Book review: The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

By Simon Demetriou

What really ties us all together?

If you were given the opportunity to upload your unconscious to a shared network that would allow you access to all the memories and thoughts currently hidden beyond your reach, would you do it? Even if this meant that everyone else in the network had access too? Especially if it also meant you had access to everyone else’s unconscious? Do you yearn for a world where live-streamers simply stream from within their own brains so that instead of watching you can live their experiences through your VR headset? If it were possible to become a citizen agent infiltrating the world of the violent rich simply by having a number of technological implants that allowed you to become a living monitoring device, would you jump at the chance?

These are all possibilities in the world of The Candy House, a world fashioned by Bix Bouton, the creator of Mandala, a company that first created social media and then destroyed it by moving towards the ‘authentic’ realm of shared consciousness.

Or would you elude? Give over your identity to a sophisticated proxy, get yourself scanned for ‘weevils’ – consciousness monitoring brain implants – and drop off the grid? This, too, is possible, because parallel to the world of Mandala is the world enabled by Mondrian – an underground company run by DND enthusiast Chris Salazar.

Within, between and around these two interdependent worlds exist an array of interdependent characters spanning the mid-90s to the 2030s, through whose stories, consciousnesses and verbal interactions, the human network that makes up Jennifer Egan’s novel is built. These stories include that of Alfred Hollander, a kind of grotesque, adult version of Holden Caulfield, whose loathing of phoniness leads him to take up screaming in public just to see authentic human responses. And Lulu Kisarian’s attempt – told solely via a convoluted and often hilarious email exchange – to meet her movie-star father whose obliviousness to her existence haunts her after her return from service as a citizen agent. And Menora Kline’s history as daughter of music impresario Lou Kline and anthropologist Miranda Kline, whose book on Brazilian tribespeople codified the laws of social interaction that Bix Bouton would adapt and monetise in his creation of Mandala. And more.

What all the stories have in common is a searching for some kind of truth, some kind of authentic relationship with self and/or other. The novel’s brilliant conclusion is that really, the shared consciousness for which characters yearn is the human imagination that unites us all in childhood. And that, in fact, the machine that allows us to connect authentically to the infinite well of humanity has been right under our noses all along.