‘The Candy House’ is audacious, messy and smart
It doesn’t feel quite correct to say that Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House” (Scribner, 352 pp., eeee) is a sequel to her Pulitzer-winning 2010 novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Yes, the same cast of characters from that book has returned. And once again, Egan is shuffling through a host of styles to explore them.
But the new novelin-stories is less a sequel than a darker, more anxious remix of its predecessor. In the 12 years between novels, Egan has grown increasingly fixated on the way algorithms and social media have invaded our privacy and manipulated our behavior. In “The Candy House,” the symbol for this anxiety is Own Your Unconscious,
a tool capable of not just mining our minds and memories but making them globally accessible.
As we learn in the first chapter, this Wi-fi-enabled Pandora’s Box is the product of the midlife crisis of a mogul named Bix, who’s desperate for “a fresh revelation to shape the remainder of his life.” By cribbing an anthropologist’s research on human behavior, he has invented something as nefarious as it is seductive. One character explains the problem (and the book’s title): “Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house!”
Chapters turn on how we can be ourselves when the algorithm wants us to be something else. One character launches into public screaming fits to provoke visceral reactions. A scholar studies him in the name of understanding of what authenticity means. An autistic programmer – the star of the memorable Powerpoint chapter in “Goon Squad” – seeks a formula for it. “Dungeons & Dragons” with its quantified character traits, is a recurring trope. Some people are determined to live off the social media grid. One, by contrast, tells a story as a Twitter thread.
The tweets are just one way Egan reprises the stylistic crazy quilt that was the hallmark of “Goon Squad.” She plays with fairy tales, email threads, a teenage girl’s stream-of-consciousness riffing, and more. It may be the smartest novel you read all year – if also one of the messiest, with the thinnest of connective tissue among sections.
Too much order, Egan suggests, would only play into the algorithm’s hands. Fiction at its best gets at our weird, gritty, secret selves in ways the internet can’t. It is the only thing that “lets us roam with absolute freedom through the human collective,” she writes. Yet that insistence makes the diversity of characters and styles feel at times ironically one-note. Everyone is trapped in a similar mode of extremely online anxiety.
Still, Egan’s audacity is welcome. Anything that’s a challenge to the algorithm is a gift to humanity – and to fiction. Those eager to escape the internet can sometimes feel like “trapped animals gnawing off their own legs as the price of freedom.” But no matter what the internet does, Egan insists, “there are still some mysteries left.”