Book Review :: The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (☆ ☆ ☆ ☆)
“To hell with God,” Fern said. “I’m worried about the Internet.” “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity that may be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you think you’re choosing for yourself?” - Jennifer Egan
What a wild ride this book is! The Candy House is an inter-weaving story of stories with each one written in a different and distinct style - examining relationships and technology and our relationship with technology! There are so many interweaving stories and characters, as well as writing styles, that I highly recommend a hard copy so you can flip back and forth and keep everyone straight. This was also my IRL Book Club’s pick for last month, and the discussions were fire - so much character deep diving!
The book begins with the story of Bix, a tech tyrant going through a bit of a mid-life crisis and trying to come up with ideas to keep himself and his company relevant. He develops a technology called Own Your Unconscious which allows you to access every memory you've ever had, and the ability to share them and see the memories of others. It puts your memories in a “cube” that you can choose to share with your friends and family and the greater world. The idea is: “Upload today” from Mandala (his company) - I can 100% see the edges of this / feel like this could happen in the modern technology landscape!
From there, the book weaves together stories loosely connected to Bix and Mandala and the question of how much access do you give people to you? What is privacy and how much value do your privacy hold for you? The characters and storylines are wildly different - both in writing style and storyline, but the author does an amazing job of weaving in these themes throughout the book.
Read if you like: Recursion by Blake Crouch or A Visit from The Good Squad (the loosely connected prequel by the same author) or like watching Black Mirror!
