Well, like all structures, it lets me do a certain set of things that I cant do any other way. That story picked up on a character from Goon Squad, much later in her life, and Im wondering if that was the gateway story for The Candy House? Anyway, there were good times, but then there was this refrain of fear. Never trust a candy house is also the advice of Miranda, who becomes an eluder, part of a movement of individuals who install a robotic proxy in their existing digital identity and then vanish into the offline world. One took place as a New Yorker Live event, on Zoom, in June, 2022. I had to start over, honestly. Egans outputshe has published seven books of fictionis notable not for its uniformity of style and approach but for its ever-shifting ambitions and obsessions. Yes. I reached a point where I just couldnt go on. My first stepfather had a good friend who was this kind of wild man named Loy Weston. You said, Read it. That is a kind of catalytic discovery for him that gets him out of his house and into action. So I think my house would have to be covered with hard candy: shiny, delicious nonfood. Youre giving the Internet access to your own music and your own computer. We have an Encyclopdia Britannica collection still! Little by little, I began to get a sense that in the twenty-thirties, which I was writing into, theres the possibility of thought sharing. 63 talking about this. We all have passing encounters in our lives that leave a memory but not enough of one to flesh out with any sort of information, and I kept thinking about how I could do that. And so that hope for transcendence actually undermines improvement. But no one knew I had sent it. My favorite candy is definitely Snickers, but what I found myself thinking about with The Candy House, especially as we searched for a cover, is that candy can actually be very beautiful. dvelopper et amliorer nos produits et services. I mean, invisibility is a joy if you can reinhabit yourself eventually. Eagan, who graduated from Boston College, will join WCVB after more than five years at WHDH 7News as a general assignment reporter and fill-in anchor. One bravura chapter, reminiscent of the famous PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad, is told in directives conveyed to an undercover agent through an implant in her brain. Its not polemical. . If you go to a graveyard and see how many women were dying in their twenties, probably in childbirth. First of all, I should say that I showed very little promise. One example of that is a character named Sasha, in Goon Squad, who likes to steal. I know for sure that Im smarter if Im writing. I still dont. One of them, much revised, ended up in my first collection. I just thought that was the book. Im thinking a lot about the nineteenth century right now, the eighteen-seventies in particular, and about what catastrophic loss most people had experienced by adulthood at that time, and how different that must have been from now. EXCLUSIVE: Jennifer Egans best-selling novels A Visit from the Goon Squad and its sequel The Candy House are getting the TV treatment in a big way as A24 All of this feels more at ease than Goon Squad, a novel Id never thought of as betraying any strain until I read The Candy House. In youth hostels, I was thrown together with a couple of remarkable women whom Ill always remember. And I think I felt that gave me some sort of control or ownership of whatever was going on, whether it was good or bad. But at least Id have got some work done. You dont need to know me to know what they are. The people who shot out of the gate, full of promise, sometimes didnt follow through fully. Later we find him running Mondrian behind a nonprofit front that organizes Dungeons & Dragons games for recovering addicts. Its so easy to say. Its now 2010, and he finds himself back at the East River at midnight, in the same spot where he stood with his friends all those years ago, and he is kind of flabbergasted to realize that he cannot remember much at all about that morning in 1993. Yes, thank God. I really left Twitter behind in the moment of entering into the story itself. I just knew that everyone kept mentioning it. Im not sure that it will be deeply related. I think the first time it happened was in a youth hostel that was in a kind of high-rise building in Reims. How could revisiting that time in its unfiltered state improve upon the story her memory has made? she realizes. J. Smith-Cameron knows what everyone thinks about Gerri. Ive settled on the eighteen-seventies because it strikes me as the last decade before all the inventions that we think of as twentieth-century, though really theyre not: widespread camera use, widespread combustion-engine use, incandescent light. It was like vanishing. It allowed time travel within the book. Her formal invention, her willingness to try anything, her attention to language, and also the way her books are full of ideas, and shes grappled with eras. It was this little room on an empty hallway in a modern high-rise. One of their leaders, Chris Salazar, is the son of Bennie Salazar, a central character from Goon Squad. Our consciousness is not like a camera. Im interested in people who are not like me. And it was on that trip that somehow the goal of writing became very clear. So she made my life possible. And Im so happy, actually, that I was like that, because I ended up having so many encounters and conversations that I wouldnt have had otherwise. Sunbeam Television Corp I wanted to be a famous model, and thank God I did so badly at it, because would I have walked away from more success in that realm? Chris starts out working for company seeking to turn what it calls stockblocks, narrative components from movies (Funny Best Friend Gets Serious to Talk Sense Into Protagonist; Crowd Rises to Its Feet in Unexpected Tribute), into mathematical formulae, although to what end he cant tell. I was thinking about this list of utterances that I was generating in the voice of this person on her spy mission. but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. Its so true. I have to find the story that can only be told that way. The title of the book is clearly a warning, but I also think of it as more neutral. But Tom was kind of nonplussed. I guess what Im saying is that I dont have judgments about technology, actually. My moms a huge readershe taught me to read, and weve been exchanging books and book ideas ever since. And, in a way, Ive never wavered from where I was heading within the first couple of weeks of arriving there. I realized that Phils focus was on getting at emotional truth, which, in a way, matters more than anything else. What is the appeal of that structure for you? A questionable service, but he was extremely successful. increase. And, if I create these very diverse, smaller units that still fuse into a larger story, it can give the book a kind of power that a straight-through novel doesnt have in the same way. So I let all of that go. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. And, somehow, I came home feeling quite sure that writing was the thing I had to do. Are there noncrime writers who have been inspirations for you? The annual clinicRead More, ORANGE CITY, Fla. (WHDH) An alert bystander is being credited with saving an 8-months old life after a Florida mother left the baby inRead More, A dedicated 20-month-old pup is making a major difference at Franciscan Childrens Hospital in Brighton. Things felt very fragmented to me. I was so alone. Is that a matter of principle or just how it works for you? See what you think. The second took place on a dark and rainy afternoon in January in Egans high-ceilinged but homey living room in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, after I had displaced one of her three catsThats Cuddles, our dim beautyfrom her spot on the couch. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. So many! It becomes so easy, I think, as a middle-aged or older person, to just settle into your own experience. So I read English literature, which was fantastic, because I had been an English major at Penn at the time when literary theory was predominant. Send me updates about Slate special offers. Its interesting that you said that that story, The Stylist, was the first one you put ideas into. The fact that Ive spent time on this doesnt mean that I need to spend more time on it. He was a straitlaced businessman who was madly in love with his wife. I think there was an advantage to having pretty low expectations for myself, and having the wish to write come more from a sense that it would complete my experience of reality than that it would bring me acknowledgement from the outside world. Chris calls his organization Mondrian, presumably in tribute to his grandmother, who kept an authentic Mondrian painting in a modest tract home so impossible to secure that no company would insure it. Highlights from the week in culture, every Saturday. And then I tried to write a novel, which was absolutely terrible, but I think my problem was more that I had not figured out what my method was yet. And then more contemporary people: I was a huge admirer of Robert Stone. I had just turned eighteen. Then the next crucial test is what happens when I start writing in this way. And then you imagine new technologies for the future. Its also remarkable that Tom Jenks said, You can do better. How much better is that than saying, This is the best you can do? Thats where the Collective Unconscious would come in handy. Usually my test is whether I really have no interest in continuingif it feels better to walk away than to continue. but that wasnt true. Which means uninteresting. Instead, The Candy House contemplates what role the imagination could still play even when other peoples livesand the forgotten periods in our ownhave become easily and totally available. At that point, the Goon Squad world really faded from my mind, except when I was thinking about abstract ideas that were interesting to me. And it wasnt just loneliness. It was kind of like that. There were also some really good Agatha Christies I hadnt read, particularly The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is just a knockout. Most young people think theyre the center of the universe, and you thought you were a shadow person. As in Goon Squad, Egan rifles through an assortment of fictional styles and motifs to tell these peoples stories. I still dont really know. How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? Jennifer Egan is not only publishing a new novel but its a sibling sequel to her Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Critics Circle-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad.. Like Goon Squad, The Candy House features a cast of intersecting characters: a tech tycoon who spearheads a new era of online sharing, an anthropologist who But this process of finding out very early what is alive and what is notvery basic questionsis, for me, really, really critical. And, if youve got to pick one, emotion, for sure. Shes witnessing a moment of liberation in her fathers life but also the beginning of the end of her parents suburban marriage. And then, if they wish, they can share all or part of their memories to a collective, the Collective Consciousness, and that ends up being an important development that plays out through the course of the book. The books you come across randomly at that age are the books that stay with you. And I feel it is essential that I do precisely the opposite. But the good part was that she paid me enough to live on, and I worked from 1 to 6 P.M. on weekdays. by Jennifer Egan RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2022 Egan revisits some characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) and their children to continue her exploration of what fiction can be and do in the 21st century. WebCopyright WHDH-TV / Sunbeam Television Corporation. So, for example, when I started working on Manhattan Beach, I was trying to establish the voice, which is one of those elusive concepts and yet a totally necessary element of successful fiction, and I had this idea that I think was left over from Goon Squad, in which I took a kind of winking approach to time: the reader often knows what happens before the characters do, because the story moves backward. Were in such a tender moment culturally, for good reasons. Ive thought about trying to teach it. I felt that there was nothing to be involved with when it came to myself, that everything worth thinking about was outside of me. Just like producer Tyrone Johnson, she became a major on air presence on the Fanatics afternoon show. I think maybe I was the inverse of that. There was no pressing reason for the PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad to be written in PowerPoint besides proving that Egan could do it, but the email/text chapter, titled See Below, could only be written in this form. And so that gap year became about trying to earn money so that I could travel, and I ended up going to Japan as a model for March and April. So you get these bolts of approval that sometimes come a little bit too soon, in the sense that theres no way to really follow up. In terms of technology, its so hard for me to evaluate what is good and what is bad, because I am kind of afraid of all of it. And I had this idea that my year would be devoted to archeology. I find myself thinking more and more about how a good crime book works and why. I ended up editing the literary magazine. But, to me, it was just enthralling at that point. It was like eating exactly the protein that my body wanted. All rights reserved. Not only thatI had saved every map and drawn circles around each site that I visited. Jennifer anchors NewsCenter 5s Weekend What are they saying? Often there is a kind of stylistic hangover from the previous project. What would your candy house be coated in? Weve talked about your recent books but not about the beginning of your career. A candy house, on the other hand, is just a trap. If A Visit from the Goon Squad is about time and music, The Candy House is about experience and art, although the novels four sections (Build, Break, Drop, Build) refer back to the musical structures of Goon Squad. Egan was born in Chicago, and her parents divorced when she was two. The Slate Group LLC. Theres not a lot of filler in Jennifer Egans radiant new novel, The Candy House, a sequel of sorts to her 2010 Pulitzer-winning bestseller, A Visit From the Goon Squad. But one sentence in the new novels penultimate chapter does strike me as unnecessary. The Collective Consciousness offers something very appealing, but it also has a dark side, and Im wondering if you surprised yourself with the manifestations of the technology in the book. And even then a lot of the people I was interviewing, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, were already in their eighties. All content Copyright 2000 - 2023 WHDH-TV. I couldnt seem to make anything much happen. You said that you dont write about yourself or people you know in fiction. But I had put myself in such an isolated situation, a kind of isolation that hardly exists anymore. Steve Eagar is a reporter and evening news anchor for Fox 4 News. Like, this is working well, and, plus, I dont even know how to write a story like that. Witnessing all these differently motivated agendas gradually coalesce into a creative force is an exhilarating delight. I never would have imagined you sitting there, looking at Twitter, and saying, I think the Homeric Mediterranean combined with a 2030 spy mission is the perfect story for this form.. I gleaned this device and its various properties more from first-draft material that I started writing in those early years, from 2010 to 2013. Phoebe sees her sister as having been real and herself as being kind of a shadow person. I put it in the mail, and two days later I had a message on my answering machine from Dan Menaker saying that he wanted to publish it. But sometimes the limitations actually feel bizarrely freeing, and I have this sense of possibility and opening and a voice that can continue. I feel such a hunger to do things that I dont feel Ive done before, she told me. So that is what interests me about that decade, and the fact that New York had a population of a millionit was a city, it had the grid that it has now, this house existedbut a few hundred miles west the landscape was still undeveloped and contested and in the process of being stolen. It was definitely one of the most difficult first-draft writing experiences that Ive had. How did you decide which characters from Goon Squad to explore in The Candy House? I just told the story in a much more straightforward way, and it was an absolute relief to do that. Let people know whats coming. It fuelled this constant desire for information. In some cases, I didnt even type the chapters up; I could just feel that they were sort of inert. And my then stepfather, I think, got Loy to persuade one of these modelling agents to bring me over. At one point, he stole a bride away from her own wedding. I dont know if I can really explain it, but that was what I thought: other people were more real than I was. And that was it. Photo by Getty Images Plus. But I will say that I worry about what happens when theres no more solitude, because, without it, Im not sure if I would ever have figured out any of the things that have made my life great, you know? I sent this book to Romulus Linney. I really want to continue with the time frame that I started with Manhattan Beach. 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