He's forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalising" memory. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea.
“Nobody would be dumb enough to do this.” And so, the world, and the families, in the book split between those who embrace the technology, epitomized by senior empiricist and metrics expert Lincoln, who narrates his own love story in the touchingly funny form of data analysis and those who eschew it, like the people at Mondrian, whose business is helping “eluders” of the Collective Unconscious.From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time comes an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own - featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad. “Once the Internet was inside your computer rifling through your music, what else might it decide to look at?” one of them asks, unbelieving. Going forward in the book and backward in time, we see the anthropologist’s daughters encountering the notion of music-sharing via Napster. When we meet Bix Bouton, he’s already a “tech demigod on a first-name basis with the world,” having started a social media company called Mandala, based on (some say stolen from) an anthropologist’s “formulas for predicting human inclinations,” laid out in her book “Patterns of Affinity.” His next big idea is Own Your Unconscious - that externalizing of memory that can then be uploaded to the Collective Unconscious. Some of “Goon Squad’s” people reappear here, but perhaps more to the point is the appearance in passing of someone from Egan’s 2001 novel, “Look at Me.” To the point, because that startlingly prescient novel anticipated the conundrum of digital reality, with a model selling her reinvented self online to viewers craving “authenticity” - and the question of authenticity is central to “The Candy House,” which speculates further down the digital line, to a time when people can “externalize” and save and share their experience and memories. Midway into Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House” you may find yourself moaning, “Why don’t novels come with an index?” A “sibling novel” - per Egan - to her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” this book takes a similar form, with a considerable cast of intricately connected characters shifting through different configurations in interlocking stories set in the recent past and not so distant future and told in a dizzying variety of ways.
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