Recap: In a dreamy, interwoven bit of organized chaos, Jennifer Egan once again delivers an exceptional story that’s not really a story, a tale with connecting throughlines, characters and themes but no real plot. It’s a tough one to explain to others. In fact, I tried to explain Egan’s storytelling to one of my coworkers recently who looked at me puzzled, and may as well have responded by saying “well, that sounds awful.” But what’s confusing, once understood, becomes brilliant and truly awe-some.
About ten years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan published The Candy House as a sequel, following some of the characters from Goon Squad. Those carryovers include Sasha, LuLu and Bennie among others. Egan does the same thing in this sequel as she does in her first book: each chapter reads like a short story about a particular character. A minor character from that story is then the “hero” of the next chapter, so the reader learns more about another person in the story. Then another minor character tells the story in the next chapter. That same thread continues throughout. The stories aren’t necessarily connected either. They’re just little slice of life pieces of each of these characters. Some stories are told in present day, some in the future, some in the past. There’s a lot of hopping around and putting together the puzzle pieces of who’s connected to who, how and on what section of the timeline.
In Goon Squad, Lulu was a young girl. In Candy House, we meet her as an adult, where she is a spy (and has maybe the coolest chapter in the book?). Here, Lulu is also part of another chapter made up of emails sent between many of these interconnected characters, which further emphasizes the brilliant interweaving of everyone. It’s very “Love, Actually” and fun to read! The connections between the characters is one of the central themes of Egan’s books: that each person has an impact on another. But Candy House has another overarching theme about social media, authenticity and who you are versus how you portray yourself online and preserve yourself for the future — big themes about which we are already talking when it comes to AI and which make this story particularly relevant.
Analysis: What’s fun about The Candy House that I don’t remember from Goon Squad is that Jennifer Egan is playfully meta in her writing. Near the end of the book, she calls out the book’s title by writing “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.” It’s exactly what she’s doing with this book: trying to lure in a new generation of readers to her eclectic writing a decade after publishing her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that younger readers may have missed altogether. She goes on to question “do all roads start to converge after age 70?” The Candy House has an answer for that too: yes, or maybe even earlier.
When I read A Visit from the Goon Squad years ago, I remember being excited to read an award winning book. I liked it, but it didn’t have much of an impact on me. It took me a while to understand what was going on, and by the time I got it, I felt like I had spent so much of the book focusing on the wrong things and missing the beauty and creativity that was right in front of me. So sadly, it didn’t land. But for some reason, The Candy House clicked much more easily and earlier for me. Reading it felt like an adventure and made me appreciate Goon Squad and Jennifer Egan much more.
MVP: Lulu. There are a dozen characters I’d love to put here, but Lulu’s chapters were the most creatively written format-wise, and her character displayed such strength and a beautiful mix of masculinity and femininity.
Lara's Book Club 