For Egan, they are also a way to explore the present quandaries of an Internet that doesn’t let anyone escape the past. Mandala’s creations are perhaps outlandish, but they are only half satire. Another of Bix’s products, the MemoryShop™, allows you to “externalize the portion of your memory” containing a painful event and then “reinternalize it with that part erased.” A small faction of “eluders” have emerged who refuse to have their consciousness uploaded. “By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online ‘collective,’” Egan writes in a chapter narrated by a minor character, “you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same.” The company’s Mandala Cube has enabled many wonders, like reliving your dead father’s first time smoking pot, or using the incidental memories of others to help you find long-lost acquaintances. All it takes is 30 minutes with electrodes attached to your head. Bix has invented a process by which memories can be exported to the cloud. You pay for infinite knowledge and entertainment with your data, your privacy, your dignity.īix Bouton, a friend of Sasha’s in The Goon Squad, is now the founder of tech giant Mandala. Whatever spoils you’ve obtained from it come at great cost.

It lures you in with promises of sweetness and then someone inside pushes you into an oven. It is the candy house in the novel’s title. But now the real problem is the Internet. We meet many of the same characters: Sasha, who has channeled her impulse for petty theft into creating sculptures out of trash Lou, who remains disgusting. In her new “sibling” novel, The Candy House, time’s passage is a foregone conclusion.

The candy house book review