In 1995, when Jennifer Egan was doing press for her first book, The Invisible Circus, her marketing strategy involved good old-fashioned snail mail. “I was handwriting postcards to friends of friends, saying, ‘I have a reading, will you come?’” Egan, a self-described “hustler,” says with a smile. “Now that’s a little bit hard to imagine, but, ya know, I am doing the equivalent.” Today, the equivalent means Zooming in from her home in Brooklyn, where she’s lived for over 20 years, to discuss a new novel that, appropriately enough, imagines technology’s future.
The Candy House is partially set in a not-too-distant time where humans can externalize their minds. By uploading them to something called a Consciousness Cube, the characters can access all of their memories—and by going one step further and electing to share their memories to the Collective Consciousness, an open-sourced database of the population’s memories, they get access to the recollections of everyone else who’s done the same. For instance, you could relive your wedding, or, perhaps more usefully, a third birthday you don’t remember, from the perspectives of family members and friends who have shared their memories with the Collective.
Egan imagined The Candy House as a companion piece to A Visit from the Goon Squad, her 2010 novel that won the Pulitzer Prize. Many characters reappear, as does the book’s unique structure. Each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view, resulting in an almost psychedelic narrative that jumps around in time (The Candy House goes as far back as 1965, and as far forward as 2032) and plays with form (one of Goon Squad’s most celebrated chapters was written as a series of PowerPoint slides; The Candy House features a chapter told in a series of Tweet-length directives—“Tell the truth without precision”—and one told through email correspondence).
The new novel also probes some of the ideas initially raised in Goon Squad about our increasingly digital future: How do interactions in the online world affect our sense of space and time? What happens when we have access to more information about ourselves and the world? Does social networking make us more or less authentic in our interactions with one another? Though The Candy House plays these questions out in a fictional world’s past and future, the answers have something urgent to say about the present. In fact, when Egan first started writing, she found herself imagining a cataclysmic event taking place in the 2020s; she couldn’t quite figure out what it was, so, in the meantime, she simply called it “the rupture.” Guess what all-too-real crisis went in that slot?
“This leads me directly back to what fascinated me about the idea of the Consciousness Cube,” she says. “I think we all know so much more than we know. We can feel certain inevitabilities not through some airy-fairy thing, but because they are inevitable. It’s no accident that science fiction ends up being predictive.”
GQ: The characters in this book return from A Visit from the Goon Squad. When did the seed for The Candy House get planted?
Jennifer Egan: I was already imagining [these characters] beyond Goon Squad by the time it came out. In 2010, on my book tour for Goon Squad, I started a novella [Black Box] that ultimately became “Lulu the Spy, 2032” [a chapter in The Candy House]. There are all kinds of strains of ideas that I gather. I kept imagining a list of wishes, which was always growing and shrinking, some of which were about characters to pursue. I also have a list of things I want to try structurally. Then when they’re beginning to cohere around some sense of time and place, that’s when I can actually try to write something. It was probably 2018 that I really thought, “Okay. I think it can be a book.”
I was looking for a book-size preoccupation that could gather together and unite this disparate material. I was thinking about the paradox inherent in data analysis, that it’s both tremendously revealing about human behavior and yet completely unuseful on the level of the individual. Individuals remain completely unknowable, even as we are so knowable and even predictable in groups. Another paradox about data is that we are as close to knowing everything as we’ve ever been, and yet we are terrible at predicting anything. We can predict for marketing purposes, but we can’t predict the big stuff.
The other preoccupation was space. Goon Squad examines time through the lens of the move toward digital. I found myself thinking, well, what about space? How has our perception of physical space been altered by digital experience? During the pandemic, I started thinking, “Wow, this was really the right thing to be thinking about.” Because what do we even mean by “space” anymore?
That leads directly to consciousness, because consciousness is one of those things that is everywhere and nowhere. Uncontainable and yet utterly contained. It cannot extend beyond each of us individually. Again, it’s a paradox. It feels infinite, and it feels so small in that it’s unnoticeable to everyone except ourselves. If I feel extreme pain right now, you can’t feel that. For me, that is so much more electrifyingly mesmerizing a concept than looking at the stars and thinking about the planets.
Which explains your Emily Dickinson epigraph [“The Brain—is wider than the Sky—/ For—put them side by side—/ The one the other will contain/ With ease—and you—beside—”], which captures it so well.
So does the [James] Baldwin one [“For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”]. We often describe freedom, or the lack of freedom, using metaphors of space. I feel cramped, I feel crowded, I feel trapped. We have a notion that if we could just get beyond our boundaries, we would experience this kind of release. That’s exactly the lure that technology offers us: access. That’s the Internet’s great gift: the candy house. What it took so long for many of us to understand was that we actually were and are paying for the access. It’s just that it’s a new idea of what payment is: an attention economy.
Your books are rooted in particular moments in American history. It seems to me you have probably have a strong grasp on how our culture has changed throughout time. How do you think technology and social media is changing the cultural stories we tell ourselves?
It’s hard for me to judge the way social media has impacted our storytelling, because I feel I’m too old to know. I’m very wary of weighing in on a genre that I don’t consume with a lot of interest. But I will say a couple of things that are interesting to me.
I feel social media so inundates us with this moment, in its fullness and its encyclopedic everything-ness, that it makes it harder for us to have any more historical perspective than we naturally do, which is not a lot. I say this as someone with a terrible memory for history. But I feel we have perhaps too great a sense of our uniqueness and the uniqueness of this moment. That ahistorical [sense of] “It’s never been like this before.” I think maybe the truth is we’ve just never had so much of this before. It feels infinite and it crowds out everything before it. That is a distortion that concerns me. Also, I’m certainly not the only one to say it, but news cycles go very quickly. Things feel both overwhelming and totally fleeting.
Then there are very obvious things, like human beings have a tendency toward narcissism because of the way we’re constructed. We are the center of our own infinite universes. One of the tensions in life is between the selfishness and self-involvement that is inherent to our condition as totally isolated beings, and the collective action and empathy and community that bring out the best in human beings, and what leads us to solve problems on any large scale. That tension has increased by the encouragement to sell ourselves as individual products in the marketplace.
But I don’t feel very judgemental about it because I don’t feel I understand it well enough. In the end, I have a very opportunistic feeling about all of this. My thought is always, “How can I co-opt this? How can I do that in fiction?” Which is hilarious, because the cultural power of fiction is extremely limited, but I think about it as if it can just eat everything.
What do you mean the cultural power of fiction is limited?
Well, if you think about the 19th century and how important fiction was because there was so little else in terms of storytelling. I’m talking about, let’s say, before 1870: no recorded music, no telephones, no film.
When you said that, I immediately thought of politics, and the stories we’re telling about what America is. In that way, cultural fictions feel very potent right now—and, in some ways, are what’s driving our partisan divide.
You may be using the word fiction differently than I am. You mean people just telling stories. That is another question. Storytelling is so basic to human art-making. It’s so basic to human life. The proof is our dreams. We make art every night when we go to sleep. It’s incredible to think about that. No wonder human beings have always made art. We do that in our sleep—literally. One of the things that’s so scary is that everyone has access to all the same tools of disseminating their stories, but the stories don’t align. We really don’t agree on what reality is. That doesn’t make me think about fiction. That makes me think about psychosis. Because that is what psychosis is. I find that so frightening.
I say this as someone whose beloved brother was a schizophrenic. We talked all the time about what a struggle it was for him to be receiving data in the form of voices that seemed to be completely real, but weren’t. It was a handicap for him. It made his life really hard. But I feel we, as a culture, are slipping into that in a mass way. It’s terrifying. Very bad things happen when people can’t perceive reality. But fiction is something different because it is intentional. That is the use of imagination to create art, not the misinterpretation of facts into an alternate reality that is ultimately distorting.
You’ve been writing portions of The Candy House for a decade now. And the environment you’re writing about—our contemporary moment—was not static, but changing and evolving as you were writing. How did that state of flux change the writing?
In a way, precisely because things are changing so fast, I knew that whatever I did would have to not hinge upon any vicissitudes of technology evolving in the moment. I had to think about things in a much broader way. But I’m not sure the writing was really affected by much that was going on around me. In fact, there are mentions of the pandemic in the book, and I did write some of it during the pandemic. But often [in places] where I mentioned the pandemic, I had been using another concept from the beginning called “the rupture,” which was some before-and-after event that I was positing had taken place by the 2020s. I wasn’t naming it because I didn’t know what it was. When I returned to the material in 2016, I thought, “Ah, maybe it was Trump.” But that wasn’t enough. It was more like something terrible resulting from Trump. The pandemic fit perfectly into that slot.
Was that eerie?
I’m so used to it. It’s been going on the whole time. This leads me directly back to what fascinated me about the idea of the Consciousness Cube. I think we all know so much more than we know. We’re bathed in this moment and there’s so much more. I think we can feel certain inevitabilities not through some airy-fairy thing, but because they are inevitable. It’s no accident that science fiction ends up being predictive. For example, the pandemic has been predicted repeatedly by medical experts for decades. And 9/11, all of the information was there. The interpretation part, the storytelling part, didn’t happen in a timely fashion. It only happened retroactively.
Now I’m thinking of the Proust epigraph in Goon Squad: “The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific merely reduces but does not abolish.” It felt like the Consciousness Cube was almost an attempt by these characters to abolish all that’s unknown between us.
I think that’s true—and also to actually have a chance to revisit one’s own experience as an adult, at a later perspective. I’ve recalled certain fleeting interactions and have wished I could know who they are and what they do. I was also thinking about Prince Caspian, the second book in The Chronicles of Narnia series, where people jump into pools and each pool leads them to a different world. So I had an idea for a book in which each chapter is a pool that leads you into a different world. These were all ideas that I was gathering up and hoping to explore narratively. In the end, they were things that my imagined machine lets people do in the fictional world. The machine is really just an analogy for what I wanted my book to do.
It’s also what we all do, in that we’re omniscient narrators of our own lives.
We’re omniscient, but unreliable. Because our memories suck. What we remember is selective. Sometimes that really bothers me. I’ll remember a moment—but what about every other moment around that one? There’s so much lost—or not “lost,” but where is it? It’s as good as lost. Again, my frustration about that led me to posit the existence of some machine that could solve that problem. I have a lot of ideas that are actually terrible ideas, but then I just put them into my fiction as other people’s ideas.
I have a lot of bad academic ideas. I love Cezanne and sometimes think, “I wonder if he’s actually painting sound?” I remember thinking about how cicadas sound, that almost shrieking sound of summer and thinking, “I think that Cezanne was hearing that, and he was trying to paint that. I wonder if you could write a whole academic treatise about this.” One minute later I thought, “That’s probably the worst idea ever, but maybe I can write about someone who has that idea.” So I’m thinking about lame ideas all the time and then putting them into my character’s heads where they become really fun.
It’s interesting you brought up The Chronicles of Narnia—as I was reading your book, I came across a C.S. Lewis quote, where he uses the phrase “the thing itself,” which you also use a few times. I read it at the exact same time that I was reading your book. That was eerie.
That is really eerie. I did love those books. I haven’t revisited them in a long time. His vision was very Christian. So my guess is that “the thing itself” was the prime mover. That sense of not getting to the thing itself is something that interests me so much. Actually, back to your question about social media, that sense of not getting to the thing itself is inherent in all forms of mass media, because we’re seeing something that is not there. The paradox is built into the experience. It is a presence and an absence always. From what I hear, one thing that makes social media so hard for younger people is that sense that I was really burdened with as a young person: I felt that other people were real and I wasn’t. My life was somehow a simulacrum or a fake, and other people were living these deep, visceral lives. I think that feeling and that worry is so much stronger now and so much more pervasive because of social media.
[Social media] tries to satisfy our longing for authenticity by giving us totally mediated and often deeply inauthentic material, which then briefly satisfies belonging for authenticity, but in the end leaves us craving authenticity even more. Really what we’re feeling is that paradox of presence and absence that is always inherent in images. When I talk to younger people, they’re so curious and they want to scroll and see all the stuff, but there is this weird feeling of emptiness that comes along with it, and a yearning that seems to be inherent to image culture. This is just something that we now live with as an everyday feeling.
It’s that feeling of being in the ocean and looking at the horizon, thinking you’re supposed to be there, and trying to approach, but it just keeps moving farther and farther away.
There’s something very human about it. It explains the religious impulse. The longing for transcendence is the longing for the thing itself. For me, writing satisfies that longing. I have the experience of transcending the boundaries of my own life, both as a reader and a writer. Fiction does that thing for me that images can’t do. That longing to bridge the gap between ourselves and some imagined, better other is so deeply human. It’s routed into mass media in ways that are very profitable to certain entities, and very enjoyable for us in moments, but also draining in ways that we sometimes don’t understand.
Do you try to impart these lessons to your kids?
Oh my God. The last they want to hear from me is my warnings about their screen time. They think I’m a maniac of screen hatred. First of all, they’re so much savvier than I am about all of this. They’re productive people. They seem to be managing this stuff fine for all my terror and all of my unwillingness to let them have it at younger ages which they, I think, will never forgive me for. No one is interested in the lessons I have to teach about this. Certainly, my readers are not. And honestly, I am not interested in reading anyone’s lessons about anything, even things that I really care about. I’m so not interested in didactic fiction. Fiction is really about asking questions. Even when I think I have the answers, I often am wrong. That’s the joy of it.
In Goon Squad, there’s a sense of a collision, between the things the characters want to do when they’re young and then the limits of what they actually have time to do as they get older. There’s a gap there. Having had the success you’ve had and having now completed your seventh book, how is that gap—or non-existence of that gap—feeling at this point in your life?
I feel lucky that I’m able to publish and that I have many readers. That feels like a gift. I’m always asking myself how long I can hold onto it. Not that that’s a motivator, because I don’t think chasing that gets you anywhere. But I’m always wondering how long my luck will hold out. Part of that is just that my success was so incremental until Goon Squad and I was already well into my 40s when that book came out. I understood really clearly how amazing that success was. I don’t know if I would’ve understood that if it had happened earlier, I might have thought, “Yes well, this is just how it goes for me.”
The only thing I really care about work-wise—I’m not talking about family and love and all that—is continuing to get better and do things I haven’t done before. So far, I feel I’ve been able to do that, and find readers for it. You cannot really ask for much more. I hope to continue doing new things and to entertain readers. Because I do see it as entertainment. My goal is to make people miss their subway stops, or their highway turnoffs, if it’s an audio book; or burn their toast, if they’re in the kitchen. I just want to lift people out of the everyday. That is what I crave, and that’s what I hope to give.
This interview has been edited and condensed.