(Bought at the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn): Even though I sometimes needed a diagram in order to keep straight the multiple characters in Jennifer Egan's intricate, decades-spanning novel, I throughly enjoyed the ride. Employing characters from her earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Candy House explores the impact of technology of a host of interconnected people. Each chapter is written in different style, the most involving being an vast chain of emails. Egan's command of language and imagination is awe-inspiring. Like the levels in a video game you can't stop playing, a minor detail in one chapter leads you into the next where it becomes significant. The saga is launched when tech guru Bix Bouton invents a system to access all your memories and upload them to an even-more invasive version of the Internet. Like AI, this new invention has its benefits such as solving crimes, but its flaws have devastating effects.
From the 1970s into the 2030s, we meet movie stars, music producers, citizen spies, black ops military, anthropologists, artists, drunks, drug addicts (recovering and otherwise).
Egan expertly explores the dangers and delights of ever-expanding tech and the pitfalls it presents.
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