Book Review: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Candy House
If Goon Squad is an analysis of external human interaction and observation, Candy House is its internal counterpart. I found myself eating up the obscurity and winding narratives of Goon Squad, trying desperately to get to know and understand the people this story was about. Bennie’s insatiable desire for greatness, Sasha’s agonizing desire for ease, Ted’s inner turmoil about doing the right thing, Scotty’s complex insanity (which may actually be normalcy in an insane world).
I felt like each chapter revealed to me a little bit more about each of them. Candy House, on the contrary, I saw myself inside of instantly. I am Bix, I am Alfred, I am Miles. A relatively successful millennial in the digital age grappling hopelessly with a desperate need for real experiences, a frustration at others utter lack of resilience, and an existential fear that I’m wasting my potential.
It’s interesting that these two books exist in the same universe, as I felt the message and tone were so different. Goon Squad is about reckless youth and artistic inclination: all the winding paths creatives can take. The horrid existential dystopia of an overly digital world only comes into play in the very last chapter, through the lens of Alex who we fleetingly meet in the first chapter. Egan is an incredible story-teller, weaving together the lives of people who you wouldn’t remember know each other. Candy House begins within the conscious of the man who orchestrated this dystopia: Bix.
Bix is only in one chapter of Goon Squad but is the catalyst for all that is to come. It was delightful and terrifying to realize the events of the last chapter of Goon Squad were being contextualized through the mind of just one man in the first chapter of Candy House. All of Candy House takes place in this dystopian future, dictated by social media as metaphorical currency.
It’s eerily similar to our current reality and is in some ways a heavy-handed critique of our existing culture. What I love about Egan’s writing, though, is that it explores these themes through the vehicle of singular lives. I’m not sure if it’s because I read them back-to-back, but I feel like Egan accomplishes what Gabrielle Zevin was attempting to do in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: reckon with the intense complexity of a digitized and globalized world.
I didn’t intend for this review to be comparative, but I couldn’t help drawing parallels while I was reading. Biracial identity, class privilege, the real-time innovation of dangerous technology in a rapidly changing political landscape in elite cities. Many of the themes were similar, and while Zevin seemed to be mapping her own narrow experience onto her characters with surface-level analysis of systemic injustice, Egan has a limited though sophisticated sociological approach to these same themes.
As a sociologist myself, I was reveling in the nuanced complexity that Egan brought to every character. I found them flawed, as in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but in a way that feels real and empathetic. Any one of us might relate to any one of the Goon Squad or their kin. There’s a humility that she brings to her terribly flawed characters that made me acutely aware of Zevin’s pedantic pseudo-intellectualism in contrast.
Where Egan falls short, in my opinion, is where I think a lot of white authors fall short which is a lack of intersectionality. These are ultimately privileged characters with privileged problems. The casual transphobia in the very last chapter also took me out of it, nearly breaking the spell entirely. I’m never confident that white cisgender writers are nuanced enough to share different opinions from their characters. My confidence decreases dramatically when white feminist narratives become the focal point, as they did in Candy House with Lulu, Kitty, and Dolly.
Similarly, I am not totally sold on the concept of “What If Evil Tech Billionaire Was Black Instead?” It is interesting to me that she would choose to navigate the inner monologue of a Black man in an interracial marriage and his relationship with his racist mother-in-law. It would have been more honest to me had she explored this through his wife Lizzie’s point of view.
The ending of this series felt dissatisfying in that it humanizes a war criminal whom we are made to believe we should feel sorry for because he was a forgotten middle child of a wealthy family.
All that said, I still enjoyed it and think I’ll return to it. It’s one of those series that you’ll find something new every time you read it; there’s so much to discover and the writing is captivating. I loved experiencing all the different writing techniques from chapter to chapter — the epistolary elements in both books really ground you in each era that each chapter is in.
If you’re as big a fan of classic dystopia and as deeply afraid of social media as I am, you’ll enjoy these.
