there are so many. It’s difficult at times to connect all the often interconnected dots. It’s something I initially found frustrating about this book until I put myself at peace with the fact that this is precisely what happens in real life. We can’t always remember where we met someone, how we came to know them, how they’re connected to others in our orbit. It’s perhaps better to approach this book as a series of interconnected vignettes, much like life.
I could have done without the 50 (!) pages in the form of an email exchange toward the end, which felt more gratuitous than engaging. But that said, this is a beautiful exploration of loss, memory and history, a not too subtle critique of what is lost when we live our lives online:
“It’s 1991, and a lot of things that are about to happen haven’t happened yet,” Egan writes, as she describes a moment at a kid’s baseball game that will be remembered differently by all who experience it. “The screens that everyone will hold twenty years from now haven’t been invented ... all these parents gathered in the fading light, and not a single face underlit by a bluish glow! They’re all here, in one place, their attention burning toward home plate.”