The Candy House

November 1, 2021

In 2010, genius techie Bix Bouton has his own company but is searching for a surefire new idea when he learns about a Columbia professor who's experimenting with downloading, or "externalizing," memory. Flash forward a decade, and Bix's new technology, Own Your Unconscious, allows users to access all their own memories and share them with others. In the spliced-narrative structure that characterized her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan shows readers what the consequences of such technology might be as she takes us from character to character, who mostly boldly embrace Own Your Unconscious but sometimes reject it. What results is an exploration of what connection really means. With a 250,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2022
Egan revisits some characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) and their children to continue her exploration of what fiction can be and do in the 21st century. As Manhattan Beach (2017) showed, Egan is perfectly capable of writing a satisfying traditional novel, but she really dazzles when she turns her formidable gifts to examining the changes to society and individuals wrought by the internet and social media. One of those instruments of change is Bix, an NYU classmate of Sasha in Goon Squad but here a vastly rich social media magnate who, in 2016, makes the next leap in the "Self-Surveillance Era" by creating, first, Own Your Unconscious, which allows people to externalize their consciousness on a cube, and then Collective Consciousness, which offers the option of "uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online 'collective, ' " thereby gaining access to "the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone, living or dead, who had done the same." Egan explores the impact of this unnervingly plausible innovation with her habitual panache, ranging from her characters' pre-internet youths to the 2030s. While there are "eluders" like Bix's son, Gregory, who refuse to share their private thoughts with strangers, many are seduced by the convenience and power of this collective tool. The most stylistically audacious chapter shows us the scarily logical next step; it reproduces the instructions of a "weevil" implanted in the brain of Lulu, daughter of morally compromised Goon Squad publicist Dolly, now a spy married to "a visionary in the realm of national security." As she did in in Goon Squad's PowerPoint chapter, Egan doles out information in small bites that accumulate to demonstrate the novel's time-honored strengths: richly complicated characters and compelling narratives. The final chapter rolls back to 1991 to movingly affirm the limits of floods of undigested information and the ability of fiction, only fiction, to "roam with absolute freedom through the human collective." A thrilling, endlessly stimulating work that demands to be read and reread.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 17, 2022
Egan returns to the fertile territory and characters of A Visit from the Goon Squad with an electrifying and shape-shifting story that one-ups its Pulitzer-winning predecessor. I’ll see your PowerPoint chapter, Egan seems to say, and raise you a chapter in tweets, and another in emails and texts. In the near future, a platform called Own Your Unconscious allows memories to be uploaded to the cloud and accessed by anyone. “Counters” seek to ferret out “proxies” that help hide “eluders” who resist merging their “gray grabs” to the collective in order to leave their online personae behind. Not everyone sees this as panacea, and a countermovement called Mondrian arises. Appearances from music producer Bennie Salazar, his mentor Lou Kline, and their lovers and children provide sharp pleasures for Goon Squad fans, and Egan cleverly echoes the ambitious, savvy marketing schemes of real-world tech barons with Own Your Unconscious. It casts its spell on Bennie, whose punk rock days with the Flaming Dildos are long past: “Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them,” he writes in an email. Twisting through myriad points of view, narrative styles, and divergent voices, Egan proves herself as perceptive an interpreter of the necessity of human connection as ever, and her vision is as irresistible as the tech she describes. This is Egan’s best yet. Agent: Binky Urban, ICM Partners.

February 1, 2022
At the center of this sibling novel to Egan's multi-award winning, genre-bending A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) is Bix Bouton, a minor character in the previous tale, now a tech guru who has developed Own Your Unconscious, a platform that allows people to access all of their memories and those of others. While many welcome this opportunity, some "eluders" seek to escape the unrelenting surveillance of every aspect of their lives. Drifting from the mid-1960s to the mid-2030s, this novel is a portrait of where we have been, where we are, and where we could be going. Its many-worlds, portal-like structure is influenced by video games, and as in Goon Squad, Egan experiments with many different forms, perspectives, and styles; one chapter consists of tweets, while another contains overlapping emails. Each presents us with characters who desire permanence in an unstable world, and many are on nebulous quests for authentic experience. Similar to Dave Eggers' The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021), this novel excoriates the desire of tech companies to quantify everything and warns about unthinkingly taking a bite from the seemingly free "candy house" offered by such companies. Haunting and often hilarious, this is a wondrous, riotously inventive work of speculative fiction that celebrates the power of the imagination in the face of technology that threatens to do our thinking for us.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The latest by Egan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Carnegie Medal, is a top spring title with magnetic pull for Visit from the Goon Squad admirers and fans of smart, literary speculative fiction.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.