The Candy House once again showcases Jennifer Egan's astonishing versatility and ventriloquistic fireworks. Revisiting many of the plot lines and characters of the Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, this novel is perhaps best enjoyed after a re-read of its precursor, but can stand alone just as well. Each chapter is written in its own style, and it can be dizzying and discombobulating each time a new one begins, yet the task of unpicking where we are in time and which character is narrating and how they connect to everyone else we have met is surely the great pleasure of the book. At the same time, Egan's meticulous representation of the intricacies of human interaction provides its own fascination. She is a unique talent and her work speaks to the 21st Century zeitgeist.

"The Candy House" by Jennifer Egan is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic follow-up to her Pulitzer-winning "A Visit from the Goon Squad," expanding its universe into a tech-infused near-future. The novel revolves around Own Your Unconscious, a technology that lets users externalize and share their memories, created by mogul Bix Bouton. Through a mosaic of interconnected stories, Egan explores the ripple effects—personal, cultural, and ethical—of this innovation across a sprawling cast of characters, from aging punks to disillusioned techies. Her prose is electric and inventive, juggling timelines and perspectives with virtuosic flair.

I wish I had a fraction of Jennifer Egan's talent. She's a wonderful writer. This magnificent sprawling masterpiece imagines the ways in which we are both connected and disconnected by technology. It's clear from reading this book that real intimacy still needs person to person contact, no matter how miraculous technology can be.
Egan's ability to create worlds and characters is the near equal of great 19th Century writers like George Eliot and Jane Austen.

(Sorry, I read this so long ago I don't remember much about it other than that I thought it was interesting, so gave it three stars on GoodReads)

The Candy House - Jennifer Egan

A spiritual sequel to A Visit From The Goon Squad, this is a thrilling ride through the mind of Jennifer Egan as she explores dozens of characters, a handful of families and various styles and formats for chapters.

I haven’t read the previous novel, and like others have said, you don’t need to in order to understand everything in the story. You might benefit from drawing out your own character/family tree or dramatis personae, because there are a lot of characters who all interconnect. Winding over and under and through, crashing into each other and missing connections entirely.
If you were to draw out the character list, you might find it looks like a spiral; getting tighter and tighter as everything (or, mostly everything) wraps up. It reminded me of Emily St John Mandel’s Sea Of Tranquility.

We start with Boulton Bix, an internet entrepreneur and genius who’s got the equivalent of writer’s block. He’s had a great idea, driven by someone else’s algorithmic theories, and now finds himself at the peak of his career in his thirties. From there, we weave through acquaintances, friends, family, neighbours and all. Most of the chapters are first person perspective, and this makes it interesting because you meet former first people in other chapters, and sometimes in the same event you’ve already seen a part of.

Conceptually, it’s a bit of a Black Mirror episode - there now exists a mechanism to upload your consciousness onto a secure drive. Memories, thoughts, feelings, conversations are all available to the people you grant access to. This is a really thought provoking concept, albeit a not wholly new one. Inevitably as a reader, you find yourself wondering what you would do if the opportunity arose. On one hand, you’d be able to replay your favourite life’s moments, over and over again, without being blurred or distorted by time. You could effectively time travel, maybe to see someone who’s dead in the present, or who you’ve lost touch with. On the other hand, your every experience is available on the internet to be cross referenced with everyone else’s. Even if you don’t opt in, you still have a presence as you’d have been captured in the background of someone else’s event. It might be something that we all need to think about seriously in the next few years - perhaps it’s already been done.

Jennifer Egan is a skilled writer, handling the myriad of characters with ease and keeping their voices clean and clear. I thought it was really fun trying to work out at the beginning of each chapter whose voice you were listening to now, and which part of the timeline you were diving into next. Given the idea that someone’s consciousness was uploaded, it made me wonder whose consciousness we as the reader was following. Who was the common denominator? Maybe it’s even Egan herself, to add a nice extra meta-textual layer to the narrative.

Recommended for fans of Jennifer Egan, Emily St John Mandel and David Mitchell - this is a sci-fi rooted in everyday so it doesn’t feel far removed from our own world.

The Candy House has a very interesting premise - the first chapter introduces us to Bix Bouton, a tech guy who has developed a way to 'download' memories and add them to a collective consciousness, so that we can all access each other's memories. The subsequent chapters are all stories surrounding different characters, and how they have been differently affected by this new technology. Sounds very Black Mirror, right? Except I just kept getting lost. These different narrative threads make the book very hard to get into, as it is very difficult to keep track of who's who and how they are all related. I did like how each main character was somehow linked to previous characters, but sometimes this link was so subtle that it was impossible to remember. Also, the technology element of downloading memories, which is supposedly meant to be what the entire novel is surrounding, often gets downplayed in favour of character studies, that by nature of only ever being one chapter long, are not very hard-hitting.
I enjoyed the varied writing styles between chapters - Lincoln's chapter for example gives a very clear style of voice (even though his description of his job within this new technological world went completely over my head). One chapter is written entirely in email threads, another almost as an espionage manual (which didn't feel fully realised. Maybe I'm just not at the intellectual level of the intended reader, but this chapter especially was virtually impossible to grasp).
As the chapters continue, the 'Own Your Unconsciousness' thread seems to lose its relevance more and more, and the chapters start to become more and more unlinked. It was never fully explained to begin with, and it just fades more and more into the background, which makes it very hard to truly care about the host of characters that the reader is bombarded with. Honestly I was rereading my Kindle notes and I lost count of how many times I had written something along the lines of 'I have no idea what they're talking about'. I also wonder whether it would be slightly easier to read as a book rather than Kindle, so you could more easily flip back to different chapters and maybe see a clearer link?
Overall I do think it is a brilliant idea and incredibly well written, and if you are prepared to put the mental work in I'm sure it's a very rewarding read. However I just wish the dystopian technology had been explored more than the overwhelmingly mundane character studies.

Enjoyed this book but read it and posted about it to friends and in our nonpublic newsletter - I read it in hard copy before I was granted access to this book

having read this I still don't know what it was supposed to be about. it just felt like an unnecessary sequel

The Candy House is a sort of sequel to A Visit From the Goon Squad, but it is not really essential to have read the earlier novel first. In fact, I only realised this in the middle of reading and I have forgotten almost everything from the first book, read over 10 years ago, other than enjoying it.

This is a series of linked narratives set in the near future and recent past, about characters who turn out to be linked together by family connections and friendships, but whose relationships are often rather fractured.

A discussion between a tech entrepreneur and a group of academics takes the tech guy towards developing and making more money out of Own Your Unconscious, allowing people access to all their memories and those of people around them. It's an interesting idea and I enjoyed reading, but feel that I need to go back again to make more sense of what I read. I was struck though that this sounds potentially a bigger change than in the story it has turned out to be, that such a far reaching idea hasn't altered lives or society as we might think. Is that because, like current social media trends, some people want nothing to do with it.

Thought provoking but and perhaps I will return to both books in the future.

Much though I wanted to enjoy this book, I just didn't - I got 40% through and still wasn't enjoying it so have now put it down.

The concept is great - a huge shared memory bank which you can access to look at other people's memories, recapture your own.; this prompts a whole load of conversation starters in my head and I was really keen to read the story.

I just didn't get on with the characters or the story - things seemed slow, and I was unable to empathise with anyone or any topic. Reluctantly I have stopped reading.

A clever and insightful follow up to Welcome to the Goon Show. I love Jennifer's writing and what can be inferred from it and I loved every word of this book

I really enjoyed this book, particularly the call backs to the Goon Squad characters and also Look At Me. I’m now reading Egan’s other books hoping for further overlaps!

I did find it quite hard to hold all the characters and their relationships in my head, but perhaps I just read too slowly. I’ve seen criticism that the voices of the characters were all too similar - I didn’t have a problem with this, as the different styles and formats in different chapters was interesting and the plots and relationships held my attention.

I had seen stellar reviews and thought the premise sounded promising - a world where the uploading of the collective consciousness was possible - but I feel like I'm missing something. In fact, I was quite disappointed.

The story is told out of sync. As a recreational reader, reading before bedtime each night, I couldn't follow and it felt disjointed leaving me thoroughly confused as to "who was who", and where the story was leading. The sci-fi element, which had attracted me in the first place, was downplayed and almost an after thought. It felt like a lost opportunity. The characters were mostly pretentious and unlikeable, and the plot didn't seem to go anywhere.

I'm assuming there was much brilliant symbolism and social commentary but this was lost on me. My apologies to the author for my more simplistic tastes.

The candy house has a very interesting premise. A big shot tech guy develops the technology to externalizations memory and creates several products around it to share/search/experience other’s memories.
And then there are people who are as varied as we can imagine and each of them have a unique experience with this new tech. These are the people we meet in the Candy House (which by the way is compared to Hensel and Gretel’s candy house which seems lucrative but is also dangerous).

Being a tech person, I was really excited to read it and it came through for the most part but I took me a long time to finish it. It didn’t make much sense to me as it began but `as `I started mapping the characters and their relations to each other, it became clear to me. Like memories, which are collected and shared, all these characters were connected by an unseen thread. They were witness to the same events one way or the other and two people joined them. Big Bourton, the person who developed the tech, and .Miranda Kline who research made it possible to map out algorithm.

Like I said, it’s a multitude of stories in one. With some characters, I instantly bonded and wanted to know more about while with others. I skimmed over paragraphs as it was just so annoying. Some came back to meet me in later chapters while some were mentioned just in passing. I also loved that there was no fixed pattern to this story telling. Some were first person accounts and some were just emails. Some were short while some ran endlessly. There are people who have made their lives with this new tech while there are others who have devoted their lives to protect their privacy.

The best part is that the whole thing is not very far fetched. I could easily see all of it happening and trying to chose a side.

At this point, I don’t know how to rate it or review it, I just know that it was an experience. It takes a while to grow on you so if you are patient, you can definitely pick it up. I wish this book was more similar to the kinds I like but then I would not be able to experience this bizarre set. So its nice as is but probably not for me?

If I'm honest, I wasn't expecting to like it. Egan's previous books have often been too experimental and, at times, pompous and I was worried this would be the same. It wasn't. Give it a try.

The key concept of a human mind with all its memories being copied/uploaded is an interesting concept.

Being Egan this is only one ambitious theme to explore and it becomes a book about identity, truthfulness and searching..

Being a Goon Squad fan I was looking forward to this novel. I'm still in admiration of the scope of Egan's ambition but the polyphonic voices and the differing time frames just became disorienting. I would rather have had fewer threads that were explored in more depth.

The satire on current Social media etc and the Frankenstein elements were intriguing but seemed buried under the accumulation of "stuff" generated by the ambitious scope of the book.. There were no characters that I cared about or who made me want to return to their story

For me "less" would have been "more".

Didn't quite hit the emotional sweet spots of Goon Squad for me, but I did enjoy the ideas being wrestled with here.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. A totally different each from the normal with futuristic ideas that in 2022 are becoming more possible. A very different story telling structure that works very well. A totally compelling read that confuses, confronts and also entertains. Well worth a read!

Much like the earlier A Visit From The Goon Squad, I found this loosely related novel interesting and intriguing, episodic way it is written makes it hard to pin down and will make it hard to remember. And it is hard to say what it’s about too, though perhaps that isn’t the point.

It is set in a nearby and terrifyingly imaginable future, where technology has been developed that can capture memories and make them shareable, allowing individuals to revisit events not only through their own memories but also through those of others who were also present. Most people have embraced this unthinkingly, much as we have done with social media in our current time, but there are voices of caution and those of rebellion, afraid of the loss of individuality and real connection in this brave new world.

The various chapters are only loosely related, which a cast of characters (some of whom also appeared in Goon Squad) drifting in and out of focus and coming together periodically in tangentially related timelines, depicting the psychological effects of living a technologically-dominated life increasingly devoid of meaningful connections with real people.

It’s a book I enjoyed, but that I find hard to describe - I personally prefer a stronger narrative drive to this series of vignettes, although it was undeniably absorbing. Definitely worth reading, but I somehow don’t think I’ll be coming back to it in future.

This propulsive, inventive follow-up to A Visit from the Goon Squad centres on a social-media visionary who invents a way to externalise consciousness and pool memories – so instead of mindlessly scrolling apps, people can explore their loved ones' memories. Naturally there are consequences, including a reorganisation of the social order. Brilliant.