Jennifer egan the candy house6/4/2023 “And one thing I know from experience is that, in order to do new things, I have to do them in new ways.” Egan repeatedly breaks down the walls of form and genre to play with conventions and the reader’s expectations-one chapter of “The Candy House,” for instance, is written in paragraphs of a hundred and forty characters or less, and was first published as a Twitter thread. “I feel such a hunger to do things that I don’t feel I’ve done before,” she told me. Egan’s output-she has published seven books of fiction-is notable not for its uniformity of style and approach but for its ever-shifting ambitions and obsessions. “Stories so bleakly wrought that they make me eerily happy.” Egan’s latest book, “ The Candy House,” from 2022, now out in paperback, is just what that reader described: a series of sometimes bleak, interlocking narratives of unloved childhood, struggling adolescence, confused youth, and wary or regretful adulthood which are nevertheless shot through with a soul-warming sense of compassion.Īlthough the book is a kind of sequel to Egan’s Pulitzer-winning novel, “ A Visit from the Goon Squad,” from 2010, it takes place in a changed world, one dominated by technologies that in the earlier book had not even been conceived of. “Stories like Jennifer Egan’s make me want to continue my subscription to The New Yorker and discontinue my prescription to anti-depressants,” a reader once wrote in.
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