‘The Candy House’ by Jennifer Egan (2022) – 334 pages
Can you elude the Internet? Certainly not if you carry a cell phone or are using another computer. The cell phone or computer tells Google and whomever else exactly where you are. When you call someone else with a cell phone, the system could easily reveal both of your locations to each other, but they consider that an invasion of privacy, discounting the fact that the entire tech world already knows where you are. When using GPS, we are perfectly happy that the tech gods know exactly where we are. Perhaps someday there will be tiny tracking devices implanted into our bodies so they will always be able to keep track of us.
In ‘The Candy House’, we have eluders and also counters to track the eluders down. In the novel, we also have government-implanted weevils in some people’s brains, apps implanted there for specific purposes.
“Among civilians, terror of weevils was rampant in the post-pandemic years, a figment of the mass psychosis that characterized that time in American life.”
But later we have the following words of advice:
“Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are.”
‘The Candy House’ is a sequel to ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’, but I, having read ‘Goon Squad’ over ten years ago, remember none of ‘Goon Squad’s characters or plot scenes and will thus treat it as a stand-alone novel.
There are many different characters and plot lines in ‘The Candy House’, sometimes only marginally connected with what has gone before. This is cutting edge fiction dealing with our near future and the new applications that await us. The novel takes place in the near future, about ten years from now.
We start with Bix Bouton, inventor of the “Own Your Unconscious” app. which allows individuals to upload all their thoughts, feelings, and memories. The goal is to “externalize your consciousness”.
After Bix, the novel meanders from one person to another. Several tell their stories in the first person. These people may be hardly or not-at-all linked to Bix Bouton. And their stories may only be marginally related to what has gone before.
This is one of those novels when if for a moment you are unhappy or bored with the plot line or characters, relax, soon it will be somewhere else entirely with nearly all different unrelated characters. What is it about? Tough question.
The various stories were usually quite entertaining, but for me they didn’t cohere into a meaningful whole.
Maybe the internet has changed us so that we readers are no longer satisfied with only one straightforward story, and now we require multi-faceted works like ‘The Candy House’.
Grade: B
Tony's Book World 
Posted by Lisa Hill on December 20, 2022 at 3:50 PM
I have my phone’s location settings turned off, and it’s not synched with any other device. That’s as much as I can do that simple enough!
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Posted by Anokatony on December 20, 2022 at 4:40 PM
Hi Lisa,
So then you can’t use GPS and must rely on maps instead. GPS is kind of amazing.
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Posted by Lisa Hill on December 21, 2022 at 1:52 AM
I have a GPS thingy in the car. And I use it, since my eyesight isn’t good enough to read the small print, even on a large print edition of the Melways. I don’t think I can turn that off, I’ve never tried. But I only drive once, maybe twice a week, so Big Brother must be a bit bored.
It’s a good thing though it occasionally leads to hilarious results when it’s cloudy or there are sunspots or the gods feel in need of amusement. Once at the height of the terrorism paranoia it led us to the wrong part of an airport which brought the attention of the security service when we stopped to figure out where we were, and another time we ended up in a one way street that ended in a solid concrete wall.
But the phone is a different story. I choose whether to take it with me or not, mostly not. I don’t feel that I need to be available all the time. The way that young people are bonded to it depresses me. I think it depresses them too…
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Posted by Anokatony on December 21, 2022 at 8:16 AM
When I was a kid, our telephone was mounted to the wall. We were on a party line and our number was “two short and a long”. We could listen in on other people’s calls, but we didn’t. It wasn’t that long ago, when there were still phone booths.
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Posted by Lisa Hill on December 21, 2022 at 8:34 AM
Yes, I remember encountering that in country NSW when I was a teenager (but I don’t think there were party lines in urban areas at that time.)
My mother had a firm rule, no making or receiving calls after 9pm, and no longer than 5 minutes in duration. I still don’t like yapping on the phone with friends who want a ‘chat’. I’d much rather meet up in person (or with Zoom)!
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Posted by Natalie on December 21, 2022 at 8:24 AM
RE “mass psychosis” …
The official framing of the mass formation (or mass psychosis) “phenomenon” is misleading and wrong in terms of what the whole true reality is. The false hope-addicted psychologists and their acolytes want you to believe this is “just some temporary occasional” madness by the masses when it is but a spike of a CHRONIC madness going on for aeons with “civilized” people — read “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room –The Holocaustal Covid-19 Coronavirus Madness: A Sociological Perspective & Historical Assessment Of The Covid “Phenomenon”” …. https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
One of these mainstream psychologists who have been spreading this whitewashed reality, Dr. Desmet, also fails to see that the PLANNED Covid Psyop is a TOTALLY deliberate ploy because he doesn’t think (after more than 1 year, even 2 years, into this total PLANNED scam!) it’s ALL intentionally sinister as he stated in a prior podcast (this makes him witting or unwitting controlled opposition). It should be apparent that Desmet’s lack of truth-telling is then also present in his largely plagiarized truth-distorting mass formation theory.
In the May of 2022 podcast with James Corbett he stated that “some people tend to overestimate the degree of planning and intentions” (behind the COUNTLESS, VERIFIABLE, FULLY INTENTIONAL, FULLY PLANNED atrocities by the ruling tribe of psychopaths over the last century alone) and see all of it as being planned which Desmet called “an extreme position” … Sound logical thinking is “extreme” and therefore false and sick in his demented delusional view!
In his overpriced misleading whitewashing old material regurgitated book the psychology of totalitarianism he too states that “There are countless … examples that seem to point in the direction of a plan being implemented, such as the fact that the definition of ‘pandemic’ was adjusted shortly before the coronavirus crisis; that the definition of ‘herd immunity’ was changed during the crisis, implying that only vaccines can achieve it … [he continuous with several other obvious facts of an ENTIRELY PLANNED event, especially discerned through the totality of all these facts].” “SEEM to point in the direction of a plan”??? No! They most evidently, clearly, and irrefutably DO demonstrate and prove it IS a COMPLETELY AND FULLY DELIBERATE PlanDemic! A big scam. An Entirely Planned Holocaust against the non-ruling herd of people (see cited link above). A coherent 12-year old kid can figure that out. But not Mr. I’m entitled to teach my deep wisdom to the world professor.
It clearly shows Desmet’s own complete lunacy. But because almost everyone in the culture is a member of mass formation (madness), including the “woke” people of the alternative media domain, hardly anyone recognizes Desmet’s lunacy. Not surprising that he has even become some type of popular “guru” among the adherents of the alternative media landscape and his whitewashed fake narrative strongly resonates with both mainstream people and alternative mainstream folks.
“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance.” —Guy Debord
As expected, “useful expert” Desmet has been also advocating and pushing the false misleading dogma-based non-scientific holy mantra of trust the official science … “everything and everyone should follow the scientific consensus” [ https://archive.ph/9QRmw ] — meaning trust and follow the fabricated fraudulent official consensus science behind the Covid jabs that the killing of millions of people around the world is based on(!!). Are you STILL wondering whom he’s wittingly or unwittingly serving? That’s why it’s no wonder he’s been heavily popularized globally by the dominant psychopathic world instead of censored and suppressed (as lots of truth-tellers have been), yet in his crafty stylish total hypocrisy and public misdirection ploy, he wants you to buy his belief that everyone should have a voice. Everyone BUT the true truth-tellers is what the reality is.
With his SUPPORT of the Covid holocaust-driving official consensus science he OKAYS and PROMOTES the idiotic herd Covid mass formation (they way the masses “think” and act)! Yet in his absurdity, irrationality and lunacy, with his mass formation/mass psychosis notion he frames the problem as the public being a mere unaccountable non-culpable victim in this phenomenon (the gist of the circular argument is: the masses should change their thinking but they got brainwashed so they’re victims). Nothing could be further from the truth (see first referenced source above).
With his false use of language Desmet also obscures or hides the true reality instead of directly and uncompromising exposing it — aiding the obfuscation of the vital reality of what the ruling authorities really are. He speaks of ‘the elite’ (as he does in a number of podcasts) when, in reality, they are THE SCUM OF HUMANS because they are REALITY-VERIFIED PSYCHOPATHS (see referenced source above). Yet in the Corbett podcast he “teaches” us that we, the masses, need to start thinking differently. Right… how about YOU start with sane instead of insane thinking/talking/”teaching”/etc, Dr. Desmet?
How do self-styled “truth-tellers” wake up the masses to the so-called truth when they THEMSELVES use lies with their deceitful fake language???
No one is “teaching” or “waking up” the ignorant masses to the CORE truths with lies, with the official “language of lies” (see first cited source above).
This all means Desmet is ALSO a member of the masses of lunatics, an ACTIVE CARD-CARRYING MEMBER of mass formation!!! When, if at all, will he wake up from his state of mass psychosis, his “invisible” stupidity? When, if at all, will he face the TRUE and FULL reality instead of hiding behind fantasies such as his whitewashed “reality” of human civilization?
It shows we live in a global mental asylum with criminal and/or delusional mainstream psychologists, scientists, and docs as the guards, “teachers” and “therapists” … The blind/criminal/mad leading the blind/criminal/mad; the blind/criminal/mad adhere to the blind/criminal/mad = the human madhouse.
In October of 2022, once a few people caught onto his public-misdirecting game he took no responsibility for it but dishonestly and conveniently framed himself as the victim of frivolous attacks against him — https://archive.ph/9QRmw
Desmet is right in that truth-activists must fight against mass formation psychosis (human madness). That also means exposing HIS deeply destructive mad part of it. This comment serves, in part, that objective.
If you’re in the US and your employer mandates the toxic/lethal COVID jabs, register to receive a free “Medical Exemption Certificate” at https://drgastonmedicalexemption.com or https://lc.org/exempt
“… doctors and scientists are now on the same lever of public confidence as the scum living in the swamp.” — Unknown in 2022
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