Jennifer Egan was in the midst of a book tour for “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” her 2010 novel that would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, when she began writing the first of several short stories that would become the building blocks of “The Candy House.” She wrote several rough drafts of chapters over the next few years, all set within the same universe as “Goon Squad.”
But it wasn’t until around 2018 that Egan realized she was working on a novel.
“It was really only over time that I began to have a sense of a new set of preoccupations that felt different from the preoccupations that I had had while I was working on ‘Goon Squad,’” says Egan by phone from her Brooklyn home. “I thought, hmm, if I can use some of these storytelling approaches to tell a totally different story, why would I not try to do that?”
“The Candy House,” published on April 5, is not a traditional sequel. You can read “The Candy House” without having read “Goon Squad.” Egan sets her focus on characters who had smaller roles or, in some instances, were only briefly referred to in the earlier novel. (Egan will be in conversation with author Danzy Senna at Los Angeles Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium on Tuesday, April 26, at 7 p.m.)
In “The Candy House,” a technology that allows people to store their memories, and gives others the opportunity to peruse them, connects characters and settings. As Egan darts back and forth through moments in the 20th and 21st centuries, shifting points of view and literary techniques all the while, the fictional technology feels wild and distant, yet frighteningly close-at-hand.
“I love approaching wildness in fiction whenever I can,” says Egan. “The way I would define it is, I really like it when I could be writing something that is clearly outrageous, and even comically ludicrous, and yet also plausible.”
And really, recording your own thoughts and sifting through the thoughts of others is what we frequently do while scrolling through social media platforms. “Probably we’re probably closer to it than we should be with social media,” says Egan. “I mean, do we need to find out how aggressive and mean people can be in their impulses? I think we all know that too well.”
Throughout “The Candy House,” Egan explores what it means to approach intimacy with others. How much should we know about each other? Is there really a benefit to gaining access to people’s private memories?
“Knowledge can be very uncomfortable,” says Egan. She adds that she was interested in the paradoxes surrounding data. In particular, she was motivated by the understanding that, even in a data-saturated society such as ours, the information doesn’t necessarily tell us everything we need to know. She points to events that data was unable to correctly predict, like the 9/11 attacks and the election of Donald Trump as president. But there’s also a limit to what data can say about individuals.
“There is a total unknowability that we all have within ourselves and to each other,” says Egan. “So the data predicts our behavior sort of in groups, but it’s useless on the individual level. And that paradox really fascinated me too.”
It was the inner workings of some of her characters that led Egan on the journey towards “The Candy House.” She notes that with “Goon Squad” there was a considerable amount of material that was ultimately not used. Because of that, she knew things about the characters that readers did not. “In general, if I know something, the reader also knows it. I don’t withhold information,” says Egan. “I had that feeling of information being withheld purely because of failed content.”
Amongst the critical perspectives in the book are those of the Hollander brothers, who were born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “They come of age during the internet, but in their early childhood, none of it happened yet,” Egan explains. “And I like the idea that their childhoods encompass this pivot from analog to digital, if you will.”
In one chapter, Egan flashes back to the 1990s as the middle Hollander child, Ames, is playing baseball in front of a crowd that’s not looking at their cellphones. “I’ve sat in many, many stadiums at that hour when the lights go on,” says Egan, whose own children have played baseball. “And what one sees now is a lot of underlit faces because everyone is everyone has a phone out. And I just really loved that sense of digging in in the moment culturally right before that started.”
Of the characters, she notes, “They were the characters in ‘Goon Squad,’ I think, who gave me the best vantage point from which to examine that pivot from analog to digital.”
One of the most interesting aspects of “The Candy House” is how it depicts interactions with technology and reactions to it from the perspective of a multi-generational cast of characters. To do this, Egan kept careful track of how old each character would be at different points in time while writing. “When you’re born is defining in one’s relationship to technology,” says Egan. “there’s no way around it and that is even more true now.”
Despite all this detail, Egan says that there’s a good amount of information that didn’t make it into “The Candy House.”
“I have to say that again, as with ‘Goon Squad,’ and even more in this case, I had a lot of failures,” Egan says. “I have as much first draft material that I wasn’t able to use as I have that I could use, so it was a 50% failure ratio in first draft material that really was alive enough to continue with.”
She adds, “I guess it’s just inevitable when I’m trying to use such extreme storytelling techniques that I have to wait a lot for the right story to adhere to the storytelling approach that will let me tell it.”
That’s a process that takes time. “I worked on ‘Goon Squad’ starting in about 2006,” Egan says. “So we’re going on 20 years of ruminating on some of these people.”
Jennifer Egan in conversation with author Danzy Senna
When: 7 p.m., April 26
Where: Los Angeles Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium, W 5th St, Los Angeles
Tickets & Information: https://lfla.org/event/the-candy-house-a-novel/
