RaveNew York Times Book Review... a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes ... Egan is after more than a cautionary tale; she is interested in describing social technology as a lived environment. She doesn’t construct a master story arc around Own Your Unconscious and its spinoffs; instead, they’re just a fact of this world, part of the stuff that goes on in the background. It’s not the A-plot, it’s the soundtrack ... Egan is a one-woman R&D department of language ... If The Candy House is less cohesive than Goon Squad, it may be because its subject is harder to get one’s arms around. The story doesn’t describe an arc so much as a network diagram; it doesn’t end, it stops. The biggest criticism I can make of The Candy House is that it kicks us out just when it seems to be getting started...But that is also the strongest praise I can give it. Egan knows that she can never offer a complete picture of the global consciousness, only an evocative impression. The challenge of a novel whose subject is, in one sense, everything is knowing what to leave out, a dilemma that The Candy House meta-acknowledges repeatedly.
Joshua Ferris
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewFerris writes the novel in the first-person plural — the snarky, gossipy, anxious employees of the agency compose the collective narrator...The collective voice is fitting for corporate employees, trained to work in teams, their groupthink honed in a million meetings, and the effect is chilling when the layoffs begin and the collective narrator is literally diminished … The major story lines of Then We Came to the End hold few surprises. Like a make-work project, they are an excuse to get through the real joys of the day, which come from Ferris’s small-bore observations. The Pavlovian magnetism of free bagels. The incredible sadness of a hard-boiled egg eaten at one’s desk. And the prophylactic amnesia that separates time on the clock from the set of waking hours we call ‘our lives.’
