First, it allows her to plumb more deeply into the pasts and futures of a set of characters who readers fell in love with more than a decade ago. In The Candy House, Bix invents Own Your Unconscious, which allows people to see into their pasts-but also forces them to upload their memories to a public cloud, effectively erasing privacy forever.Įgan’s memory machine serves two key purposes in the novel. One chapter was told via a Powerpoint presentation another took the form of a scathing celebrity profile.īut there’s one significant change: where Goon Squad was organized primarily around the music industry, The Candy House shifts its focus to tech, and the world surrounding the social media magnate Bix Bouton, who appeared briefly in Goon Squad as an Internet obsessive in the early ’90s. Goon Squad was hailed for its kaleidoscopic structure, which leapt across eras and literary styles as it unraveled a web of stories following loosely connected characters. This new work is a quasi-sequel to her most celebrated book: 2010’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and appeared on several decade-end lists, including TIME’s. The Candy House is one of the most anticipated books of the year, and not just because Egan has, for two decades, consistently sold out book tour dates across the country and drawn rave reviews for her fiction. That machine, called Own Your Unconscious, is the connective tissue of the stories in The Candy House, her new novel that arrives April 5.

So, in her next work of fiction, she invented one. Egan wished for a machine that would allow her to revisit both her life and those of friends and family members she had lost too soon.

The candy house book review