MixedThe BafflerEgan trades neither in prelapsarian realism nor pure experimentalism, but an oddly seamless mix of the two ... Fluidly written third-person narrative rubs up against showy formal tricks without either seeming out of place—mostly, they’re separated neatly by chapter ... it becomes necessary to note the lack of technological sophistication that Egan’s novel possesses, its strangely old-timey feel. None of the prophetic sharpness, however short-lived, of actual genre sci-fi; none of the jaded dead-tech glamour of a DeLillo or a late Pynchon. It kind of worked in Goon Squad: the jarring way in which, for example, texting was rendered seemed appropriate for a novel entirely about being out of step with the present, the future slipping away into the past. But here it starts to raise questions. How adept is Egan, really, at understanding this stuff? It’s an issue, that, in the end, she ducks. The Candy House is interested in shared memory and data harvesting merely on the level of content, not form ... Despite Egan’s prolonged grappling with the fiction vs. technology debate that has structured her novel from the outset, we’re left with no clear image of her idea of what the kind of writing that Gregory will produce—writing that will supposedly triumph over the tech industry’s invasion of the traditional domain of fiction even as it makes good on its insights—will actually look like (and I don’t think it’s The Candy House). This anticlimax feels fitting for a novel which, in the end, has come to seem like something of a lost cause. If we can accept a category like the \'big data novel,\' then perhaps that’s all it ever was: a brief spark of information on the map of modern literature, a set of signals in time, archived but rarely revisited, whose importance now is lost in the machine.
