As Jennifer Egan arrives at our table, I am losing a battle with technology. The writer is known for her searing, often prescient, imaginings of how the digital realm shapes humanity, and her new novel features characters uploading their consciousness into a slick cube and sharing their memories with the public collective. I, meanwhile, am struggling to press record on my new phone.
Egan is immediately sympathetic. She wrote The Candy House outside in her Brooklyn garden during the rigours of a New York pandemic winter, until “my computer froze literally . . . It was never the same.” The book is a sequel of sorts to A Visit from the Goon Squad, the 2011 Pulitzer-winning bestseller, which catapulted her from widely respected novelist to the suddenly-everyone-is-reading-her-on-the-train variety.
