I wish she would stick with one protagonist for an entire novel in this mode and drop the stale experiments, which feature elsewhere in the book, with chapters narrated in emails and instruction manuals (these are as unwise as Goon Squad’s section written as a PowerPoint slide).Īt the level of the sentence, The Candy House zings, but it does not cohere as successfully as its sibling. When Egan lets fly with this kind of hypnotic stream-of-consciousness narration, she is like an improvising jazz musician, taking readers on a revelatory ride. “In summer there is always the faint thop thop of tennis balls and kids’ voices tangled with pool splashes and it is a beautiful place, our Country Club, when I’m not fighting for my life,” she says, referring to a dark twist in her story. I wanted the chapter about a teenage girl in upstate New York to go on longer. At the same time, she excels at writing from young people’s perspectives. Later, a paranoid music journalist worries that spyware has been implanted in his mind via digital weevils: “Doesn’t it ever occur to you that another entity might be looking out through your eyes and listening through your ears or uttering words through your mouth?”Įgan captures a culture that, as Bennie says, “seems to happen in a non-existent ‘place’ that we can’t even find unless our kids (or grandkids!) show it us”. “Nothing is free… Never trust a candy house,” warns one. It whizzes about in time, across a period roughly 50 years in the past and 50 years from now, beginning in a near-future when Bix Bouton, a black tech entrepreneur, has invented a “memory externalisation device” which allows people to watch each other’s memories on screens.Įgan is sceptical about the temptations of the internet and cannot resist putting ideas to this effect in her characters’ mouths.

If, as Egan said, Goon Squad was inspired by Marcel Proust and The Sopranos, The Candy House reads like what might have happened had Thomas Pynchon been in the writers’ room for the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That… (not necessarily a bad thing), with Egan both a streetwise satirist and a sensitive chronicler of the way people age. In The Candy House, which Egan is calling Goon Squad’s “sibling novel”, it is a pleasure to catch up with Salazar, his ex-wife Stephanie, the kleptomaniac Sasha, the punk band The Conduits, the comical New York publicist Dolly and many more familiar characters.

The candy house review