drollgorg 's review for:

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

4.25

emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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I found it a bit trickier to sort out my feelings on this one compared to its progenitor, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan's ability to write really moving character moments or epiphanies in plain language, unadorned but still carefully crafted, remains fully in effect here. However, it felt a bit like a repeat of the first one's trick, following characters that didn't initially originally present a particular reason to follow them. I think where I shake out is that The Candy House offers more novel ideas and thematic resonances to consider, but fewer moments of emotional connection with its characters. I think Bix and Gregory Bouton, whose chapters open and close the novel, were maybe my favorite expansions from the first book/derivations from its original themes, especially given that Bix was such a footnote in the first. And Lulu's "citizen agent" chapter is something I will probably remember in isolation from the rest of the novel for a very long time, it functions as an excellent, terrifying short story purely on its own strength, connection to the rest of the novel aside. 
Other parts of The Candy House are a bit less impactful- in general, things work as a character story, or a thematic/idea piece, but generally not both, and in a few cases neither. The email chapter was kind of a waste, it felt like it was only there because I'm sure the Powerpoint chapter in the original got a lot of mentions and Jennifer Egan wanted to return to having part of the book written in a new, unconventional format. The best parts are those diving into new territory, with the book's particular focus on the paranoia generated by increasingly advanced and theoretical methods of surveillance, or the seeming impossibility of both originality and anonymity in a world of exponentially increasing cataloguing of information and ideas (which in this novel gets extrapolated into the next iteration of the Internet being a growing collective consciousness into which people's memories, even those they no longer remember themselves, can be scanned). The least impactful are the handful which are basically a "hey, did you ever wonder what that named background character from Goon Squad got up to on their own free time?" 

Still definitely worthwhile, either standalone or to follow up the first- my preference here may not be shared depending on what character stories you personally respond to.