“Goon Squad” used some narrative fripperies. For example, a chapter was told in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. In this novel, one chapter is a series of text exchanges. Lulu’s secret agent adventure – I was totally captivated – is told as a series of short, succinct directives, as if they come from headquarters.
These start off serious (“Your goal is to be part of its atmosphere”) and get more and more dire: “The homes of the violently wealthy have excellent first aid cabinets.” Egan doesn’t need these toys, but she feels comfortable with them.
I left out a lot: there is an academic who studies authenticity and cliché; an elite Chicago lawyer who’s been overthrown by drugs, slides down like on a corkscrew spiral, then gets a second chance; a man so intolerant of fakes and hungry for real reactions that he screams out loud, on public transport, only to gauge the reaction; girls whose cryptic mother left them to carry out the fieldwork in Brazil that led to the cube. If one of Egan’s characters exits through a window, she will return through the door.
All this is wrapped together; almost everyone is connected in some way. It’s all too much, except it isn’t.
Egan has a sinking sense of control; she knows where she wants to go and the polyphonic effects she wants to achieve, and she achieves them, as if writing on a type of MacBook that will no longer exist in ten years.
“The Candy House” and “Goon Squad” are the touchstone New York City and technology (literary trivia: Egan once dated Steve Jobs) novels of our time; they will one day be printed in one volume, I suspect, by the Library of America.
I could argue, I think, that the corners of this novel are too sharp, that it lacks a certain weight and drift. The implications of the cube on sex habits, online and offline, are oddly omitted. And the ending is tapioca soft.
Always check your wallet when a writer goes all in, like Egan does here, about the power of storytelling and of fiction. “The Candy House” makes that case simple by existing.