Jennifer Egan’s second episodic novel, Candy House. – Culture

While digital life fragments our attention spans into chunks of a second, literary forms behave in opposite ways: epic storytelling produces novels that are many hundreds of pages long, seriously moral ones like those by Jonathan Franzen or emotionally overwhelming ones by Hanya Yanagihara. The sense of reality suffers from the variety of reality offers available online, but in the novel one relies on good old realism. Even surpassed by the claim to the truthfulness of the autofiction, with Knausgård or Annie Ernaux.

Literature puts the world in order where it messed it up just a few decades ago. Does anyone remember how in Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” a crime writer posing as a private detective named Paul Auster found the writer Paul Auster in the telephone book, but then disappeared soon after, so that Paul Auster of all people is now making his notes on the novel “City of Glass”. could? Was that a long time ago? Forget the mask games of postmodernism, the metal epsis, the game with non-linear storytelling, the euphoria of hypertext. Thinking in networks, jumping between profiles of self is now everyday life, bitter, bland, exhausting. People long for stable stories, and authors apparently do too.

American writer Jennifer Egan is one of the few who hasn’t lost her sense of narrative possibility and humor. In 2010, to the amazement of the world, she wrote a popular novel in which she changes form with each chapter, one of which is told as a PowerPoint presentation, for example. There had to be something human even in that interface, and Egan wrote in presentation slides of a particularly sensitive child. A Visit From The Goon Squad was an episodic novel set in the post-9/11 mood: Egan sampled the stories of a group of loose acquaintances who were involved in rock music in New York or with public relations or with drugs.

The teenage idols of just now aged unwell, young lovers became third wives

She contrasted precise character drawings with leaps in time and style changes, but proceeded more casually, not as weightily as David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon. She could also rely on the habits of a readership schooled in the episodic storytelling of relatively new series television: The decade of The Wire and The Sopranos was just coming to an end. It worked, Egan received the Pulitzer Prize for the book, and enthusiasm was unanimous.

Despite all the fun in the form, there was a palpable melancholy in the central question of the novel, “what happened between A and B”, which was to be understood both narratively and biographically: the teenage idols of just now aged unwell, young lovers became third wives of men of questionable influence and unhappy children. Something seemed irretrievably lost, not only in the Manhattan skyline: “There would have to be some be, you know,” says one character: “At least a kind of echo.” The other person replies: “They’ll put something there.”

In fact, today there is something again on the site of the twin towers. And we’ve simply lived past the feeling of “A Visit From The Goon Squad” that “everything comes to an end” a few times now. A new episodic novel by Jennifer Egan is now eagerly awaited, in which characters from the first reappear. In terms of storytelling logic, one would have to say that “Candy House” is the second season, and there’s no harm in binging on the first.

From the “collective consciousness” you can load other people’s experiences

The new novel begins with a guy you saw sitting in the background in the previous novel, hunched over a computer in the next room of a quartz shared flat. This goes with the anecdote of how Steve Jobs, with whom Jennifer Egan briefly dated in the 1980s, is said to have installed a brand new Macintosh in her bedroom one night. In the presence of her new book, tech mogul Bix Bouton is now so famous that he can no longer walk around New York unnoticed. He thinks of his past, which we know from the first novel, as a time that “would soon be obsolete”, he foresaw the discovery of the Internet and changed it with his social network “Mandala”. The question now is whether he will succeed in making such a groundbreaking innovation a second time.

In the previous novel, Jennifer Egan blended the high spirits of the pop culture years and the struggle against old age with a mellow sunset vibe that seemed to be characteristic of the turn of the millennium. “Candy Haus” is about decades of rapid technological evolution, creating lifestyles, problems and characters that were just thought impossible. To mimic the numbing optimism with which human consciousness adapts to its expansions through mobile devices, apps, data traffic, Egan must now escalate the new we’ve always been accustomed to: In their near-future scenario, Bix develops Bouton an external memory for the subconscious. This allows you to look at your own memories from the outside more completely than you can see them in front of your inner eye.

Of course, soon there will also be a cloud, a “collective consciousness” from which you can download other people’s experiences. There are dataminers who catalog motifs and gestures from television series and real human relationships and make them calculable in formulas. “Proxies” are created from the data, placeholders that keep digital identities alive while the people behind them retreat into anonymity.

Small devices called “licepods” send signals directly to the brain, because where information can be extracted, information will of course also be sent in. One chapter tells Egan in terms of commands sent and received internally by a woman named Lulu as a remote-controlled secret agent: “For best results, formulate the thought clearly in your mind.”

Dissociative tricks, such as letting a character slide through different levels of fiction using the proper name “Paul Auster”, were formal experiments in the old postmodern era. The author proudly retained power over it. Now, characters reeling between dataformed, drug-dimmed, filtered versions of themselves are a plausible part of the narrated world. But even a fearless storyteller like Jennifer Egan finds it shockingly little to understand them. That is the great disappointment of this novel, which is perhaps indicative of our Biedermeier phase of the digital age.

Egan’s characters don’t believe for a second in the utopia that such a memory shared by everyone could mean: finally an objective look at the truth of others, absolute empathy, with all the political consequences. Instead, even in such a radically delimited world, people are primarily looking for protective corners for their fragile selves. Egan portrays a family man who only finds peace when he looks at his family on his wife’s Facebook account. A girl finds her own image in her father’s memories tinged with contemptuous thoughts. It turns off immediately. In general, the children of the hippies, potheads and punks of yesteryear are not looking for union with the world spirit in the external subconscious, but above all their parents, i.e. for a lost love that would only apply to them.

The question of how one would still talk about individuals at all if subjective differences in perception became accessible en masse is more radical than art has dreamed of since films like “Rashomon”. Would one have to invent collective narrative perspectives? Jennifer Egan reacts noticeably limp to such claims. “The collective”, it says towards the end of the son of the tech founder Bix Bouton, who has become a writer of all things: “He perceived it even without technology. And the stories it contained, whether all-encompassing or individual – he would tell them. ” The defiant self-assertion of a literature that resolutely withdraws from the disruptive violence of technical progress and apparently does not want to compete with it. Although you would have thought Jennifer Egan the first to do it.