'The Candy House' is a brilliant portrait of intersecting lives
In Jennifer Egan's novel, there is a persistent, lovely countermelody to the corporate project of mapping human experience; it's full of people engaged in a sweeter and more plaintive human algebra.
I drew a character map while reading Jennifer Egan's The Candy House, just for the pleasure of charting the swooping, kaleidoscopic intersections of parents and children (and cousins and tennis partners and drug dealers) of a central set of people first introduced in her 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Mapping people in relation to each other is one of the central activities of characters in these novels — anthropologists, publicists, anxious high schoolers, or employees of social media companies all seem to be asking, What makes people matter to each other? And can you predict or control it, either for love or for profit?
first introduced Mindy, a beautiful 23-year-old anthropology student on safari with the much older
