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Jennifer Egan, Dan Bittner, Michael Boatman, Nicole Lewis, Thomas Sadoski, Colin Donnell, Griffin Newman, Rebecca Lowman, Jackie Sanders, Lucy Liu, Christian Barillas, Tara Lynne Barr, Alex Allwine, Emily Tremaine, Kyle Beltran, Chris Henry Coffey, Ali Andre Ali, Corey Brill, Danny Campbell, George Newbern, Timothy Andrés Pabon, Gibson Frazier, Allison Light, Travis Tonn: The Candy House (AudiobookFormat, 2022, Simon & Schuster Audio)

audio cd

Published April 5, 2022 by Simon & Schuster Audio.

ISBN:
978-1-7971-2840-5
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(2 reviews)

7 editions

Magical realism meets surveillance capitalism

Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House” straddles the line between magical realism and sci-fi—and I am here for it.

Anthropologist Miranda Kane’s 1995 book, “Patterns of Affinity” lays bare exacting formulas for predicting human behavior. She could never have anticipated Bix Bouton seizing on these ideas to expand his surveillance capitalism juggernaut: “Mandala” (the novel’s answer to Meta/Facebook).

Later, in 2010, while fretting about the future of Mandala, Bouton infiltrates a college discussion group of Kline’s work. There he learns of experiments to externalize people’s memories into machines.

Bix uses the research as the inspiration for “Own Your Unconscious”—a way to relive your past (including everything you’d forgotten).

Later, Mandala introduces “The Collective”—a pool of memories users can tap at the cost of releasing their memories for others. The collective is a database searchable by geolocation and time—enter the date and place and watch events unfold through the eyes of any …

Review of 'The Candy House' on 'Goodreads'

An extension of A Visit From the Goon Squad that carries those notes of worry with aging and an additional layer that seeks to make sense of memories, finality, and the idea of a person's story in within the overwhelming scale of the world. A lot of spinning parts that can sometimes be hard to track over more disparate generations yet have delicately interwoven pieces that don't necessarily need to be revelatory. Sometimes it's enough just to be, knowing when to look away and embrace that knowing everything is unnecessary.