In Pulitzer Prize Winning author Jennifer Egan's new novel "The Candy House" she explores memory and social media and authenticity. That barely describes it though.
From theNew York Times Review:
Jennifer Egan’s 2010 “A Visit From the Goon Squad”
was, depending whom you asked, a novel, or a collection, or a story cycle. But you could also call it a concept album. Following a tangle of characters in and adjacent to the music business across decades, it switched voices and techniques in a kaleidoscopic extended-family portrait.
“The Candy House,” which passes the microphone to a number of peripheral “Goon Squad” characters, is similar in its anti-chronological structure and chameleonic virtuosity. But given its subject matter, it might be better to describe it as a social network, the literary version of the collaborative novel written by your friends and friends of friends on Facebook or Instagram, each link opening on a new protagonist. It is a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes.
Tech may not be the new rock ’n’ roll, but it serves an analogous function in “The Candy House.” It’s the world-shifting phenomenon that defines an era and connects strangers. It is also, though it wears the fine cloth
of idealism, big business.
The killer app that defines the alternative reality of “The Candy House” is dreamed up in 2010 by Bix Bouton, briefly introduced as an early-90s internet obsessive in “Goon Squad,” now a social-media mogul. His next
big idea, built on an experimental technology that can digitally capture animal consciousness, allows people to upload a life’s worth of memories — even long-forgotten ones — share them in a collective archive and access others’, as if traveling in a cranial time machine.
Listen to our conversation from the Thursday morning Show at the top of the page!
