The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

A revisit to the magic of Egan’s Pulitzer Prize Winning A Visit from the Good Squad, Candy House offers a timely exploration of how social media alters our lives.

In the not too-distant future, tech guru Bix Bouton has found a way to externalize and aggregate individual consciousness. Anyone who contributes to the collective consciousness gains access to all other uploaded memories. It is a bit like an episode of “Black Mirror,” though the world Egan creates feels only as dystopian as our own.

The “candy house” is this social media - a thing that draws you in, right before its inhabitants shove you in the oven and eat you alive. It is a timely theme, as America grapples with polarized politics in the age of Facebook. (The Atlantic has a great article by Jonathan Haidt called “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” that explores this topic beautifully).

Like Goon Squad, Candy House reads like a collection of short stories (or even fables) that are loosely connected through overlapping characters and themes. Egan eschews the typical rules of novel writing – there are myriad characters and no discernible overarching plot arc. In some ways it mirrors the brain’s mapping of the broader social landscape - dotted with characters whose stories we glimpse briefly, whose lives we understand solely in scraps – particularly in the age of social media. Often, we peek in to discover unexpected twists and complications that defy the traditional curve.

But because there is no central plot, if I am being honest, I found the book easy to put down – there was no unfinished story calling to me from the latter pages. That being said, the writing is fierce and the underlying ideas are profound, and if you stick with it, it will give you plenty of intellectual vitamins in a very tasty form.