‘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