A Review of Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House”
Another Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan is one of those writers who may not exactly be a household name but is one who has developed a cult following and has made a tremendous mark on the American literary world. Famously, her 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the Pulitzer Prize (awards don’t get too much bigger than that) and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her 2017 follow-up, Manhattan Beach, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her first novel, The Invisible Circus, was turned into a movie. Thus, in some circles, Egan is quite famous. She’s at a point where if she didn’t turn in another novel or short story collection, her body of work would still be quite strong. This brings me to her latest novel (or is it a story collection?), The Candy House. The book shares a striking similarity to another novel being released on April 5, 2022: Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility. Both books are quasi-sequels: in Egan’s case, several characters from Goon Squad reappear in The Candy House. Both books are set in the past, present, and future (though it’s the far future in Mandel’s case). And both books are really interconnected stories fused into novel-length works.
The Candy House is interesting because, while looking up some facts about Egan’s accomplishments on Wikipedia, I learned that she once dated Steve Jobs. That’s an important detail because a Jobs-like character looms large over The Candy House. Though we only meet him as a major character in the first chapter, the book’s central character is a Black man named Bix Bouton, who is a tech entrepreneur who, in the year 2010, develops a type of social media called Own Your Unconscious that allows people to retrieve their own hidden memories and, eventually as the technology develops, share them with other people in exchange for the memories of others. The resulting chapters are accounts of other characters who are linked to a character usually from the preceding chapter and are told either from the first-person singular point of view or the more omnipresent third-person narrative. In keeping with the style of Goon Squad, whose most memorable trait is that one chapter was told in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, Egan tries to capture lightning in a bottle by repeating the same sort of trick not once, but twice: one chapter is written in the style of a spy training manual, and another consists solely of emails between a whole chain of people.
But whereas A Visit from the Goon Squad was a five-star read that was fresh and original when it was first released, The Candy House fails to entirely recapture that novel’s magic — though it does remain fun (in its own way) and somewhat engrossing read, as much as it is something of a failure. There are a few reasons it doesn’t reach Goon Squad’s storied heights. I don’t know about you, but I first read Goon Squad when it came out 12 years ago. Thus, it’s hard to remember certain characters from that book when one has read it some time ago, as I have. While, like Sea of Tranquility, you can read The Candy House without having to have read the book that preceded it, it probably helps to have read the earlier book recently if you want to spot all the references to it.
Another issue is that Egan is shooting fish in a barrel here: The Candy House seems to be about the dangers of social media and technology in general, with the author fearing that fiction — which she claims at the end of the novel is the one true way to have unfettered access to the memories of other (not real) people — is dying off thanks to the likes of Twitter and Facebook. That is, people want to tweet more than they want to read books. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have to read a book to discover that the Internet is a wonky place controlled by giant corporations who want access to your personal data, soul, and firstborn. To that end, The Candy House feels pointless. What’s more, the middle section of this book is the strongest part of the novel. I found that I wasn’t really interested in Bouton’s backstory at the start of this volume and those of the people he’s connected by a thread to. So, the first quarter of the book is hard to get into and some readers may find they’re skimming until they get to something interesting. Conversely, by the novel’s end, the characters really pile on and things spiral a bit out of control.
It’s in that middle third or so, once we get over the hump of being reintroduced to most of the Goon Squad characters (at least, as far as I can remember), that The Candy House finds its footing. The tales of junkies who use Own Your Unconscious are thrilling and there’s an interesting analogy that’s made between technology and addictive drugs (though that’s again an easy one to make). I found that the middle of the book really captured the charm and interest of Goon Squad with memorable characters and precise writing, only for that to be squandered as one gets deeper into the book and it delves into the idea of technology being used for government surveillance — which, in Egan’s hands, comes off as being a little bit silly. (Weevils, anyone?) Ultimately, The Candy House is uneven and only comes about halfway to matching A Visit from the Goon Squad’s brilliance. One wonders why she bothered to try. Like Blade Runner, some things are best left alone. All in all, The Candy House is an unnecessary sequel that is oblivious to its obviousness and doesn’t offer the quality that one would expect from a writer of Egan’s stature. I was disappointed by this mediocre read. All in all, this book is not what one would expect from such a major league writer and all I can do is suggest that if you read only one sequel that comes out in early April that you might want to make it Sea of Tranquility (though that book isn’t perfect, either). The Candy House wants to be the very important book about social media that the world needs right now; it comes across as just another sequel that we didn’t need at all. All I can say is, what a way to devalue the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. It’s a crying shame.
Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House will be published by Scribner on April 5, 2022.
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You may also be interested in the following review: Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
