The Candy House opens in New York City with Bix Bouton, a character we only glimpsed briefly in Goon Squad. With many characters re-appearing and a timeline of events that follows on from the previous book, this rich read becomes even more rewarding when you can connect the dots between the two. Described as a ‘sibling novel’ to Goon Squad, The Candy House stands on its own, but I would recommend giving yourself the pleasure of reading (or re-reading) Goon Squad first.

Taking the same patchwork form as Egan’s previous novel, each chapter in The Candy House is told from the perspective of a different character, creating an intersecting narrative that spans decades.

Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning, genre-bending A Visit from the Goon Squad. A woman famous for her viral online posts has her real life upended when her sister's baby is born severely ill.This is it. If you like this, read: No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury, 2021, $26.95, buy here, borrow here), a Booker Prize-shortlisted novel which mimics 'the infinite scroll' of a social media feed. She has a knack for making things look effortless - like taking candy from a baby. Her riposte is to render these impossibly vast networks through the machine of fiction, though she handles her big ideas with a light touch. Yet, is this not how discourse often exists in the depthless digital world? Egan is cognisant of the way social media has reshaped the essence of story, reducing it to a series of brief snapshots that vanish after a day. It is a utopian vision laced with irony, given what one knows of today's toxic online spaces, but this is never really explored. Issues such as race are glanced at, then abandoned.īix Bouton, the African-American inventor of fictional app Mandala, envisions in the 1990s that the metaphysical sphere of the Internet will deliver black people from real-world racism.

Several in the middle seem to go nowhere. One consequence of the novel's unusual structure is that few of the stories achieve significant depth - Lulu The Spy, 2032 is a startling exception - and nearly none reach a resolution. 'It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. 'Never trust a candy house,' warn the daughters of a record producer brought low by streaming services. The title refers to the witch's trap in the fairy tale Hansel And Gretel. Often alluded to is the schism between the uploaded faithful and the eluders, who opt out of online existence and go to great lengths to erase their digital footprint. She is also fascinated by matters of privacy and surveillance. What Egan is creating here is a network novel, driven not by the progression of a plot, but by the links among its characters.

Reviews the candy house