In the tradition of the realist novels of the 19th century, the cast of The Candy House is wide and varied. What my students taught me about reading: old books hold new insights for the digital generation
In particular, she is concerned with how we struggle to find our place in the world, and form and maintain meaningful relationships with others. What interests Egan is not technology for its own sake, but how it has transformed human experience at both the individual and social level. Unsurprisingly, he is horrified at what it will do to his bottom line. One example is the reaction of a music mogul to the long-forgotten Napster, the free music-sharing platform. Sure, the novel brims with characters and through-lines (I hesitate to call them storylines) that bear witness to the rise of the internet since the 1990s. But such a narrow term does a disservice to Egan’s nuanced treatment of the theme. One is Lincoln, a “senior empiricist and metrics expert”, whose world view has become so dominated by quantification that he subjects his courtship of a female co-worker to an ongoing analysis that involves units of attractiveness and odds of success in relation to his rivals.Īnother is Chris Salazar, who works for a start-up entertainment company that is attempting, in a tradition stretching back to the Russian Formalists, to reduce movie storytelling to standardised elements – stockblocks – which he converts into algebraic equations.Īt first blush, it would appear the main concern of The Candy House is digital technology. There are also characters we might call quantifiers, for want of a better term. Then there is the reclusive Miranda Kline, the late-blooming anthropologist whose research on “affinity and trust”, based on her study of a Brazilian tribe, is appropriated to drive Mandala’s social media revolution, in a way that is the perverse opposite of her intention. Mandala’s flagship products include Own Your Unconscious and The Collective Unconscious, programs that allow people to upload the content of their minds, which can then be shared on a global online platform that allows subscribers to relive memories and experiences. She opens a window not just to the America that is, but the America that may very well come to be.Īmong the novel’s teeming ensemble of players is Bix Bouton, tech entrepreneur and helmsman of Mandala, the company he has formed to realise his vision of the next quantum leap in social media and virtual reality. In particular, she shows herself to be both shrewd and adept at assembling the right characters to develop her themes. In this bustling, multifaceted report on contemporary consciousness, Egan more than delivers on her claims.
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