Egan continues to incorporate each generation’s peer groups from school and work, and now we see the youngest children as adults. Here, in chapters that span roughly the 2010s to the 2030s, Egan unspools subsequent events in the lives of The Goon Squad ’s principals-the record executive Bennie Salazar his mentee, Sasha Blake and his mentor, Lou Kline (the original three generations)-accoutered with spouses and innumerable unhappy offspring. Calling it a sequel is more accurate at least I can’t imagine rewards to its readers that don’t include renewing acquaintances with old friends. It seems to mean that she trundles out The Goon Squad ’s methods to try them again. The Goon Squad seemed to promise deeper significance because the novel was also reading the news.Įgan bills her new book, The Candy House, as a “ sibling novel,” a curious bit of nomenclature. Egan’s epigraph was from Proust, but The Goon Squad proposed Google and Facebook as inspiration, and “the wish-fulfillment fantasy these portals offer: What ever happened to … ? ” Meanwhile, at the edges of scenes, surveillance cameras, the internet, post-9/11 national-security paranoia-the invasions of public recording-were at work unsettling the realm of private recording: the intimate pop-music soundtracks of individuals’ lives. The approach called out for thematic justification, and the literary techniques suggested technologies of the moment. Glimpses of the main action through the eyes of minor characters (some deranged, some children) supplied the glue.

The puzzle-box precision in the ordering of chapters-and the narrative medley, varying past and present tense, first and third and even second person-turned an ordinary generational portrait into a mosaic. The effect was to accentuate the melancholic gap between ambition and actuality. The chapters took the protagonists from their 40s-when they were already in decline after appearing on the culture’s radar as moguls, musicians, publicists, journalists influential in the recording industry-to their hopeful beginnings in high-school-band rehearsals and college-dorm musings.

Racing back and forth in time (between the 1970s and the 2020s), the book found its center in the chastened view from middle age. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan