Do you know what I hate? Besides grocery store “bagels”? I hate shit on the internet that goes like this: “Want to feel old? [Pop culture thing] came out [XX] years ago!”
It doesn’t make me feel old at all. The only thing that makes me feel old is tweaking my back by simply moving wrong, and really that just makes me feel like I should work out. Anyway, what these things really make me feel is a time warp.
Here’s what I mean. A few days before its release, I found out there was a new Jennifer Egan novel and that it was a sequel, sort of, to her Pultizer-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad. I couldn’t really remember what happens in that book or who it happens to, only that I loved it, so I was alarmed by how little I remembered about a book I supposedly love. Then I said out loud, “It was published in 2010, that’s not even that long ago!”
Reader, I don’t know how strong your math skills are, but that’s 12 years ago. A whole decade and a fifth. I’ve lived in five cities since 2010!
So what my brain is doing, I guess, is compressing most of my adulthood. I don’t care for that at all, so if you have any tips for… I don’t know, improving your memory or scrapbooking or something, you know where to reach me.
— Ashley
let me tell you about these books
Do authors hate to be categorized as much as musicians do? I have no idea, but I’ve never seen one elude categorization as Egan does in these two… books. Yeah, it says “a novel” right on the Goon Squad cover, but the honest (and completely unsuitable for a cover) tag would be this lede from a New York Times review:
Jennifer Egan’s 2010 “A Visit From the Goon Squad” was, depending whom you asked, a novel, or a collection, or a story cycle. But you could also call it a concept album.
The Candy House fits the same non-mold and doubles down by being not-quite-a-sequel. Calling something a sequel suggests that there’s a plot to forward. What’s happening in The Candy House is the passing of time.
The complex web of characters Egan wove in Goon Squad remains intact, but she’s pulling different threads this time. Minor actors, most of whom were kids in the first book, are the main players now. At the center — or as close to center as anyone can be — is Bix Bouton, who makes a brief appearance in Goon Squad as a main character’s roommate’s internet-obsessed boyfriend in the early ‘90s. In The Candy House, it’s the 2020s and 2030s and he’s a tech demigod who created a way to upload your consciousness to an archive and share your memories with anyone who cares to look.
This future is not meant to be a dystopia, but as far as too-close-for-comfort dystopian premises go, this is an excellent one. Consciousness-sharing in this world is as commonplace as sharing your thoughts and photos on Facebook and Twitter in the real world. And in this fictional world where everyone is extremely online, some people make their living as “counters,” keeping track of whose online identities are real and who left behind a shell to be filled by a “hermit crab” pretending to be them. The people who succeed in disappearing are the “eluders,” and Chris Salazar — son of Bennie Salazar, the punk-turned-record-exec at the heart of much of Goon Squad — heads up the secretive company that helps them do it.
All other strands lead back to these at-odds people and ideals, in a straight line or through a knot. It’s incredible as a standalone work but paired with Goon Squad, it’s stunning world-building. We usually reserve that term for fantasy and sci-fi, and this is a little different. World-building in those genres generally refers to geography and biology. World-building in the Goon Squad - Candy House is all about interpersonal connections. The music industry of the former and tech industry of the latter aren’t the focus of the stories, just the foundation for them.
What The Candy House is really obsessed with is memory and by extension connection and the passing of time. (Probably unintentional, but what a move, when peak enjoyment of the thing you wrote relies on the reader’s ability to remember characters and their lives from 12 years ago.) Its characters look into each others’ pasts, trying to understand each other, or upload their own and look at pivotal moments for answers. Meanwhile, others are going to great lengths to opt-out entirely. All the while they’re dealing with the repercussions of the people who came before them — the Goon Squad parents, bosses, aunts, uncles, spouses, and friends who made messes and tried their best before anyone even had an iPhone.
Does that make you feel old? If these people don’t feel old they’re all definitely wrestling with mortality, cultural relevance, and legacy. I don’t know if there’s a meaningful difference between “feeling old” and fearing that you’ll be gone without a trace. Probably not.
So would you do it? Upload your consciousness? Allow others to access everything you’ve ever seen, done, and thought? You can do the first thing and not the second — externalizing your memories for your eyes only — but there are fictional and real people alike who would say even that’s going too far. I’d probably do it for me and me only, if I’m being honest. I can’t resist that candy house.
There’s mention in the book that people are connecting their consciousness to the "cubes” as they die in an attempt to give those left behind a look at what’s next. The answer, repeatedly, is nothing. Cut to black. And that’s sort of what Egan does at the end, even as it feels like there’s more of this world to be had. It all kind of just ends, and I wish it wouldn’t.