You sense the novel’s laborious scaffolding when the narrator of a mid-1960s interlude asks: “How can I possibly know all this? I was only six.
Maybe the book’s biggest problem (and its point, if you’re generous) is that Silicon Valley will never be rock’n’roll Here, action is seen as if through gauze: witness the 2032-set chapter about a “citizen agent” programmed by a shadowy government agency, told as 30 two-column pages of bulletpoint-like diktats from her handlers. There’s a shortage of the human moments that made Goon Squad fizz Bennie feeling like a fish out of water at his upstate country club, for instance, or his assistant, Sasha, hiding her kleptomania. Lincoln works in data mining (of course) and his storyline tees up some background action involving privacy activists known as “eluders”, who implant the brains of tech employees with “weevils”, electronic mind-control bugs that Egan keeps explaining until 20 pages from the end – a mark of how little the book’s gizmos ultimately contribute.
Remember 13-year-old Lincoln, whose obsessive cataloguing of “great rock’n’roll pauses” was recorded by his younger sister in a series of PowerPoint slides, Goon Squad’s most eye-catching narrative stunt? Lincoln, now in his mid-20s, gets his own chapter, but his hyper-attentiveness (previously the focus of a between-the-lines take on family life) is now just a distinguishing tic, as he longs for a colleague who “wears hair bands 24 percent of the time, scrunchies 28 percent of the time, and her hair loose 48 percent of the time”. Like Goon Squad, it turns reality up a notch: this is an America in which – in a big-tech data grab – 21-year-olds are urged to upload their memories to guard against brain injury.įertile ground, to be sure, but Egan has ideas to burn, and in this novel that’s what she does: her painstakingly constructed backdrop has barely any impact on the book’s drama, ill served by characters reduced to a trait. The Candy House, Egan’s follow-up, likewise hops around a large cast, this time from the 1990s to the 2030s, and once more has its eyes on the internet (the title refers to the seduction of free-to-use online services that sneakily turn us into the product, the echo of “the White House” presumably intended as a suggestion of where true power now lies).
The quirky title referred to time’s ravages Bennie, once part of 1970s outfit the Flaming Dildos, finds himself by the book’s discreetly futuristic end catering chiefly to “pointers”, tablet-wielding preschoolers whose tastes are the main driver of income in an industry altered beyond recognition. J ennifer Egan made her name with 2011’s Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, a zig-zagging multigenerational saga centred on a multiplatinum record producer, Bennie Salazar.
0 kommentar(er)
