The Candy House - Jennifer Egan
Fiction, 350 pages

Jennifer Egan's latest work, The Candy House, is an inventive, miraculous piece of writing and impossible to fully capture in one review. The story begins with Bix Bouton (who readers might recognize from A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning novel), a tech demi-god reminiscent of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg. Bouton has developed a new technology, Own Your Unconscious, that allows users to upload and preserve their memory into "cubes" that can be shared with the "collective," a type of digital space where people around the world can access peoples' experiences. Each chapter moving forward is a window into a different character's life, incorporating some element of Own Your Unconscious into the plot. However, this technology is not the driver of the story. Instead, Own Your Unconscious sits quietly in the background as a type of quasi-setting - a reminder of the ever present themes of memory and authenticity in a world that mirrors ours.

 Although I have read books before where each chapter follows a different character but are all somehow linked together, Egan's structural foundation is wholly unique. Egan does not center the narratives around one time, place, event, or voice (indeed, one chapter is written entirely as an instruction manual in the second person in the mid-2030s while another is a series of email exchanges between different characters). Instead, as is discussed in the New York Times review, the structure has the feel of a social network, where people across time and space are connected in unexpected, wonderful, and often inconsequential ways. The Candy House blew me away, not least of all because of Egan's inventive brilliance. You do not need to have read A Visit from the Good Squad in order to read this book, but if you have not already you certainly will want to after reading The Candy House.

Rating: 10/10

I honestly can't even classify this book! Which is not to say I didn't like it because I definitely did. The chapters are so unique, and almost feel as if different people wrote them, with vastly different personalities and writing styles in each. Overall, it was a really interesting and unique read. I purchased several copies for the library.

I have loved Jennifer Egan since reading her The Invisible Circus. The Candy House is the first one of hers that I could not connect with. I cannot really give a summary of the book because I am not sure what is actually about. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of Eagan’s writing that I love; however,, this book was too hard to follow. Thank you NetGalley!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me an advance copy of this book to read in exchange for my honest review and opinion. I have not read anything by Jennifer Egan previously and maybe that would have helped me but I had a hard time with this book figuring out what was going on. Lots of different points of view and I just found it to be a tough read. I was disappointed as I really wanted to love this book

I DNF this one at 48%. I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad and gave it 5 stars when I read it. I was so excited for this book but it’s just not for me. I felt so disconnected for the characters due to the ever changing format and structure. I know critics will say this is brilliant but it was not an enjoyable reading experience for me and life’s too short to read what doesn’t serve you. I liken this reading experience to my time with Cloud Atlas and Cloud Cuckoo Land.

I read The Candy House a few weeks ago and started to write a review several times, but each time, I was compelled to pause and rethink what I wanted to say about it. I'm a Jennifer Egan fan, so no matter what, I knew I would enjoy this book even if it wasn't something that I would ENJOY in an all-caps kind of way while reading (i.e., some of her books are more of a slow burn, similar in my mind to Donna Tartt).

It's been a minute since I read a Visit from the Goon Squad, so I didn't know if The Candy House would feel out of reach as a result. But it didn't. In fact, I think having read it but not being super "in it" still helped forge my understanding and appreciation of The Candy House. It stands on its own.

When I read descriptions of this before I got my hands on a copy, it felt like, oh geez, here we go with some high-falutin treatise on how social media is the devil, some story where I will feel the strident morality rise up like a preacher's crescendoing voice. Packaged in literature and sprinkled with powdered sugar, but still. Like I said, I am an Egan fan, so I gave it a shot anyway. I needn't have worried. The story was primary, not the social commentary. The character development was quite strong. I felt more connected to the characters this time around, vs. Goon Squad and surprisingly connected to all of them in some shape or form. In that sense, reading the book was eerily meta to the shared memory experience of Own Your Unconscious, the technology at the center of the stories, where people upload memories straight from their brains to share and to stitch together.

In that sense, each chapter which flowed from one character to another, was like living a memory, sharing the perspective through the eyes of whomever the butterfly landed on next. Or perhaps, like a virus spreading through the air or more like a demon transferred through eye contact, moving the reader on to someone who was either pivotal or tangential to the previous character's perspective. Half the fun was in figuring out the connective tissue. If you need to know very clearly who is talking and what their relationship to the overall story is, you may not love that as much as I did.

Overall, the central part of the story was the connection to technology and how we connect with each other — on one hand the Own Your Unconscious enforces a default empathy when the users see through someone else's eyes, experience what they have experienced. But on the other, it creates distance between us, this simulated/mediated interaction. And distance within ourselves. Memories subject to perfect recall make the narratives we tell ourselves subject to fact checking in a way that feels uncomfortable, at best. (Why, hello there, cognitive dissonance, my old friend!)

Overall, if you enjoy literary fiction that takes some chances, that feels fresh in its approach to long-standing issues of being human and what that continues to mean, stop by The Candy House and take a bite of whatever shiny confection part of the story appeals most to you.

About ten years ago I was walking home from the bus stop when I found a box of free books outside someone's house near the Art Museum in Philadelphia - I picked up a paperback copy of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan that still sits on my bookshelf today. I loved the book and when I learned a sequel was coming, I couldn't believe it. I was even more delighted to receive an ARC of The Candy House courtesy of Scribner / Simon & Schuster.

Much like Goon Squad, The Candy House is a journey through the lives of many interconnected characters going back and forth through time, with a shared thread of memory and technology. I loved the different styles of writing the author uses for each of our narrators in each chapter, the style matching their voice and not one of them the same. I would describe The Candy House just as.... a cool ass book. There is really no other way to describe it.

I would HIGHLY recommend reading or re-reading A Visit from the Goon Squad before reading The Candy House. You can probably still enjoy The Candy House without reading Goon Squad, but they are truly companion books and are meant to be read together.

The publishers description reads "If Goon Squad was organized like a concept album, The Candy House incorporates Electronic Dance Music’s more disjunctive approach." I think this is a good description of both books. While Goon Squad flows from story to story, The Candy House jumps through time and space. The Candy House has a more solid thread than Goon Squad. Bix Bouton (remember him!) creates a way to "externalize" memory, making it possible for people to relive and share their entire lives. The stories explore not only the impact of this technology and the memories of characters before Own Your Unconscious."

I loved this book as much as Goon Squad. It was wonderful to catch up with known characters and explore other branches of connection. The writing is of course excellent, Egan really makes you care about these characters for the short time we spend with them. The book is both futuristic and nostalgic.

I’m still thinking about this one, trying to figure out if I liked it or not. But, the fact that I’m having to think about it is probably a sign that I didn’t exactly like it. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I reread A Visit from the Goon Squad in anticipation for this book since I’d seen that Egan would be using some of the same characters. In this rereading of Goon Squad, I somehow managed to love it even more, so I was puuumped for Candy House.

The book revolves around a futuristic sort of social media tech called Own Your Unconscious that allows you to revisit every memory you’ve ever had and those of everyone else. I think one of the strongest things about this book is the philosophizing on memory and the implications of them being public. What is our privacy worth? Do we know what it costs to bite the Candy House?

Between the two books there is an actual buttload of characters, which made it hard for me to completely pick up on who someone is. Unfortunately it was hard to latch on to a character and root for them when there was a new person every few minutes. The first half was a struggle and the second half finally started to feel like it was going somewhere. It was definitely more enjoyable once the book started getting deeper into Own Your Unconscious in the second half.

I know, I know. I should have tempered my expectations. But there are so many iconic moments in GS - the hot oil party catastrophe, the stolen wallet in the bathroom, the gifted fish, the genocidal General, and THAT PowerPoint. I never really experienced any of that whoa-this-is-so-original feeling with Candy House.

It’s still a great book and I love the whole Hansel and Gretl imagery, but don’t go in like I did with Goon-y expectations.

If A Visit from the Goon Squad revolved around the music scene between the late 1970s and 2020, anchored by characters Bennie Salazar, Lou Kline, and Sasha Blake, The Candy House unfolds, roughly, between 2016 and 2034, with occasional glimpses into the past, populated by the progeny of the cornerstone characters in Goon Squad, plus some close relatives and friends, in a much-too-possible dystopian tableau in which memories are a commodity.

The popularization of a technology to upload your unconscious into a cube for personal use, or to a collective pool—to search for something among other people’s memories— has raised questions of trust and the potential mismanagement of that technology in a sector of the population known as eluders. They have deployed proxy programs to pose as the online identities they have vacated, but that has created a counter culture in which those vacated profiles are sold, and where a hidden economy is afoot.

A Visit from the Goon Squad was formatted like a music vinyl album with sides A and B having, approximately, the same number of essays as an album would have songs. The sibling novel, The Candy House, is structured in four parts: Build, Break, Drop, and a recurring Build, with the first three parts having four essays each, and the last one, two. It isn’t necessary to have read Goon Squad to understand this novel, as it stands well on its own, but reading its sibling work first, may give the reader a deeper appreciation of the intricacies of the story, and the connections between the characters. Multiple narrators and narration styles challenge the definition of a cohesive narrative.

In short, The Candy House is imaginative, complex, but somewhat dense.

Disclaimer: I received a digital ARC from the publisher, via Netgalley, in exchange for my honest opinion.

Loved the perspective on our tech world, often questioned myself through reading if I should have read goon squad first - not sure if there’s a way to make that clear in the synopsis or to booksellers but I felt like it was still entertaining for me! Going to read goon squad next!

Almost a 5 star until the end disappointed. I know this book will be controversial, some will love and some will hate, but I mostly loved it. I read Visit From the Goon Squad many many years ago and vaguely remembering enjoying it enough, but not having strong feelings about it. This is sort of a sequel, but it's not really necessary to have read the first one first. There is some overlap in characters, but they're just a touchpoint.

This book will be impossible to describe. Each chapter is different, almost a world unto itself, until you start to connect the dots (which aren't even always there). I needed a map with lines drawn between the characters. But also, it's possible to read this book without trying that hard.

The general theme is maybe technology and the way it burrows into our lives, and what is the authentic self with and without it, and what are its effects.

So each chapter focuses on a different person and it can be a short glimpse, or a condensed view of their life, or current events. And it can take place in the past, or the present, or the future. See why it's hard to describe?

I think the author is brilliant and "contains multitudes" and can write in so many different unique voices that it's hard to believe it's one person. Fascinating.

The pitfall here, then, is that because each chapter is different and condensed, there are a lot of loose threads, no closure in many cases, cliffhangers that are challenging for someone like me who wants the answers. What happened?! And that's how it ends.

Author Jennifer Egan takes the world of "Return of the Goon Squad" and takes us forward, and sometimes backwards, in an engaging narrative that interweaves the lives of characters across generations. At the center of the plot is a technological breakthrough that allows anyone to add memories to the Collective Consciousness, allowing anyone to access old memories,even not their own. Each narrative has its own plot, and while there's not an overarching plot that comes together at the end, The absence of an bigger plot does not take away from the enjoyment of reading this book, it's a great read.

Critics smarter than me will say things like this book is a ‘searing critique of the intersection between technology and humanity.’ That is probably a correct assessment. But this book’s message felt lofty and just out of reach to me. Egan is an excellent writer and I enjoyed some of the narratives almost as short stories, but overall, it was a little out there for me.

The audiobook was read by a full cast which is always a pleasure to listen to. I noticed in the digital copy that some chapters have different typography (a list of instructions, a series of email/text exchanges) that may have been easier to parse by reading vs. listening. This is a high-concept book and it won’t be for everyone. In fact, I don’t think it was for me! But it’s the kind of book that wins awards and will probably be on the ‘best of’ lists.

Thank you to @simon.audio and @Netgalley for this review copy. The opinions are my own.

I vaguely remember A Visit from the Goon Squad from a decade ago, but I knew I wanted to read The Candy House a loose sequel. As with Goon Squad there are many characters to keep track of in The Candy House. They are all loosely tied together through out their stories.

In The Candy House Bix Bouton has created new tech that allows people to upload all their memories. Own Your Unconscious can be just for you or you can share it with everyone creating a Collective Conscious. So Facebook, but on steroids. Can you imagine letting people view your most intimate memories? This would not be for me. Anyway, of course some people embrace this tech and others think it's terrible.

The book starts with Bix Bouton as he's suffering with insomnia and wandering the streets of NYC. He misses the days of his youth where people would talk about ideas and philosophize for hours. I can relate to that being in my mid forties now. I love hearing my daughter and her friends talk about life, love, politics, etc as they are forming their views. But as full adults we no longer do these things with our friends. On one of Bix's late night wanderings he finds a flyer about a group of grad school students meeting to discuss a lecture from someone he used to know. The someone being the woman whose work inspired his social media platform. With all of this knowledge he knows he can get into the group discussion without attending the lecture. The conversation that ensues is what leads to Own Your Conscious.

The next few stories are related to this new tech and engaging. From there the book goes off the rails for me. I could not keep track of how characters knew each other and it seemed to have left the main idea of Bouton's business. I enjoyed the first half of the book, but the last half was hard to slog through at times.

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!

I loved Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, although now, nearly 12 years later, I didn’t remember much about the book. Maybe I should have reread it before reading the sequel, The Candy House, but instead I read it much like a stand-alone book. Maybe that’s why I had trouble connecting with it.

Both books are written in a similar fashion, as a series of interconnecting short stories that trace characters over years and go from the past to the near future. The Candy House is built around the idea that a way to upload our memories into a “Collective Consciousness” has been invented and people will now be able to access everyone’s memories. There are upsides to this – improved crime solving, and people can store their memories and upload them in the case of brain injury.

The title refers to the house of sweets in Hansel and Gretel and the idea that what is most tempting comes at a hidden cost. Throughout this book, Egan explores what privacy and identity mean in a world where everyone shares their most intimate thoughts. There are plenty of parallels with our current social media-driven, no-privacy world. The young accept it without question, while those of us who are older try (and mostly fail) to hide from it. One character replays one of her father’s memories and is devastated by his views of what she thought was a cherished childhood moment. But for the most part the Collective is in the background. I would think that actually sharing our memories into a searchable internet collective would be catastrophic in a lot of ways, but Egan instead delves into the more subtle consequences like the search for authenticity, the difficulty of independent thought, and the struggle to filter vast quantities of information into something meaningful.

But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.

Jennifer Egan, The Candy House
It’s an ambitious book, and one that would probably improve if I’d read it with much greater attention. But I struggled to connect with the characters in the way I did with Goon Squad. I’ve come to like the format of interconnected short stories (like the novels of Elizabeth Strout) because they let you see characters from different perspectives and I enjoy seeing how one character/story connects to the next. The downside, though, is that the reader jumps from character to character before getting to know any of them well. In this book I rarely felt I got to know any of the characters enough to be really interested, and the next stories didn’t go back to those characters enough for me to feel like it was one overarching story. I found myself really interested in a few of the characters, more early in the book than later (Bix, Lincoln, and Molly, for example), but then I wanted more about them and instead the book veered into completely different storylines.

If you loved Goon Squad, you might want to reread that before you dive into this one. Egan returns to the stories of characters Sasha, Bennie Salazar, and Lou Kline, and their families and friends. In my review of Goon Squad I wrote about how much I felt for Sasha’s struggles, and I wish I had felt more in this book.

In the end, while I loved Goon Squad, I can’t say I enjoyed this one. I didn’t like most of the characters, and it felt like a lot of ideas were thrown at me without building a real human connection. Arguably, that is exactly the point of this book, since that is what we’re experiencing every day, and many of us long to turn it all off and go back to meaningful, simple, human connection. This was a very thoughtful, very complicated book – but it felt too “meta” for me. It’s a book about ideas, not a book that felt like it was about real people.

Maybe, if I reread Goon Squad, I would feel similarly. I know that book didn’t work for a lot of people, but it resonated with me. Maybe it’s a change in my own reading tastes – certainly books read differently at different ages. If you’ve read both, what did you think?

Note: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from NetGalley and publisher Scribner. This book published April 5, 2022.

Whoa. You have to know A LOT about a lot to really understand this book. Even if you don't know much about technology (gaming, portals), you can enjoy this book because it's Jennifer Egan, and I bet you loved A Visit from the Goon Squad like I did. I was worried that since it's been so long since I read AVFTGS, I wouldn't be able to follow this companion book, but honestly, it doesn't matter much. Does it enhance your reading if you have read AVFTGS? Absolutely. But even if you don't know the characters from before, can you still appreciate the gorgeous way Egan examines memory and authenticity in this book? Yes. This book really is about examining what makes us tick, and what makes us care about each other. I love that Egan is even trying to do this in this futuristic/dystopic/technological way. I am having a very hard time explaining this book, but that's because there's no precedent. You should read it for yourself, and you won't regret it.

The Candy House is another mind-altering reading experience from the author of A Visit From the Goon Squad.

An businessman/inventor offers a way to store your experiences including what everyone surrounding you felt about it (as long as you share your memories for all the world to see). It is a natural extension to our current social media experience. However, the book is written in short tales of different people’s experiences with the technology.

I think it would have been helpful to use some type of mind cloud program to keep all the characters and timelines straight. It took me almost half the book to see how some of the stories related to each other. Some never fit into the picture in my head. Is this a negative? Yes and no. Don’t read this book to relax before bed. Don’t try and read it in one sitting. It is more of a completive experience. Take it slow (and maybe take some notes). If you do, you will be rewarded with a completely different type of novel.

While this is labeled as a sequel to A Visit From the Goon Squad, it works fine as a standalone. Overall, The Candy House is an intelligent and innovative book that would be perfect for book club discussions. 5 stars!

Thanks to Scribner and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

As A Visit to the Goon Squad illustrated, our culture changes constantly, and it doesn’t take long for anyone to look around and think–how did we get here? Computers in our pockets are now a given. Social media has made it possible to communicate with millions of people, all at once, in seconds. We can now look up any information that comes to mind–except our own memories. But wait, what if a technology existed that allowed us to transfer all the memories in our minds to a device that showed us our lives, like a movie? The price? We’d have to share our memories to a collective. One more invasion of privacy.

Bix Bouton, of Mandala fame, has a new idea: Own Your Unconscious ™ . Many people will find this fascinating, then tempting. . Eventually, most people will happily accept this and their memories will become part of the collective.

Jennifer Egan creates a world in which we the people have been so minutely studied that there are algorithms that can predict our actions and reactions with very close accuracy. Even conversations are broken down to algebraic codes. And there are people who are employed to perfect the system–and then, there are eluders, or people who view Own Your Unconscious as a very bad idea for everyone.

Indeed, it becomes challenging to feel and express authentic feelings and thoughts. But people all have a need to do just that, and have a variety of ways of hearing their own voices over the den. There are enough characters in this novel to be challenging, as their stories scatter and converge over decades. This story is populated with souls I found to be likable, their stories compelling. There are too many wonderful plots to begin to discuss in a review. This book is pure genius, which may be what one character in the story called a “word-casing,” but it is an authentic thought, nonetheless!

Thank you to Scribner and Netgalley for the opportunity to review this superb novel.

This might be difficult to describe but this is more like an eclectic collection of short stories with a theme. Everything centers around the shared consciousness, Own Your Unconscious.

This book is provocative and is definitely sending a message to us on what is the good, bad and evil in our world centered around friends we’ve never met and if it is altering how we think and live.

I went back and forth from the audio to the print and while the book at times seemed chaotic to me, it did all fit together after the halfway point. It is definitely like nothing you’ve read and while I don’t normally read short stories, I like how these were tied together,