Publishers Weekly
★ 01/17/2022
Egan returns to the fertile territory and characters of A Visit from the Goon Squad with an electrifying and shape-shifting story that one-ups its Pulitzer-winning predecessor. I’ll see your PowerPoint chapter, Egan seems to say, and raise you a chapter in tweets, and another in emails and texts. In the near future, a platform called Own Your Unconscious allows memories to be uploaded to the cloud and accessed by anyone. “Counters” seek to ferret out “proxies” that help hide “eluders” who resist merging their “gray grabs” to the collective in order to leave their online personae behind. Not everyone sees this as panacea, and a countermovement called Mondrian arises. Appearances from music producer Bennie Salazar, his mentor Lou Kline, and their lovers and children provide sharp pleasures for Goon Squad fans, and Egan cleverly echoes the ambitious, savvy marketing schemes of real-world tech barons with Own Your Unconscious. It casts its spell on Bennie, whose punk rock days with the Flaming Dildos are long past: “Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them,” he writes in an email. Twisting through myriad points of view, narrative styles, and divergent voices, Egan proves herself as perceptive an interpreter of the necessity of human connection as ever, and her vision is as irresistible as the tech she describes. This is Egan’s best yet. Agent: Binky Urban, ICM Partners. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Praise for The Candy House
“The novel — with its prismatic plotting and ever-shifting chorus of seekers, kooks, and visionaries — feels less like a house than a honeycomb full of fantastical rooms, each one alive and thrumming with bright, weird humanity.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
"The Candy House is really an incredible feat... astonishing, even a little bewildering! Jenny is shockingly underrated. She should have the kind of fawning sycophants that dudes like Franzen and Denis Johnson do. Let the cult begin herewith!"
—James Hannaham, New York Times Book Review
“This is minimalist maximalism. It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century triple-decker novel onto a flash drive... Egan goes all in on the power of storytelling and of fiction.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“A brilliant demonstration of the unquantifiable pleasures of great fiction.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Radiant... an exhilarating delight...Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, in which what happened depends on who’s telling the story.”
—Laura Miller, Slate
“You don't have to read A Visit From the Goon Squad to love this sibling novel to Egan's stellar hit... complex and intimate.”
—Good Housekeeping
“May be the smartest novel you read all year... Fiction at its best... gets at our secret selves in ways the internet can’t... Egan’s audacity is welcome.”
—Mark Athitakis, USA Today
“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.”
—Allison Arieff, The San Francisco Chronicle
“A fast-paced polyvoiced romp thru America in the grip of a sinister tech that allows others into your mind. EEK!”
—Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments
APRIL 2022 - AudioFile
The ensemble performance of this novel is exceptional. Michael Boatman narrates the opening chapter at the right pace with the right intonation. He captures the interior life of the enigmatic Bix Boughton, a social media genius who invents the world-altering technology “Own Your Unconscious,” which is crucial to the plot. Alex Allwine delivers a haunting automaton-like second-person narration of the chapter titled “Lulu the Spy, 2032,” Tyra Lynne Barr emulates the chirpy sound of 13-year-old Molly in “The Perimeter After-Molly,” and Dan Bittner supplies sharply insightful tone as Ames, whose life story ends this imaginative tour de force. The time-traveling chapters reprise some of the characters from Egan’s award-winning A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, but this novel has a wider timeframe, a greater trajectory, and a more complex plot. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-12-24
Egan revisits some characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) and their children to continue her exploration of what fiction can be and do in the 21st century.
As Manhattan Beach (2017) showed, Egan is perfectly capable of writing a satisfying traditional novel, but she really dazzles when she turns her formidable gifts to examining the changes to society and individuals wrought by the internet and social media. One of those instruments of change is Bix, an NYU classmate of Sasha in Goon Squad but here a vastly rich social media magnate who, in 2016, makes the next leap in the “Self-Surveillance Era” by creating, first, Own Your Unconscious, which allows people to externalize their consciousness on a cube, and then Collective Consciousness, which offers the option of “uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online ‘collective,’ ” thereby gaining access to “the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone, living or dead, who had done the same.” Egan explores the impact of this unnervingly plausible innovation with her habitual panache, ranging from her characters’ pre-internet youths to the 2030s. While there are “eluders” like Bix’s son, Gregory, who refuse to share their private thoughts with strangers, many are seduced by the convenience and power of this collective tool. The most stylistically audacious chapter shows us the scarily logical next step; it reproduces the instructions of a “weevil” implanted in the brain of Lulu, daughter of morally compromised Goon Squad publicist Dolly, now a spy married to “a visionary in the realm of national security.” As she did in in Goon Squad’s PowerPoint chapter, Egan doles out information in small bites that accumulate to demonstrate the novel’s time-honored strengths: richly complicated characters and compelling narratives. The final chapter rolls back to 1991 to movingly affirm the limits of floods of undigested information and the ability of fiction, only fiction, to “roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.”
A thrilling, endlessly stimulating work that demands to be read and reread.
