Jennifer Egan revisits 2010’s ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’

Sequel to the Pulitzer Prize winner is one of the most anticipated books of the year

Even in an era of boundless hype, Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House” has a legitimate claim on the title of Most Anticipated Book of the Year.

This is, after all, a sequel to “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” Egan’s astonishing demonstration of literary bravado that swung through 2010, grabbing a Pulitzer Prize, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Egan’s creativity was so magnificent that commentators focused not on the storyline of “Goon Squad” but its multifarious forms, her confident array of perspectives ranging through time and around the world. It was a novel of such peacocking swagger that only its knockout triumph saved it from looking obnoxious.

Well, here we are more than a decade later, and even if you were a fan — as I was — the intervening years are likely to have beaten those characters from your memory. As someone in that earlier novel observed, “Time’s a goon,” and unfortunately, Egan is in no mood to help out, which means you’re likely to be as baffled as dazzled by “The Candy House.”

The music that ran through “Goon Squad” and gave the novel its melody is far harder to hear in these new chapters. Also, 12 years later, readers are less likely to be awed by literary experimentation.

But if “The Candy House” is less uniformly successful than “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” it still contains terrific parts. The opening story reintroduces us to Bix Bouton, now a tech mogul whose social media company has made him very rich. Exploiting the discoveries of an anthropologist name Miranda Kline, Bix monetized “algorithms that explained trust and influence” to build a “luminous sphere of interconnection.” Now, in his early 40s, despite his fame and vast wealth, Bix worries that he has “no vision beyond the one he’d nearly exhausted.” It’s a fear that gives him “a haunted, hunted feeling” as he struggles to divine “what should happen next.”

We eventually learn that Bix went on to invent a program with the ironic name Own Your Unconscious, which completely reshaped human culture. Egan explains: “By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online ‘collective,’ you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same.” It’s a clever parody of the Faustian bargain we’ve made with social media, relinquishing our privacy for access to the comments, likes and images of others. “The Candy House” ties this sci-fi brain technology back to Napster.

Somewhat more effective is a chapter constructed from a great thicket of nested email conversations. But here again Egan presumes a lot on her readers’ ability to know what she’s talking about. It would have taken so little additional information to make this more inviting that I can’t help feeling the author was overindulged by her editor.

The chapters that work best embrace their radical forms more gently — or even mock them. One of the best is about Chris, the adult son of Bennie Salazar, the music producer who served as the axle of “Goon Squad.” Now an adult, Chris works at a shadowy software company trying to translate every element of every story into a mathematical formula. Through a series of awkward encounters, Chris falls into a cerebral comedy of absurdity in which he realizes that he has shifted from being the Protagonist to being an Enabling Sidekick. It’s a witty deconstruction of the presumptions of algorithmic insight and a brilliant demonstration of the unquantifiable pleasures of great fiction.

Toward the end of “The Candy House,” we come back to Bix’s 28-year-old son, who rejected his father’s work and wealth. He’s a struggling fiction writer who knows that we don’t need some new development of social media to access each other’s minds. We already have these ancient things called books that allow us to feel “the collective without any machinery at all.”