“Bix Bouton, a tech billionaire, develops Own Your Unconscious, a memory-externalization technology. The novel runs thirteen interlinked chapters across the next decades of the broader Visit-from-the-Goon-Squad universe.”
What's in this book
- Jennifer Egan's 2022 sixth novel — a tech billionaire develops memory-externalization technology
- Structural sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010, Pulitzer)
- 352 pages of thirteen interlinked chapters with form-experimentation across multiple chapter types
- Returns Sasha, Bennie, Scotty Hausmann, and the broader Goon Squad ensemble in the back third
- Nicole Lewis / Michael Boatman / Thomas Sadoski / Sutton Foster ensemble audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Circle, Klara and the Sun, and contemporary American literary fiction about technology
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The Candy House is Jennifer Egan's 2022 sixth novel, the structural sequel to her Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and one of the canonical contemporary American literary novels about contemporary digital technology. The structural premise is Bix Bouton, a Manhattan tech billionaire who built Mandala (the fictional analogue to Facebook-and-Meta), developing Own Your Unconscious — a technology that lets users externalize and share their memories. The novel runs thirteen interlinked chapters across the next decades of the broader Visit-from-the-Goon-Squad universe (the Sasha and Bennie and Scotty Hausmann characters from the prior novel return as characters in the back third of The Candy House; the broader ensemble of the prior novel reappears across multiple chapters). The novel's structural conceit lets Egan return to the form-experimentation she pioneered in A Visit from the Goon Squad (the PowerPoint chapter in the prior novel; the Wired-magazine-essay chapter in The Candy House; the Twitter-feed-rendered-as-prose chapter; the corporate-memo chapter).
Egan's structural method is the patient chapter-rotation construction across the thirteen interlinked stories, with the broader Bix-and-Mandala technology-development arc providing the structural setting and the multiple individual chapter-protagonists providing the structural emotional engines. The novel reads in the patient form-experimentation register Egan has been refining across the broader catalog (Look at Me 2001, The Keep 2006, Manhattan Beach 2017) and that distinguishes The Candy House from the broader contemporary American literary fiction tradition on contemporary digital technology. The Bix Bouton chapters across the front and middle of the novel carry the structural argument the broader novel makes about how the operational mechanics of contemporary American technology development have produced specific kinds of changes to the structure of consciousness and the broader Goon-Squad-universe-characters chapters in the back third deliver the structural emotional payoff that returns readers of the prior novel to the broader extended-universe project.
Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad, and for fans of Egan's broader catalog. Read A Visit from the Goon Squad first for the structurally connected universe. Compare to The Circle (Dave Eggers), Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro), and contemporary American literary fiction about consciousness and technology. The Nicole Lewis / Michael Boatman / Thomas Sadoski / Sutton Foster ensemble audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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