Jennifer Egan tends to write two sorts of novels – mind-bogglingly clever books about metaphysics, such as her 2011 Pulitzer-winner A Visit from the Goon Squad, or straightforward, deliciously enjoyable epics, such as her most recent historical novel, 2017’s Manhattan Beach. The Candy House falls into the former category; indeed, it’s a loose sequel to Goon Squad, sharing many of its characters and the same evasive structure: both are arranged as a series of loosely connected short stories. Yet where that novel explored ideas about time and pop music, The Candy House probes the invasive omnipotence of the digital sphere and is largely set in a terrifyingly plausible near future.
Egan’s brave new world is the dream child of Bix Bouton, a visionary who essentially resembles a black Mark Zuckerberg, and whose desire to see “everyone rise together in a new metaphysical sphere” has led to the creation of an online environment based on anthropological research into predictive behaviour (although Egan doesn’t explain how his creation differs from the internet as we know it). His company Mandala’s big game changer, however, is Own Your Unconscious, a wardrobe-sized piece of tech that allows users to access their memories, and, if they then upload them to the Mandala Cube, those of everyone else who has done the same.
The temptation to poke about in other people’s lives under the guise of greater connectivity proves too much for pretty much everyone, and with memories externalised for nearly all to see, some good things happen: sex abusers, for instance, suddenly become a thing of the past. Over time, however, Bix’s digital breakthrough spawns a resistance – “eluders”, who hire online “proxy” versions of themselves so that they can live a private life outside this Faustian globalised consciousness, safe from the “counters”, who comb the collective cube for data to sell on to companies to monetise.
The Candy House, which takes its title from the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel is, however, no sabre-tooth savaging of corporate big tech in the way of, say, Dave Eggers’s recent novel The Every. Egan doesn’t waste too much time imagining the dystopian impact of faceless conglomerates manipulating the digital mass mind to its own ends, and whenever she does, her purpose is invariably for absurd comic effect. One drolly funny skit features Lincoln, a particularly dedicated “counter”, who spends most of his time trying to calculate the statistical likelihood of a co-worker falling in love with him. Another satirises the work of an entertainment company, SweetSpot Networks, whose employees comb movies for every possible stock element, and convert them into algebraic equations for mass market stories in which redemption for the protagonist is guaranteed.
Instead, Egan is more interested in the ways the various yearnings and sorrows of her deftly characterised cast repeatedly come up against the lived reality of Bix’s supposed digital utopia. Many of her stories resemble tightly contained, semi-social-realist dramas featuring essentially lonely characters striving for moments of connection or redemption, moments that, for all the Cube’s beguiling promise of frictionless interconnectivity, remain stubbornly out of reach.
Roxy, a heroin addict (drugs, Egan suggests throughout, are almost analogous to the internet in the way they feed the primal craving to escape reality or seek out a new one), plugs herself into the Cube to get closer to her distant father, Lou, a record-label mogul familiar to Goon Squad readers, only to discover that when she was younger, he didn’t really want her around. Ted hopes that by accessing the memory of seeing a college friend drown in the Hudson river, he can rid himself of the trauma, only to realise memory is far too canny to be so easily contained. Instead, the only way to escape it in the Cube would be to obliterate all his memories entirely – in other words, “to erase the life I’d built and I can’t. I love it all too much.”
Egan’s novel is a display of virtuosic storytelling – one story is a series of second-person instructions delivered from an implant inside the head of a female spy during a mission in 2032. Still, for all its richly realised characters and restless probing intelligence, it remains easier to admire than love. The reader sometimes feels a bit like Hansel and Gretel, following breadcrumbs through the forest in the hope of reaching somewhere safe and solid. Indeed, there are several moments in the novel that question the purpose and future of fiction itself, in a digital future in which virtual world-hopping will be the norm and which seems predicated on reducing pretty much everything, including stories, to a metric.
But in its immersion in the lives of strangers and effervescent resistance to easy categorisation, The Candy House mounts a dazzling defence. “I see now that the place I’ve been yearning for is my own imagination,” says Lulu. “It was with me before and will be always. It’s in every children’s book.”
The Candy House is published by Corsair at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
