jennifer egan a visit from the goon squad review

‘The Candy House’ takes its title from a repeated metaphor for temptation: the lures of amusement and nostalgia that Hansel-and-Gretel us into a spun-sugar edifice upon which we are invited to gorge and in which we - our desires, our memories - are also on the menu.Ĭontemporary fiction often treats this sort of “Black Mirror” premise (specifically, it has shades of the episode “The Entire History of You”) skeptically the technology is an oppressor, or, to the novelist, a competitor. Bix, who is Black, imagined the internet in the ’90s as a “new metaphysical sphere” where “Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world.” The idea, he concedes, “looked comically naïve from a 2010 perspective.” Nonetheless, we try, try again. We’ve seen how that kind of vision plays out - surely the more we know about one another, the better we’ll understand one another? Right? - and so has its creator. The name of the product, Own Your Unconscious, suggests a lofty, even spiritual aspiration, as does the name of Bix’s company, Mandala. 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. 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. It is also, though it wears the fine cloth of idealism, big business. 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 a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes. 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. “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. 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. But you could also call it a concept album. Jennifer Egan’s 2010 “ A Visit From the Goon Squad” was, depending whom you asked, a novel, or a collection, or a story cycle.

Jennifer egan a visit from the goon squad review