The Candy House is a speculative fiction novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan, first published in 2022. The novel follows the intersecting lives of various characters in a series of stylistically diverse short stories as they engage with a future in which individuals can upload their consciousness to a digital cloud.
The novel begins with Bix Bouton, a tech executive and founder of the company Mandala, who is searching for his next new idea and feeling stuck in a rut. He attends a discussion group after a lecture from one of his biggest critics, anthropologist Miranda Kline, and learns about innovations in the field of digitizing memories and thoughts. This sparks his new concept "Own Your Unconscious," a program that allows users to upload all of their memories to a shared network and, in return, gives them access to a collective database of users' lives. Mandala uses "counters" to secretly gather data on its users to map and predict their consumer behavior patterns. Concurrently, the novel also describes the work of "eluders" such as Kline: individuals who attempt to outwit Mandala's invasive information collection by confusing the company's pattern detection. Towards the novel's conclusion, it is revealed, by Bix's lawyer, that he ultimately regrets the impact his digital empire has had on the world and decides to leave a massive amount of money to the CEO of a non-profit called Mondrian, Chris Salazar, whose products help elude data-collection. Bix hopes that by doing this he can correct some of the harm he has done. Egan tells this story through a variety of perspectives and styles, leaping back and forth through time. In the chapter titled "See Below," she uses overlapping email chains to show the ripple effect of a woman, Lulu Kisarian, trying to reconnect with her movie-star father after returning from a traumatic espionage mission. In "i, the Protagonist," she shows Salazar as a young man, working at newly-founded Mondrian, breaking apart story blocks into equations and finding himself forced into an uncomfortable situation when he takes an unexpected motorcycle ride with a colleague. By weaving these stories together, Egan's book creates its own wide-ranging trove of feelings and memories, not so dissimilar from Mandala's memory cloud.
Published by Scribner in 2022, the book is a sequel to Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, and revisits a number of the people and events from that book, while also introducing a new generation as it leaps forward in time. It received critical praise from publications like NPR and The New York Times, which noted its nuanced look at the impact of technology as well as its fresh perspective on the characters from the previous book.
