Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Jennifer Egan - The Candy House
Reading The Candy House is like witnessing a magic trick by someone whose already proven they're made of something supernatural. You're expecting it, but are awed maybe even more so the second time around.
This has been gaining steam in the realm of avant-gaurd fiction, and while it's not a bad status to have pinned on you, it's mostly just literary fiction at its finest, done daisy chain style with each chapter picking up on the POV from a previous chapter's supporting character.
The candy house is that intangible something that keeps enticing us to give up pieces of ourselves to anonymous companies so we can stay wallflowers on the great, mind-altering experiment that is social media, a 'tongue-and-cheek nostalgia acting as a portal through which we hope to lure in and bewitch the next generation.'
Through this kaleidoscopic, multi-POV narration, people can externalize their consciousness, saving it for their later selves or opting to have it uploaded to the publicly-available collective. It's an implicit conversation on whether having unprecedented access to other peoples' minds is bettering our understanding of each other. The technology flips the concept of 'how will you be remembered' to 'how exactly were you.'
Egan is the only writer capable of brushing off trapeze-perfected format twists with ease. In the series' first book, A Visit From The Goon Squad, she disorients readers with a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation. In Candy House, there's two: a chapter told 2nd POV as a field guide for spies (MIND MGMT style) and another as a long interconnecting email chain with cascading consequences.
Egan makes a cakewalk of literature as sci-fi, gesturing and teasing the world building rather than fisting it down your throat. She could easily win a 2nd Pulitzer for the sequel, but I'm sure it'd be as meaningful to her as praise from a single fan. Her radar operates on a different frequency, and we should all pause long enough to bask in its brief but insanely bright glory.