Jennifer Egan’s ‘Goon Squad’ Follow-Up ‘The Candy House’ Examines Role of Fiction and Memory in an Online World

“Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free,” warns a character in “The Candy House,” illuminating the novel’s larger curiosity around Big Tech in its setting: a world where minds and memories can be uploaded to the cloud and accessed by others. “The Candy House” is Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to her 2010 novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Known for its inventive playing with form — each chapter can be read as an independent short story, with distinct and yet interconnected characters; one chapter is told entirely through PowerPoint — “Goon Squad” introduced some of the characters and storytelling techniques continued and expanded in this new novel. Egan joins us to discuss storytelling in our online age and why she considers this book an “homage to fiction.”