The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

Published by Scribner on April 5, 2022

The Candy House is a novel of characters, some of whom first appeared in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan develops the characters and lets them loose to do as they please. Their stories never quite cohere into a plot but telling a story with a conventional plot does not appear to have been Jennifer Egan’s intent. Yet she acknowledges that “without a story, it’s all just information.” And so she tells stories, lots and lots of them.

The novel jumps around in time. Much of it takes place in the immediate future, although the fictional present includes technology that does not exist in our temporal reality. Backstories tend to date back to the 1990s with glimpses of memories formed in the 1960s. Stories also extend into the mid-2030s.

Egan uses her characters to explore themes of identity, affinity, authenticity, privacy, and the price of freedom. She primarily raises those concerns with technology that Bix Bouton invented in 2016. Own Your Unconscious allows people to externalize their consciousness to a Mandala Cube and revisit their memories. An advance in that technology soon allows memories to be uploaded anonymously to a Collective Consciousness (sort of a digital cloud for memories).

Collective memories are available to everyone who wants them. There is, of course, nothing anonymous about memory, as faces of individuals performing good or bad deeds are recognizable to those who dip into the collective. The technology allows crimes to be solved and reduces some versions of evil, but it also creates a new form of surveillance society and sparks a higher level of social paranoia.

Part of the story focuses on the idea of a vacant identity — an identity established on the internet and later abandoned, only to be reinhabited by a proxy (typically a bot) that uses clues to the originator’s personality to impersonate the creator. Some people vacate those identities to escape from a society based on data. The escapees are known as “eluders” because they strive to remain invisible to the digital world.

Since there is no overriding plot, readers might get of sense of whether The Candy House is their kind of book by learning something about the characters. There are too many to mention, but some stand out more than others.

A music producer and an anthropologist named Miranda Kline had two daughters. Miranda abandoned her daughters for a few years to study the “affinities” that make people like and trust each other. She developed “formulas for predicting human inclinations.” Miranda studied a closed, isolated society. She didn’t think her predictive formulas would work in a large society because people would be unwilling to supply all of the information that the formulas require. She didn’t anticipate the willingness of individuals to abandon their privacy, to live their lives in the spotlight of social media. (The potential consequence of documenting your life on social media is another of the novel’s themes.) A few years after Bix Bouton commercialized her ideas, a displeased Miranda eluded.

Rebecca Amari is obsessed with authenticity. So is Alfred Hollander. Alfred made a long, tedious documentary about geese because he viewed animal behavior as authentic. His next project involved screaming whenever he believed people were being phony to provoke authentic responses. Rebecca takes a more scholarly approach, but she is worried that any study of authenticity will become so wrapped up in “phony academic bullshit” that it will not attain the authenticity she seeks to understand.

Alfred’s brother Ames has a mysterious connection to the military. His brother Miles messed up his life in various ways before ending up in rehab and becoming a drug counselor. His cousin Sasha had a compulsion to steal before turning her life around and made a career by recycling trash into art. Visiting Sasha on impulse only accentuates Miles’ sense of failure. Miles describes his story as one of redemption because redemption stories have “narrative power.” Lucky for Miles, “America loves a sinner,” so he decides to enter politics.

Sasha’s husband Drew, a surgeon, has his own demons, living the memory of a friend’s drowning for which he holds himself responsible. Bix was in their company until they entered the river. Sasha and Drew’s son Lincoln is a counter. His world is about numbers, statistics, percentages. His work involves the detection of proxies posing as humans in social media. Outside of that realm, he is socially awkward. Lincoln is representative of individuals who think humans are less complicated when they are represented as data. One of the novel’s themes is the difference between impressionists and empiricists, the difference between those who “tend toward the romantic” and those who tend toward scientific detachment. One of the novel’s questions is whether it is possible for someone to be both at the same time.

A chapter narrated by Molly offers a funny take on the importance that teen girls place on being “in” with the right person, leading to a desperate jockeying for social status. Another chapter seems to be part of a future instruction manual for infiltrating and gathering intelligence about violent men. A chapter written as text messages became a bit wearying to read.

So that’s what The Candy House is. Individual stories, loosely bound by connections in the ways we are all connected — by family, acquaintance, interests, memories, and media. A lot happens during the course of the novel, including interesting events: an attempt to commit suicide by jumping from a hot air balloon; a potentially violent quarrel between neighbors about whether a fence post has been moved. Still, readers are unlikely to become attached to any character because, their stories having been told, the novel moves on to someone else. They might reappear in a memory or be mentioned as the relative of another character, but the novel is frustrating in its failure to follow the full lives of its most interesting characters. Rebecca Amari seems to be a central character before she becomes lost in the crowd. Bix Bouton is frequently mentioned but not often seen, although his son Gregory makes a late appearance. We learn what happened to Miranda but we don’t see it happen. Yet that’s life, and that might be Egan’s point. We drift in and out of each other’s lives. We might hear about someone we used to know, we might remember them, we might look them up on social media, but after our stories diverge, they might never rejoin. (On the other hand, I was happy to see the mystery of Ames’ military career resolved in the last chapter.)

Like characters, intriguing concepts (such as “vacant identities” and “proxies”) are introduced early in the story before they all but disappear. Other themes, including the perils of collective consciousness, show up more consistently. Gregory offers the most useful take in that regard. Gregory rejected his father’s Own Your Consciousness, viewing it as an existential threat to fiction. Gregory wants to be a writer but can’t finish his book after Bix dies. A visit in the 2030s with his former writing teacher leads to an epiphany. Gregory discovers that we don’t need technology to create a collective consciousness. Fiction does that by letting readers “roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.” Writers have the vision to see “a galaxy of human lives,” each “propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible,” a collective that hurtles toward the writer’s curiosity, each star in the galaxy an individual story for the writer to tell.

That might be Egan’s purpose — the selection of unique stars in the galaxy of human lives, showing how the characters or their stories relate to each other. Some of the stories are so evocative that may trigger, or become embedded within, the reader’s own memories. The book ends with a wonderful scene in which a kid playing baseball is confident that, while he has never hit a pitch in his life, each failure is an explainable aberration from the norm in which he always hits a home run. The kid’s story could be any story of self-delusion or self-confidence, the story of people who don’t let the past stop them from trying. It also reminds the reader that successes, like failures, are transitory; that there are always new challenges ahead; that past performance is no guarantee of future success or failure. The lesson I took from The Candy House is that the future keeps coming, that every person has a different future and an infinite number of potential futures, and that we shouldn’t be lost to the possibility of writing our own story.

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