The Candy House

Alfred Hollander is Miles’s youngest brother and one of Ted Hollander’s sons. Ted Hollander is an art historian who befriends Bix Bouton at their Big Questions club. Since childhood, Alfred has had a sharp distaste for the inauthentic. He rejects television for portraying falsehoods and rejects people for mimicking television tropes. This makes Alfred very unpopular, but he feels authentic in his rebellious loneliness. In adulthood, Alfred takes on private projects in which he acts out in socially unacceptable ways to try to provoke the inauthentic people around him, like screaming in public. His goal is to make people uncomfortable. Alfred’s misanthropy is misguided because in trying to troll others, he adopts his own version of inauthenticity. Alfred lacks empathy for others. For example, he can’t see that his older brother Miles is crumbling from the pressure of maintaining his perfect image. Alfred is, paradoxically, enamored with Jack, who personifies typical heteronormativity and human messiness. Alfred is a character full of contradictions.

Miles Hollander is Alfred’s oldest brother. Miles has crafted an image of perfection for decades. He has the high-paying job, the house in the suburbs, the successful wife, and the kids. He has checked off all of society’s boxes for success. But Miles is an endlessly anxious man who works hard to keep up his façade. He has a drug addiction and ruins his marriage with a disastrous affair. But Miles’s story embodies the American bootstraps myth: He falls from grace and picks himself back up. After a prolonged struggle with his mental health and a suicide attempt, Miles turns his life around. He surrounds himself with healthy people who support him and, against all odds, becomes a politician in the second part of his adulthood. Miles’s story is proof that people can change and rebuild their lives. Miles also changes internally because he stops feeling sorry for himself and cuts off his resentment of happy people.

Drew is a doctor who serves the low-income community. He is a man of great kindness and deep empathy. He loves his family, even though they are a flawed group of people. He tries to extend kindness to Miles, who initially snubs him. Drew saves Miles’s life, proving that human connection is possible even when personality differences and resentments present a challenge. Drew looks at life with a positive outlook. He balances his many responsibilities and accepts that life has its ups and downs. Drew is haunted by the death of his college friend Rob, who died in the East River while swimming with him. Drew and Bix reunite to revisit their memories of that night in an effort to exorcize them of guilt and grief. Instead, Drew is traumatized by Bix’s memories of seeing Drew and Rob before their swim, desperate to change the events of the story he has no control over. 

Lincoln is Drew’s son. Lincoln considers himself “atypical” because he is mathematically inclined to a fault. Typical social norms are lost on him because he sees the world around him as a series of diagrams, algorithms, and statistical possibilities. He can’t help but interpret the world through numbers, but this alienates him from deep human connection. His closest ally is his sister Alison, who gives him positive affirmation. Even as an adult, he relies on his parents when his mathematical interpretations of the world exhaust him. Lincoln is in love with M, a colleague at work. Ultimately, M and Lincoln end up getting married. This unlikely turn of events proves Lincoln wrong. Statistically, Lincoln has determined that a relationship with M is unlikely, though not impossible. That M falls in love with him and they end up together proves that algorithms can’t account for the inexplicable twists and turns of the human heart.

Miranda Kline influences the characters in this novel, though the reader never sees her first-person perspective. Miranda is a legend, both personally and professionally. She resurrects her dormant career and achieves academic success later in life. Her book, Patterns of Affinity, is an anthropological study of a remote, indigenous community in Brazil that has been away from larger society for so long that their human connection is rooted exclusively in the tribe’s experiences and histories. Miranda uses this study to develop a theory on algorithms of human behavior. She becomes a household name when her theory is sold to Bix Bouton and turned into the foundation for collective consciousness.

Miranda rejects fame and becomes a recluse. She and her daughters were once close, but her daughters’ devotion to their father, from whom Miranda divorced, forces a wedge between them. This wedge grows when her daughter, Melora, sells her intellectual property to Bix Bouton. Miranda is disappointed in the ways her theory of human connection is appropriated for capitalistic gain and technological advances. She turns into an eluder—a person who escapes their real life through a virtual avatar. She dies without most people knowing because she commits so much to her role as an eluder that she disappears from society altogether.

Melora Kline is Miranda Kline’s daughter. She loves her mother and has a mostly estranged relationship with her father, Lou, as a child. But as a teenager, she grows closer to her father and ends up moving in with him. Melora takes on his business and responsibility for him as he grows sicker. Melora needs her mother, but she prefers being needed by her father. Melora is committed to her father’s music production business, but social media and online streaming services threaten the well-being of that business. Through Melora’s perspective, Egan brings up the symbol of the candy house and the concept of the Faustian bargain. Melora rejects Bix’s Own Your Unconscious software because represents the technological advances that destroyed her father. Melora loses both her mother and her sister to online alternate realities, but she stays centered in the real world while those around her get lost in technology.

Charlie Kline is Lou’s daughter from an earlier marriage. She accesses her father’s memories through Own Your Unconscious in an attempt to understand Lou and herself more. Charlie discovers that his memories show snippets of his life that don’t detract from or add to her understanding of him. Charlie is a minor character developed by Egan to highlight that access to knowledge doesn’t necessarily give us the answers we’re searching for.

Roxy Kline is Charlie’s sister, another of Lou’s daughters. Roxy has dealt with drug addiction for most of her adult life and ultimately dies of an overdose. Now in her fifties, Roxy lives in a recovery center but manages to sneak in drugs and continue using. She uploads her memories to Own Your Unconscious to reconnect with her father, who is long gone. Roxy’s happiest memory with her father was a trip to London, but his memories reveal that he hadn’t wanted her on that trip in the first place. Roxy’s character is a warning for Egan’s readers that knowledge can disappoint you and rob you of your own interpretations of the past.

Chris Salazar is connected to Lou Kline’s family because his father, Bennie, was friends with Lou. Chris grew up knowing Lou’s children, and as an adult, he works with recovery center residents like Roxy. Chris has developed an online alternate universe modeled on Dungeons & Dragons. Chris develops this idea after his best friend, Colin, dies from a drug overdose. Desperate to help people dealing with trauma, his business provides people with a safe escape from social media and Own Your Unconscious. Chris’s business ends up being as successful as Bix Bouton’s, but this, too, comes with controversy. People such as Miranda Kline become so entwined in their avatars that they elude society and disappear altogether.

Before developing his own business, Chris worked as an algebraizer of story tropes and elements. But this job was unfulfilling and heightened his sense that he was only a supporting character in his own life. Chris’s character development is motivated by his determination to improve people’s lives and become the central character in his story. Chris is empathetic, generous, and kind. He proves that human connection is essential to understanding but takes that understanding to dangerous levels of disembodied identity formation.

Lulu is featured in two chapters, once as a teenager and once as an adult. Lulu has led an extraordinary life. As a child, her mother was incarcerated, so Lulu spent formative time with Chris Salazar’s family. She continues a friendship with Chris when her mother is released from prison and starts a new life. As a teenager, Lulu is generous with her kindness and makes friends everywhere. As an adult, Lulu marries a man who works for National Security. Through his connections, she becomes a Citizen Agent, a role that requires her to act as an escort for wealthy men, on whom she spies. The government installs microphones, recorders, and buttons inside her body to make her missions possible. When one mission ends with her being shot, Lulu returns home, depressed and traumatized, to her husband and twins. She reaches out to Jules Jones, Chris’s uncle, for help connecting with her movie star father. Jules also helps her remove the dead government equipment still inside her body. Lulu is characterized by her need for human connection. Like other characters, she is troubled by a lack of connection with her father. This motivates her to change her life all over again. Lulu’s character represents resiliency but also warns the reader not to sacrifice their bodies to technology or others’ goals and desires.

Jules Jones is Chris Salazar’s uncle. He moves in with Chris’s family after being released from prison. Jules deals with mental illness and paranoia, but he is also deeply intelligent, thoughtful, and considerate. He strikes up an unlikely friendship with his neighbor Noreen, who terrorizes him. He turns his life around by writing a successful biography of a famous band. Jules becomes a well-respected music journalist and helps Lulu connect with her father and rid herself of weevils. Jules’s fortitude against spies and infiltrators is representative of his mental health issues, but his suspicions are proven correct. While other people willingly sacrifice their autonomy for knowledge, he protects his individualism at all costs.

Gregory is Bix Bouton’s youngest son. Despite his access to financial wealth and stability, Gregory rejects his father’s technological success at an early age. He finds progressive technology dangerous, a particular threat to novels, which he loves. He pays his own way through college and his MFA program and devotes his life to working odd jobs while trying to write his novel. Gregory reevaluates his identity when his father dies. He’s always been the black sheep of his family, and with his father gone, Gregory has no hope of rehabilitating their relationship. Gregory is an important character because, although he comes in at the end, he presents an alternate life to the one obsessed with collective consciousness. His role as an author represents the power of human imagination and the value of storytelling over factual knowledge.