Culture
A Visit to ‘The Candy House’
One other is launched as an outsider teen visiting a suburban nation membership; the subsequent chapter finds her using her adolescent presents for infiltrating the lives of strangers on an precise spy mission in 2032, her physique outfitted with subcutaneous electronics that make her right into a sort of human smartphone. The latter chapter is written completely in second particular person, within the voice of a discipline guide’s directions, which flip wistful because the agent uploads delicate information by a port in her foot: “You’ll really feel a surge as the information floods your physique. The surge could comprise reminiscence, warmth, chilly, longing, ache and even pleasure.”
Egan is a one-woman R&D division of language. (One in every of her characters cash the time period “word-casings,” for phrases which have been overused till they change into like “a shell with no bullet.” Egan fires dwell rounds solely.) One chapter, “i, the Protagonist,” follows a former English main employed to render story situations algebraically for an leisure start-up, a fashion of considering that bleeds into his life. When a cabdriver strands him after a disagreement, Egan renders it thus:
However a schism had occurred between a and i
a ≠ i
a ←→ i
i
LOL. Our pal i, by the way in which, is Chris Salazar, son of Bennie Salazar, the punk rocker turned music govt who rises and falls in “Goon Squad.” Though “The Sweet Home” is filled with such connections and reappearances, you don’t actually need to have learn “Goon Squad” to observe it. However there’s no must deny your self the pleasure, and the thematic connections could also be much more vital than the plot tissue.
Simply as Egan’s music-world characters have been obsessive about authenticity, by way of artwork and promoting out, her “Sweet Home” characters search the real self in an period when persons are always known as on to carry out themselves digitally. One writes a dissertation on “authenticity within the digital period.” One other goes a extra direct route, growing a behavior of shrieking in public locations to catch the briefest glimpse of unpremeditated human responses.
This compulsion places a crimp on his social relations, however who isn’t pushed a little bit nuts by digital life? Time and again, Egan’s characters crack up, seemingly past restore, however handle to seek out redemption. “The Sweet Home” takes its title from a repeated metaphor for temptation: the lures of amusement and nostalgia that Hansel-and-Gretel us right into a spun-sugar edifice upon which we’re invited to gorge and during which we — our needs, our reminiscences — are additionally on the menu.
If “The Sweet Home” is much less cohesive than “Goon Squad,” it could be as a result of its topic is more durable to get one’s arms round. The story doesn’t describe an arc a lot as a community diagram; it doesn’t finish, it stops. The most important criticism I could make of “The Sweet Home” is that it kicks us out simply when it appears to be getting began.
However that can be the strongest reward I may give it. Egan is aware of that she will by no means provide a whole image of the worldwide consciousness, solely an evocative impression. The problem of a novel whose topic is, in a single sense, all the things is realizing what to go away out, a dilemma that “The Sweet Home” meta-acknowledges repeatedly. “Understanding all the things is an excessive amount of like realizing nothing; with no story, it’s all simply info.”
One response to the overload of this modified world is to write down fiction, which, like Personal Your Unconscious, additionally exists to faucet reminiscence and make connections throughout lives and deaths. Bix, notably, hangs on to a weathered copy of “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s hundred-year-old try and weave a world huge net between two covers. “The Sweet Home” is way more accessible, however it’s likewise an formidable effort to deliver an infinite community all the way down to human scale. To which I say, within the language of our real-life collective consciousness: favored and subscribed.