The Candy House: A Novel

by Jennifer Egan

Overview

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF THE ECONOMIST TOP SIX BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY’S TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF SLATE’S TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022

Also named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by Vanity Fair, Time, NPR, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, LitHub, Self, Book Riot, Vogue, Bookpage, The New Yorker, BBC, Vulture, and many more!

From one of the most celebrated writers of our time comes an “inventive, effervescent” (Oprah Daily) novel about the memory and quest for authenticity and human connection.

The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious”—which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes.

In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,” those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also a moving testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, family, privacy, and love.

“A beautiful exploration of loss, memory, and history” (San Francisco Chronicle), “this is minimalist maximalism. It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century novel onto a flash drive” (The New York Times).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476716770
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	6,893
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Egan is the author of six previous books of fiction: Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Keep; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist; and The Invisible Circus. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New York Times Magazine. Her website is JenniferEgan.com.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Candy House

“The novel — with its prismatic plotting and ever-shifting chorus of seekers, kooks, and visionaries — feels less like a house than a honeycomb full of fantastical rooms, each one alive and thrumming with bright, weird humanity.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

"The Candy House is really an incredible feat... astonishing, even a little bewildering! Jenny is shockingly underrated. She should have the kind of fawning sycophants that dudes like Franzen and Denis Johnson do. Let the cult begin herewith!"
—James Hannaham, New York Times Book Review

“This is minimalist maximalism. It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century triple-decker novel onto a flash drive... Egan goes all in on the power of storytelling and of fiction.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“A brilliant demonstration of the unquantifiable pleasures of great fiction.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Radiant... an exhilarating delight...Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, in which what happened depends on who’s telling the story.”
—Laura Miller, Slate

“You don't have to read A Visit From the Goon Squad to love this sibling novel to Egan's stellar hit... complex and intimate.”
—Good Housekeeping

“May be the smartest novel you read all year... Fiction at its best... gets at our secret selves in ways the internet can’t... Egan’s audacity is welcome.”
—Mark Athitakis, USA Today

“This is a beautiful exploration of loss, memory and history, a not too subtle critique of what is lost when we live our lives online.”
—Allison Arieff, The San Francisco Chronicle

“A fast-paced polyvoiced romp thru America in the grip of a sinister tech that allows others into your mind. EEK!”
—Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

★ 01/01/2022

Egan returns to the interlocking narrative structure of A Visit from the Goon Squad, once again embracing the distilled power of short fiction in individual chapters while subtly allowing the distinct, imaginative parts to crescendo into a sterling sum. But where her Pulitzer Prize-winning earlier novel proved to be more conceptual in its story's framework, this work is a more straightforward narrative, albeit rendered wonderfully kaleidoscopic. Egan's latest broadly centers on a technology called "Own Your Unconscious," a very near-future innovation that allows individuals to access every memory they've ever had and upload them to a collective virtual space in exchange for access to others' memories if desired. From here, Egan allows her narrative to gyre outward, tracing connected characters across decades and into the crannies of her richly realized world, made all the more portentous for looking only shades different (and darker) than our present one. But nothing here is about mere showmanship; everything is both imaginative and utilitarian, including its shape-shifting style, which regularly jumps between tenses, distinctive voices, and even forms (an epistolary chapter, a chapter of tweets). The result is something of a mosaic, each meticulously rendered chapter feeling nested within the others rather than simply lashed together. Most impressive, however, is the prescience—never resorting to cheap technophobia or didactic moralizing—with which Egan manages to ask: What does it cost us to taste the Candy House? VERDICT A forceful, wonderfully fragmented novel of a terrifyingly possible future, as intellectually rigorous as it is formally impressive, and yet another monumental work from Egan.—Luke Gorham

Library Journal