We hopscotch across time, meeting the same characters again and again, refracted through the lenses of dozens of different points of view. It’s the novel as daisy chain: Each chapter picks up the point of view of a supporting character from a previous chapter, taking us from the mind of a strung-out record producer to his recovering addict daughter to her annoying D&D-playing sober companion. The structural innovation Egan made with A Visit From the Goon Squad and repeats here with The Candy House is deceptively simple. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark You already know she can do it, so now the pleasure is in watching the details. Reading this book is like watching Simone Biles execute a trick that she’s crafted and polished and honed to perfection. But where reading Goon Squad felt like watching a circus acrobat pull off a flip you’ve never seen before, The Candy House has a subtler joy. Now Egan has released what she’s calling “a sibling novel” to A Visit From the Goon Squad titled The Candy House, which borrows its sprawling structure and a number of its characters from its predecessor. Playful, ambitious, and formally inventive, Goon Squad stands as a model for what the contemporary novel could be and often isn’t: a book that sets out to express something new, and builds itself a wholly new form with which to do so. But the 12 years that have gone by since Jennifer Egan published her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad have treated that book with kindness. Time is a goon, marauding and thieving and vicious.
0 kommentar(er)
