Day 3: “The Candy House” by Jennifer Egan
Besides baseball, another awesome thing about a holiday weekend is reading. This weekend I’ve been obsessed with The Candy House, the latest book by Jennifer Egan.
Egan has a knack for peering into the not-too-distant future and showing you a world that has been altered by technology. Her riffs are plausible but not inevitable, which is what makes them so fascinating, compelling, and disturbing. For example, The Candy House begins in 2010 with Bix Bouton, a social media megamogul, worrying that he “can’t do it again.” Later chapters, set in 2023 or later, encounter characters living in the world that Bix has (again) changed: Through a technology called “Own Your Unconscious,” Bouton’s company, Mandala, now allows any consumer to have their entire memory downloaded and made reviewable. While many cannot resist the urge to review and relive their past, the technology also gives rise to the more powerful - and potentially sinister - Collective Consciousness, in which the memories of anyone in the system can be accessed and viewed. Want to know what your peers really thought of you during your rebellious phase? Want to know what a famous person was really like to those who knew them? Much of it’s there, accessible to anyone (anyone willing to pay a fee to Mandala, that is) in the Collective Consciousness.
The title is a reference to old fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel in which the children can’t help treating themselves to candy from the witch’s house, even though they know it will probably lead them to ruin.
Egan’s characters aren’t living in a dystopia. That would be too easy to write off. Instead, like us, they’re abruptly moving down a path of technological change that makes many wonderful things possible but always seems to create just as many complications as it resolves (or more). In the end, Egan’s characters are not victims, but neither are they victors. They remain ineluctibly human despite all the “progress” humanity has achieved, suffering for and finding comfort in the innermost sphere of human existence that technology - even in the age of the Collective Consciousness - somehow can’t reach.