This flattening effect ends up mimicking Egan’s very critique of online culture by editing out the boring bits from the dozens of characters who race across the novel with what can feel like the speed of a screen scroll. Whatever the case, Egan too often resorts to a novelistic shorthand of easily recognizable types that flattens rather than deepens characterization. Perhaps she sensed that there are simply too many characters for the average reader to keep track of in a relatively short novel.
More problematic is Egan’s tendency to define characters by typically contemporary obsessions or character tics. The radical textual shifts that follow - one chapter is told entirely in tweets, another in emails - feel dated and beneath Egan’s ability. The social and personal consequences of that innovation fuel the rest of the novel. We are brought up to speed in the first chapter with Bix Bouton, now a super-rich tech guru in search of his next Big Idea, which turns out to be a social media platform that uploads an individual’s memories into the cloud, where they can be shared like Instagram posts. “The Candy House” follows several of “Goon Squad”’s characters (and their offspring) as they transition from the pre-digital America eulogized in that earlier novel to a culture and economy defined by Big Tech. So it is surprising and disappointing to find that her latest novel, “The Candy House,” largely replicates “Goon Squad”’s showy set pieces and multiple narrative threads while failing to reach its emotional depths. “Goon Squad”’s formal daring - a key section is rendered as a PowerPoint presentation - tempered by nuanced characterization and a sombre, nostalgic tone, feels both like a finale to the works that preceded it (such as Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”) and a sign of things to come (Ben Lerner’s “Leaving the Atocha Station”).Įgan herself followed up “Goon Squad” in 2017 with “ Manhattan Beach,” a brilliant historical family saga that cleaved to more traditional storytelling strategies. Looking back, the publication of Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which won Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010, can be seen as a bridge in literary fiction between the hyper-ironic experimental novels of the aughts and the more reflective, ideologically charged work that followed.
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