Jennifer Egan’s ‘Goon Squad’ Follow-Up ‘The Candy House’ Examines Role of Fiction and Memory in an Online World

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

“Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free,” warns a character in “The Candy House,” illuminating the novel’s larger curiosity around Big Tech in its setting: a world where minds and memories can be uploaded to the cloud and accessed by others. “The Candy House” is Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to her 2010 novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Known for its inventive playing with form — each chapter can be read as an independent short story, with distinct and yet interconnected characters; one chapter is told entirely through PowerPoint — “Goon Squad” introduced some of the characters and storytelling techniques continued and expanded in this new novel. Egan joins us to discuss storytelling in our online age and why she considers this book an “homage to fiction.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Support for Kikiweedy Podcasts comes from Rancho LaPuerta, a wellness resort on 4,000 acres located 45 minutes from downtown San Diego.
0:08.7	Established in 1940, Rancho LaPuerta offers adult summer camp-like vacations for individuals and groups.
0:15.0	Rancho LePuerta.com
0:16.7	Greetings, Boomtown.
0:18.4	The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming!
0:20.6	Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile.
0:23.8	So we've all got lightning fast speeds at home and on the go!
0:27.4	Learn more at Xfinity.com.
0:29.3	Restrictions apply.
0:30.0	Xfinity, Internet required.
0:31.0	Actual speeds vary.
0:33.3	From KQED.
0:34.3	Thank you. From KQED. From KQED. From KQD in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:49.3	Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, was the kind of book that
0:54.3	stayed with you. I'd remember snippets of it years later and wonder about the characters I'd met.
0:59.5	The same was true, apparently, for Egan herself, who's written a new novel featuring many
1:04.3	of those who appeared in Goon Squad. The new book, The Candy House, stands on its own, though,
1:09.4	as an exploration of what happens when we realize that our lives
1:12.8	are not meaningful because they're unique,
1:15.4	but because of their texture, of relationships, of the feeling of being alive.
1:19.8	It's a stylish, fun, serious novel,
1:22.0	and Jennifer Egan is coming up next after this news.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KQED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of KQED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.