The Candy House

This is a fantastic book – 4.5 stars. I'd give it the full 5 if I hadn't already read and absolutely loved A Visit from the Goon Squad. This book has the same style, in that each chapter is from a different character's perspective, and the subsequent chapter is from the perspective of a minor character from the previous chapter. In that way, Candy House could be considered something of a sequel to Goon Squad, if not for the non-sequential nature of both novels, which jump between generations (part of what makes them so interesting). Characters from the the Goon Squad reappear here, but as minor characters (and vice versa, I think, but I'd have to go back to Goon Squad to confirm; I might re-read it again next just to experience that puzzle-piece delight).

This one is a bit more of a sci-fi, with a company called Mandala (which could easily be Meta) patenting technology to externalize memories, allowing yourself and others to view them like movies. Once those memories are extracted, there is the option to upload them to the Collective Unconscious, a database of anonymized memories, which you can only access once you've contributed. Searching those memories is like social-media stalking on steroids. It's clearly a take on how far we can go with social media, and calls into question both what it means to be authentic and have authentic, meaningful relationships. Fascinating, powerful stuff.

As ever, Egan delivers some powerful writing from fascinating perspectives, with some edgy chapters that keep the reading experience fresh. It's hard to put down. Highly recommend.

I have very little interest in reading a book that contains the phrase ‘suckling at her breast' in the first few lines. Flipping through the first chapter, it got worse and it's a nope for me.

Abandoned, p.57. Then again, p.162, and again p.200, and so on. Lost track of the number of times I abandoned it. Caught up on New Yorkers. Gazed at New Mexico skies. And each time, went back to reading, because so many people I respect & trust speak so highly of this book.

The gimmick was clever, and well done: each chapter is a completely different voice, tone, perspective, style; like it was a writing exercise. Okay, Egan is a talented writer. I'm impressed. If you appreciate fine writing, this is your thing.

It's just not my thing. It might've been, if the story worked for me, but it didn't. Far too much That's-Not-How-It-Works, and too few relatable characters. I realize that wanting to care about characters is a defect in both my personality and intelligence; it is not a flaw I am able to fix. I also realize that my T-N-H-I-W quirk is inconsistent and even hypocritical, since I happily read about hyperintelligent spiders and TV-devouring Murderbots and magical unicorns. Why did I dwell on it so much in this book? Three aspects, I think.

First, that's not how memory works. Seriously, this is kindergarten neuroscience. Memory is not a recorder, you can't simply hoover up forgotten memories. The book gets this so fundamentally wrong, and it's such an important part of the plot, that I could not suspend disbelief. (Also, human behavior and relationships are quantifiable—an important subplot—but not without involving astronomical, ridiculously-impossible numbers of variables.)

Second, okay, let's pretend it were possible to upload memories to the cloud: who would do so? Who among us has no secrets? No truly private memories, fantasies, desires, misdeeds, embarrassments, or even quiet personal/ prides? Egan draws parallels to privacy loss in the social media age, trading your surf habits for free music, but that's not even close to comparable.

Finally... fine, let's go with it all. You can retrieve and net-share all your memories, and you do. Egan doesn't even follow through with the really interesting ramifications of such a development. Like, all the asymmetries! What do megacorporations and governments do with all that? How will it be used to further oppress disadvantaged peoples? How will banks authenticate now that the entire world knows your password, favorite pet's name, and Dream Vacation? Everyone you meet, for the rest of your life, you now need to wonder: what do they know about me? And, beautiful people: even if they themselves haven't uploaded their memories, some of their circle will have. Are there no stalkers in this world? What are the unexpected consequences? What are the right questions to ponder? That's what makes good SF.

On the positive side, though, we could learn what happened to our favorite Van Halen concert t-shirt. So it really is a difficult trade-off.

Bah. Enough. You get my point. But back to the characters: the vast majority were shallow, self-absorbed, banal. The penultimate chapter, that was good: depth, complexity. A few other snippets of light throughout the book: again, Egan is clearly very smart and compassionate, so I assume that she deliberately chose to write about vapid people. Which, again, is not my thing.

This was extremely good. But also extremely pretentious. I feel like you'd need to be in a certain mood to enjoy this book. However it reminds me of some of my favorites: Rings of Saturn and Winesburg, Ohio if they had been combined.

4.5 rounded down.

Absolutely up my alley. Clearly I should have been reading Jennifer Egan's work all along.
I loved the interconnected characters telling interconnected stories and I loved the unusual format.

The half star off comes from the less-than-ideal description of a (possibly, but never confirmed) trans character. Trans women didn't “use to be men.” They are women who have been mistakenly raised as men. In this day and age (let alone in, what was it, the 2030s? that Gregory's portion of the novel was set in) it should be pretty well known that it's inaccurate and offensive to describe trans women that way.

Alas, authors, like all humans, are fallible creatures. But honestly, this should have been caught by a sensitivity read before it went to print.

This is a complex novel that centers around the idea that in the near future, people are able to upload their consciousness to the cloud where other people can have access to it. The book starts with Bix Bouton, the tech guru who invented the technology to do this, attending a salon-like party incognito and worrying that he is all out of great ideas. Going “incognito”/posing as someone you're not vs. authenticity is a theme in this world. There is a significant group of people, “eluders,” who are resistant to the idea of granting the public access to their private lives. They maintain a “shell” online, an account that posts and interacts to give the illusion that a real person is behind it for as long as possible, while the real person escapes to somewhere inaccessible. There are also people who work to facilitate “eluding,” a kind of technological resistance movement. There is also a character who, from a young age, demands authenticity from the people around him, and as an adult creates scenes in public to elicit “authentic” reactions from bystanders.

Chapters in The Candy House are written in different styles; some are straightforward third person omniscient narration, some are epistolary (email style), some are what turns out to be first person-writing-a-guidebook style. The novel tends to move from one character to another without going back much. Although it starts with Bix Bouton's worries about his ability to come up with great ideas and maintain his mover-and-shaker status, once it moves on from him it doesn't go back until near the end. I found that a bit frustrating, because once I invested in a character I wanted more development of their story. That frustration was somewhat tempered by the fact that the characters are interconnected–they are children, spouses, friends or acquaintances of someone you've already met, so you are getting development of those stories, but it's on the periphery.
At times it felt like a loosely connected series of short stories or novellas on a theme rather than a novel, though.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of my all time favorite books, so I was elated to receive an advance copy of its companion novel/sequel The Candy House.

Like Goon Squad, the novel is composed of several interrelated stories, with the same characters popping up or at least referenced over and over again. Writing a novel with such a complex web of character relationships might come across as forced, but I really like it. Is it necessary for some minor character to be the second cousin of the ex-roommate of the wife of the previous story's protagonist? No. But is it fun? Absolutely.

The theme of this book, as much as there is one, is big tech. The specific innovation at the center of this story involves the digitization of one's memories. That's not particularly inventive, but Egan also created a faction dedicated to fighting against this tech, which I thought was a fresh approach. In my lifetime, backlash to big tech has started to snowball, but much of it still relies on social media campaigns and individual action, such as #deleteFacebook. As Silicon Valley's influence over society continues to grow, I think that we may see more organized forms of resistance and backlash and Egan will have been proven prescient.

The book's title is an apt metaphor for the tech world and one that I hadn't considered before. It's a reference to the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale as well as a poetic, if much more sinister, spin on the rather trite saying around that “if a product is free, you are the product.” You come to the candy house to eat, but end up being eaten.

Ultimately, though, the book is all about people, and big tech is just a tool to learn more about them. I love that we get to see these characters at all different points of their lives. I think that Egan's particular genius is in understanding the vast range potential that each person holds, and making full use of that in her writing. A lesser author would take a talented and popular kid and have him grow into a talented and popular adult. Egan can take that same kid and show him first excelling on the Little League field, then in middle age as a high-strung lawyer with all the markings of success but whose life is teetering on the brink, then as a divorced and impoverished recovering addict. And at each stage, she's able to make the reader feel for the character.

I very much enjoyed this book, and I would quickly recommend it to anyone, but especially those who liked A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Clearly Jennifer Egan is not for me. She's a great writer, and for the first half of the book I enjoyed getting to know her characters, but as soon as I got comfortable in one perspective, she shifted to another. And then the actual focus of the plot somehow went from own-your-unconscious to an intricate game of connections across families and time. And it started to feel like a puzzle exercise, but without any payoff?

A really hard read.

There are so many characters involved that it is impossible to understand what is going on.

Essential,y a book of short stories of which two are interesting.

Avoid.