Bix Bouton is a stony-faced “tech demigod”, the founder of social media mega-entity Mandala. It begs to be read alongside its more extroverted sibling, and to consider, in the space between them, the deflations – incremental and otherwise – of the last decade.Įgan begins on the sharp edge of an epiphany. As befits its title, The Candy House is a novel of Easter eggs – of hidden in-joke treats. Minor characters are thrust into the thick of things formerly major characters make Hitchcockian cameos. The Candy House is less a sequel to Goon Squad than a fraternal twin. It’s this sense of paradoxical isolation that Egan revisits in her new book. In an era of screen-curated selfhood, autofiction surged instead.Ī dozen years on, and Egan’s cult novel now feels like the end of something, a kind of techno-optimist elegy: a study in time’s “incremental deflations”, and the loneliness of hyper-connectivity.
But if A Visit from the Goon Squad carried the promise of a grand wave of tech-inflected fiction, that literary trend never quite materialised. And the plot ricocheted like a browsing-addled brain. The cast was a neon collision of kleptomaniacs, philanderers, It girls, autocrats and a guitar band called the Flaming Dildos. One chapter was written entirely in PowerPoint slides another in textspeak (“if thr r children, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?”). It was a tale as gimmicky and restless as the smartphone era threatened to be. A visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer-winning rock’n’roll novel, felt like the beginning of something.
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