#50 [2022/CBR14] The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

I finally read A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan in 2018, and it was one of my favorite books of the year--and probably in my top ten ever. It was such a delightful surprise. Earlier this year, I heard there was something of a sequel coming out. I was excited but also worried that it would not live up to my expectations after the first book. However, I faced my fears and picked up The Candy House (2022) because there was no way I was going to leave it unread. 

The Candy House took me a little bit longer to get into, and it didn't grab me quite as strongly as A Visit From the Goon Squad. However, once I got into the story, it definitely had the same feel as the earlier book. I enjoyed reading it, and I noticed some continuing connections between the characters.

The Candy House begins with Bix Bouton, a multi-millionaire genius who had started some kind of internet thing (like Facebook?), feeling lost and looking for new ideas. He finds a group of Columbia professors who give him the idea of downloading your own memory. Not too many years later, Bix Bouton has commercialized "Own Your Unconscious," and people all over the world are downloading their memories so they can keep them and access them later. Then things go a step farther with a kind of collective consciousness available to others. If you want to access other people's memories, you must submit your own. 

This is an intriguing idea, although I often got hung up on the details. Before everything had really started, a character had suffered a bad stroke and was not doing well. He learned that a psychology professor at Pomona College (my alma mater!!!) was uploading people's consciousnesses and got his uploaded. But strokes damage the brain, so how could he have good memories to upload? Later, his daughter was able to watch scenes from his life almost like a movie but even healthy brains don't have such clear memories.

Later, when the collective consciousness came into being, people could use "date and time, latitude and longitude, to search the anonymous memories of others present" at certain times and places. This made for some interesting storytelling, but how could this possibly work? Again, our memories don't work that way. I don't even know what day it is today let alone what day, time, and location something happened years ago. I guess you could imagine some very impressive future technology that figures all this out, but it wasn't explained. I was constantly distracted by the thought that none of it could actually work.*

My favorite part of the book was a chapter told entirely through emails. It was the part that reminded me most of Goon Squad. It was original and showed character motivation and development and was simply fascinating to read. A woman was looking to meet her famous father, and started an email conversation with his employee, which spiraled from there. It brought in characters from the previous book and furthered the story--all through emails. This chapter felt more personal and was not hampered by my disbelief in some of the technology.

The Candy House was a good book with some interesting ideas. However, because there wasn't enough information for me to really believe or understand the technology, it limited how the book affected me. Still recommended, but I preferred A Visit From the Goon Squad.

*One of the characters works as a "citizen agent" in this book, and I also had problems believing that this was ever a remotely viable program.

"Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free." (125)

"Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them." (298)