5/21/2023 0 Comments Manhattan beach egan summary![]() ![]() Jennifer Egan’s new one, The Candy House, is one of these novels. You’ve entered elite head space of one kind or another. Sometimes.you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle-not necessarily because it’s a great novel qua novel, which you can’t know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions. ![]() The challenge of a novel whose subject is, in one sense, everything is knowing what to leave out, a dilemma that The Candy House meta-acknowledges repeatedly. Egan knows that she can never offer a complete picture of the global consciousness, only an evocative impression. The biggest criticism I can make of The Candy House is that it kicks us out just when it seems to be getting started.But that is also the strongest praise I can give it. The story doesn’t describe an arc so much as a network diagram it doesn’t end, it stops. If The Candy House is less cohesive than Goon Squad, it may be because its subject is harder to get one’s arms around. ![]() Egan is a one-woman R&D department of language. It’s not the A-plot, it’s the soundtrack. She doesn’t construct a master story arc around Own Your Unconscious and its spinoffs instead, they’re just a fact of this world, part of the stuff that goes on in the background. Egan is after more than a cautionary tale she is interested in describing social technology as a lived environment. a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes. ![]()
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