Jennifer Egan on the Literary Pleasures of the Concept Album

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jennifer Egan’s new novel, “The Candy House,” one of the most anticipated books of the year, has just been published. It is related—not a sequel exactly, but something like a sibling—to her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” from 2010. That earlier book was largely about the music business, and Egan, a passionate music fan, has described its unusual structure as having been inspired by the concept albums of her youth. “The very nature of a concept album is that it tells one big story in small pieces that sound very different from each other and that sort of collide,” she tells David Remnick. “I thought, How would I do that narratively? I ask myself that all the time.” We asked Egan to speak about three concept albums that influenced her, and she picked The Who’s “Quadrophenia,” about a disaffected, working-class mod in the nineteen-sixties; Patti Smith’s “Horses”; and Eminem’s “Recovery.” Plus, a story about two young boys, obsessed with basketball cards, who schemed to get a rare triptych card from a third friend. Decades later, their ill-gotten prize might be worth a lot of money—but whose money is it? The staff writer Charles Bethea looks at the grown-up consequences of a childhood prank.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.7	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:13.1	The author Jennifer Egan is out with a new book this month and it's called The Candyhouse.
0:19.0	It's a kind of follow-up to her novel A Visit From The Goon Squad and that book from
0:24.5	2010 won a Pulitzer Prize. Now Candyhouse revisits some of the same characters and it's definitely
0:31.8	one of the most anticipated novels of the year. Goon Squad was largely about the music business
0:37.8	and that's not a surprise because Egan herself is a tremendous music fan and her ideas about
0:43.4	structure and form often owe something to the albums that shaped her as a young listener.
0:50.8	You know, I came of age in the great era of concept albums and they were so literary.
0:59.4	First of all, there were pages, there was paper, my friends and I poured over the lyrics and
1:05.1	the images and the very nature of a concept album is that it tells one big story in small pieces
1:13.8	that sound very different from each other and that sort of collide.
1:17.9	I invited Jennifer Egan to tell us about three concept albums that may have influenced her
1:23.4	over time and she started in 1973 with the Who's Quadrofemia, which tells the story of a
1:30.2	disaffected working-class kid in the 1960s.
1:39.2	I think Quadrofemia is really one of the greats because it tells an enormous story.
1:44.4	It has such an epic, the music itself has such a lush epic quality.
1:52.9	And I think for me also, you know, part of it was that I fell madly in love with Roger
1:58.0	Daltry and so I felt that somehow England and the sort of rock and roll version of England
2:04.5	really held my future.
2:05.8	You know, I grew up in San Francisco, I had never left the country and for me, this idea of
2:17.0	getting to England and somehow merging with the world that seemed to exist there which
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