FICTION: The Candy House, Jennifer Egan, Hachette, $32.99

In year one of the pandemic, I used to click on Instagram posts, maybe a picture of someone’s dog, and then click on the name of a stranger who’d liked the photo. And then I’d repeat, the images loading across the world – from Melbourne to maybe Nashville, and then on to Bogota or Mumbai. Everywhere: puppies, meals, bored teens staring back at me. We were severed from the world and yet linked. It comforted me in my five-kilometre zone.

Jennifer Egan’s new novel mines the shifting online connections that have fed off the collective consciousness for 20 years. Like Patricia Lockwood, who somehow found the poetry in Twitter in her 2020 debut No One is Talking About This, Egan finds a space for storytelling that harnesses new tech for age-old emotions.

The Candy House is a follow-up to her dazzling 2010 novel, A Visit From The Goon Squad, which pursued a cast of characters backwards and forwards through different eras and narrative techniques in a suite of interconnected stories. The titular goon squad is time, coming to ravage us all, but for all the bleak comedy of her dystopian scenes, this was a novel full of grace notes: memories and revelations and even moments of hope.

In the intervening 12 years, Egan proved she could write a straightforward historical novel with her racy World War II-era Manhattan Beach. But now she’s come back for the future, bringing with her many of the characters she played around with the first time.

Bennie, the San Francisco punk turned music producer, still looms large, providing both the sequel’s emotional engine and title, when he muses: “Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.”

The Candy House expands on Goon Squad’s universe by replacing Facebook’s current hulking presence with a metaverse of Egan’s own creation: a social media platform called Own Your Own Unconscious. The invention of a minor character from the first novel, this allows users to upload every memory they’ve ever had into the cloud, where in an anonymised form it can also be shared with everyone else who uploaded their identity.

The idea is hardly new, or even that far from what we signed up for, what with Facebook’s daily prompts to share the memories. Egan’s world is only a shade more invasive than the one we already inhabit.