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Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House opens with Bix Bouton, a tech wunderkind desperately searching for his next big idea. He stumbles into a late-night gathering of college professors, one of whom is theorizing about downloading memory. Within a decade, Bouton’s “Own Your Consciousness” technology, which allows you to access every memory you’ve ever had, has changed the world and the people who live in it. This new world spawns groups like “counters,” who track and exploit people based on their memories and desires, and “eluders,” who are not willing to pay the price of this technological advancement, and who interact with each other through a series of interconnected yet increasingly stylistically ambitious and creative stories. Throughout all of this theorizing about the impact of technology on society, Egan explores the importance of human connection, relationship, loss, and love.

I have always found Egan to be a deeply intellectual writer, using her writing to explore her interest in the intersection of humanity and technology. The same holds true in The Candy House. Functioning more as a series of short stories than a pure novel, each chapter is from the perspective of a different character. Some chapters are directly about Bouton’s new technology (which, very simplistically, revolves around uploading your memories to a publicly accessible cloud) and how it impacts society in the near future. Others are seemingly not connected to the tech at all, focusing instead on a particular character who pops up later in another story in a lesser role, their subsequent appearance revealing the connection to technology hidden in their own story. Additionally, each chapter reads as an exploration of a particular literary genre with Egan putting her own spin on accepted genre structures while maintaining the throughline of her story. It’s a complicated map, yet Egan manages it confidently, never dropping a single thread. She writes with the utmost confidence, befitting her intelligence and skill.

Honestly, though, I don’t know how I felt about it. I have often found Egan’s writing to be warm yet somewhat inaccessible emotionally, as if she doesn’t want you to get too close. And yet the theme of The Candy House is hugely relevant–a warning about the dangers of lived technology and its impact on what makes human connection so deeply important to our lived experiences. But here’s the thing. I don’t know if I actually like her writing. This is the third book of hers that I’ve read, including her most famous, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which shares characters with The Candy House. But I have no memory of those other two books. Like zero. I reread my reviews of both of them, and nothing jogged my memory. And I honestly expect the same thing to happen with The Candy House. It was good, it was thought-provoking, it was interesting, it was remote, and I can barely remember character names as I’m writing my review notes. Even now, as I write this review, images from different chapters flash through my head, but I can’t put those images into context other than some from the opening chapter about Bouton’s visit with the college professors.

And I don’t know, maybe that’s the point? Or maybe I just don’t connect with Egan’s writing on an emotional level? I’ve talked to a few others who have read The Candy House, though, and they feel similarly. It’s a hard book to describe and a hard book to connect to, even if it is timely and relevant and objectively well-written. Sometimes, though, it’s good to read things that challenge us in these ways and make us go, “Huh.” And I think that is The Candy House, and Jennifer Egan’s writing as a whole, for me. I am confident that I will read more of her work, and I hope one day I will connect more with her writing. But at least I know she will make me stop, think, and go, “huh,” even if I don’t fully get it, and that is worth something.