A visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer-winning rock’n’roll novel, felt like the beginning of something. It was a tale as gimmicky and restless as the smartphone era threatened to be. One chapter was written entirely in PowerPoint slides; another in textspeak (“if thr r children, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?”). The cast was a neon collision of kleptomaniacs, philanderers, It girls, autocrats and a guitar band called the Flaming Dildos. And the plot ricocheted like a browsing-addled brain. But if A Visit from the Goon Squad carried the promise of a grand wave of tech-inflected fiction, that literary trend never quite materialised. In an era of screen-curated selfhood, autofiction surged instead.
A dozen years on, and Egan’s cult novel now feels like the end of something, a kind of techno-optimist elegy: a study in time’s “incremental deflations”, and the loneliness of hyper-connectivity. It’s this sense of paradoxical isolation that Egan revisits in her new book. The Candy House is less a sequel to Goon Squad than a fraternal twin. Minor characters are thrust into the thick of things; formerly major characters make Hitchcockian cameos. As befits its title, The Candy House is a novel of Easter eggs – of hidden in-joke treats. It begs to be read alongside its more extroverted sibling, and to consider, in the space between them, the deflations – incremental and otherwise – of the last decade.
Egan begins on the sharp edge of an epiphany. Bix Bouton is a stony-faced “tech demigod”, the founder of social media mega-entity Mandala. By day, he strides about in his trademark leather fedora – his version of Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirt – busy “ubiquitising” his empire. By night, he dons a disguise and sneaks into a discussion group of Columbia University postgrads. For Bix is bereft of ideas. When he looks to the horizon of his mental landscape – the place where inspiration waits – there is nothing.
These night-time debates will vanquish Bix’s great white emptiness. In their wake, he will create a household gadget that allows a human mind to be copied (a kind of cortical back-up drive), and a subscription-only spiritus mundi. Users who agree to upload their brains will gain access to the anonymised content of every other user, living or dead; a great “churning gyre” of memory and thought. Wondering about the identity of a beautiful stranger, the grisly truth of a murder, or the fate of a long-lost frenemy? Just run a face-match on the CollectiveConsciousness™. Who could resist the lure of a tangible, search-optimised past? “The collective is like gravity,” Egan writes, “almost no one can withstand it.”
Against this backdrop of escalating disclosure – what Egan calls the “Self-Surveillance Era” – The Candy House tells stories of searching. A recovering heroin addict considers the redemptive possibility of Dungeons and Dragons. A lovesick programmer collects trinkets, like a human bowerbird, in the hope they’ll wordlessly convey his affection. A film-maker begins shrieking on the subway, to jolt his fellow commuters into a moment of pure sincerity. A former spy worries that her thoughts are no longer her own. Here, once again, is the novel as network: each component tale – each node – can be traced back to that New York apartment full of books and big talk, where Bix is waiting for his lightbulb moment. Connectivity is more than Egan’s theme, it’s her modus operandi.
But for all Egan’s form-elasticity – her inventive peacocking, tech speculation and bricolage – the tales that work best in The Candy House are the least flamboyant. What felt playful in Goon Squad now feels a little stale: a sustained passage of back-and-forth emails is too conveniently expository; a treatise on spycraft is an on-the-nose wallop (“As Americans we prize human rights above all else and cannot sanction their violation. When someone threatens our rights, however, a wider leeway becomes necessary”).
Underneath all the glitz and frippery, there is something fundamentally old-fashioned about The Candy House. Egan takes her title from Hansel and Gretel, and the wicked witch’s gingerbread trap. It’s a handy metaphor for the dopamine sugar-rush of social media, and the bargains we too willingly strike to participate in online life (“Never trust a candy house!”). But the most ardent searchers in this book are grown children – the sons and daughters of absent baby boomer parents. “An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favour of invention, hope,” one bereft daughter explains, as she reconstructs a catalytic night in her father’s life, “and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault.” So many Hansels and Gretels, wandering alone in the wilderness with their desperate hunger.
It’s this insatiable – and unsatiable – yearning that The Candy House draws out so tenderly, as those children tell their feckless parents’ stories as a way to find their own, scour the great aggregate brain for signs they were loved, and reanimate a heyday they never lived. This is a novel of new tech and old wounds.
The near-future America Egan conjures is numbed and festering: a country full of opioid dreamers and pill mills. But the most irresistible and dangerous drug of them all – the ultimate brain-rotting candy – is nostalgia, even the sly, ironic kind that powers our dreary cycle of reboots and remakes. “Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will,” an ageing rock star muses, “through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.” How hard it is to beat on, this novel shows, when we’re borne back ceaselessly into the past.
• The Candy House is published by Corsair (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
