The Candy House

Part 1 of The Candy House is titled “Build” because the various characters in these chapters build ideas and lives. The narrative threads are interconnected through relationships and a giant tech company named Mandala, to which all characters are directly or indirectly related. While the chapters are linked, each also stands alone, like a collection of short stories. With this, Egan plays with the structure of typical novels to show how different people are while navigating similar sources of pain, frustration, joy, and growth.

Part 1 begins by introducing the founder of Mandala, Bix Bouton. Bix has built a surprising life for himself; once dismissed for being a minority PhD student, Bix has become a tech icon after transforming social media. He is a visionary who has changed his culture, but Egan questions whether this progress is for the greater good. Bix’s journey in Chapter 1 is one of interiority. Now that he is famous, successful, married to the woman he’s always loved, and a father, Bix wonders what comes next. Because he is inherently a visionary, finding success doesn’t bring him happiness; he craves more intellectual stimulation and new discoveries. Bix is clouded by his frayed memories of his college friend’s death, who drowned when he and a friend swam in the East River.

Bix seeks an answer to his blankness by seeking out an academic discussion group that explores big, existential questions that confront their disciplines and lives. Despite his success in an intellectual field, Bix rarely engages in discourse that pushes his thinking and ways of being. Thus, Bix seeks out a way to build something new. The first construction is being part of something again, without the stigma of his fame. Ironically, the impetus for this discussion group is the work of a woman that Bix has appropriated into his own success. His engineering student disguise symbolizes his desire to return to his past, his nostalgia for simpler days when dreams and ambition were motivations but not realities. Bix’s character demonstrates that financial and career success doesn’t necessarily equate to happiness, which is one of the ways Egan rejects normative understandings of American happiness in the text.

Bix’s desire to revisit the past echoes the way all humans deal with memory. Memory can be a burden; decades after an event, people often churn over their fractured memories and seek meaning. But meaning is not always relevant to the process of remembering, which causes frustration and nihilism. Bix’s desire to revisit his past to better understand his future inspires him to create a new technology that captures the world through memories. Here, Egan sets the foundations for the theme The Formation of Identity Based on Memory, and subsequent chapters will explore the ripple effects of uploading memories into a collective consciousness, including challenges to peoples’ senses of self.

An important part of Bix’s character development throughout Chapter 1 is the question of missing vision. Vision here becomes symbolic of intellectualism, genius, and progressively building new layers to life. In this context, the ability to see is linked to a desire to see something that can be manifested in the future. Bix is successful in uncovering and achieving a vision. Other characters in Part 1 also strive for better futures, highlighting Egan’s message that a vision for a better life is an intimate part of the human experience.

Setting is crucial in this novel, especially for Bix’s character development. East Seventh Street in New York City is a physical place that symbolizes Bix’s memories, and he goes there to simultaneously remember the past and try to envision his future. Thus, East Seventh Street acts as a time machine into deeper consciousness. This symbolic setting inspires Bix to develop technology that allows people to upload their memories anonymously and sift through others’ memories so that they can better understand and revisit the past. Setting is a key path to memory because people associate places with what they experienced there. While acts and conversations may fade with time, environments are crucial backgrounds for our associations with the past.

In Chapter 2, Egan explores the limitations of our hang-ups with the past through Alfred’s story. Alfred is connected to the events of Chapter 1 in two ways. The first is that his father, an art historian, befriends Bix Bouton at the discussion meetings. Thus, Alfred has an indirect connection to the new technology of consciousness collecting. Secondly, Alfred is approached by Rebecca Amari, a PhD candidate who also attended the meetings with Bix and Ted Hollander. Rebecca is interested in Alfred’s much-derided documentaries of geese because she seeks to understand patterns of behavior. Bix attempts to collect human behavior, and Rebecca is interested in the sociology of desires and capacities. Notably, Chapter 2 is told through Rebecca’s first-person point-of-view, even though the plot focuses on Alfred and reveals intimate knowledge that Rebecca likely can’t know. This impossible knowledge echoes Bix’s program, with which someone like Rebecca could hypothetically access Alfred’s memories. But Rebecca’s narrative voice also gives the reader some distance between the eccentricities of Alfred’s behavior and an analysis of Alfred as a character.

Alfred is defined by an obsession with inauthenticity. Since childhood, Alfred has derided the facades that humans put up. He never quite understands that these facades are often survival tactics in the face of ostracization, disappointment, and failure. Alfred’s obsession with inauthenticity becomes his own disguise. He acts out in ways that shock people because he wants to provoke reactions from strangers and family alike. While everyone else lives inauthentically, Alfred’s identity as fully authentic and rebellious is motivated by his desire to trick people into exposing their true or false selves. This means that Alfred defines himself in contrast with others, which is just another way of creating an identity around the very social norms that he dismisses as foolish. Alfred’s life is, therefore, inherently lonely, though his ego dictates that his loneliness is a necessary byproduct of his radical freedom.

Alfred doesn’t see his derision of others as a lack of empathy, but through the connection between Alfred and his brother Miles’s perspective in Chapter 3, the reader discovers that Miles, a symbol of inauthenticity in Alfred’s life, struggles with the pressures to be a certain type of person. Thus, Alfred’s dismissal of his brother is exposed as an inability to understand how and why people put on facades. In Chapter 2, Egan reveals that everyone acts in inauthentic ways because people seek community or individualism in juxtaposition with community. Chapter 2 ends with Alfred embracing Rebecca’s desire to turn his documentary into evidence for her sociological theory, which confirms that despite his dismissal of society, Alfred desires to be a part of cultural change and conversation.

Chapter 3 is structured through two dueling first-person narratives. Miles, Alfred’s brother, has fallen from grace and struggles to rebuild his life and, like Bix, find a new vision. The second narrative voice in Chapter 3 is Drew, the husband of Miles’s estranged cousin. This unlikely pair finds a connection, which emphasizes Egan’s point that people who are different are still fundamentally interested in connecting.

Miles’s story questions the American ideology of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The pressure of living an externally perfect life causes him to develop a drug addiction, and boredom with his life results in a torrid affair and a divorce. Miles’s impulsivity and instability result in an accident that keeps him paying, financially and emotionally, for years. Without the social cache provided by a high-paying job and a perfect suburban family, Miles is forced to create a new vision of his identity. Despite his flaws, he can’t help but judge others for their successes and their happiness. This judgment is a projection of his own failures; though he played by the rules and met all of society’s expectations of him, his life is undignified. His pride blocks him from understanding how “messy” people turn out to be happy and healthy. When people build their identity based on a checklist of perfection, they are existentially threatened by the happiness of people who evade this checklist. Miles feels the rug is pulled out from underneath him and decides that suicide is his best option. Notably, his attempt is sparked by the beauty and symmetry of his cousin’s artwork; beauty challenges Miles’s sense of inner and external ugliness, deepening his existential crisis.

Miles and Drew put barriers between one another, but when Drew saves Miles’s life, their relationship drastically changes. Their friendship is rooted in a mutual fight with death and the value of life. Drew is Miles’s foil in many ways. Unlike Miles, Drew chose to focus his career on helping others. He accepts his son Lincoln, who is difficult, and he loves his wife despite her flawed history. At the start of Chapter 3, Egan does not foreshadow a friendship; she surprises her readers instead. With Drew’s help, Miles rises from the ashes of his own self-destruction and becomes an upstanding and successful citizen. He passes the bar exam and becomes a mayor, and later in Part 1, the reader discovers that he becomes a state senator. Miles’s story is redemptive. It demonstrates that no matter how dark life becomes, a new vision is always possible. But the possibility of this new vision requires the support and love of other people. Like Bix, who turns to his mother-in-law in his time of need, Miles discovers that other people, people can help him save himself. The Importance of Human Connection and Understanding is one of Egan’s major themes. While social media and the question of collective consciousness make people believe they are communicating with the world, it is one-on-one relationships between real individuals that help people envision their futures. No matter how sophisticated Bix’s technology might be, Egan posits that it wouldn’t save him in the same way Drew could. This point is driven home by Miles’s crisis occurring in relative isolation; alone with Drew, floating far above the ground, all they have is each other.

The value of virtual connectivity is cast into doubt in Drew’s narrative as well. Drew is connected to Bix through their past in New York. Drew was with Rob when he drowned in the river. This memory, which terrorizes Bix in Chapter 1, also haunts Drew. Despite the decades that have passed, Drew still cries about Rob’s death. When Drew accesses Bix’s memory of the event, he doesn’t achieve catharsis; instead, this collective consciousness hurts Drew even more. He screams at the past version of Bix to go back and stop them from playing in the water, but no one can change the past. They can try to psychologically repress and technically erase their memories, but doing this will not change the fact that Rob is dead. This proves that there is a limitation to the collective consciousness. There is nothing therapeutically beneficial for Drew in accessing Bix’s memories. There might, however, be something beneficial in talking to Bix about his memories. As Drew states, Bix’s outreach about Rob’s death moves him because he hadn’t expected Bix to also still be thinking about it. This reveals that for Egan, human connection—the revelation that we are not alone in our grief—is the key to healing.

In Chapter 4, Egan reiterates Part 1’s question as to whether human behavior can be quantified. This logically extends to the larger, existential question of whether human behavior should be quantified. Lincoln, Drew’s son, considers himself “atypical” because he sees the world through numbers. This doesn’t lessen his capacity for feeling, but it makes his ability to deal with his feelings difficult. Because he wants everything to be quantifiable and therefore predictable, challenges hit him hard. Lincoln’s desire to quantify human behavior parallels Bix’s software around collective consciousness, seeking to understand complex, unpredictable human behavior through cold analysis that proves insufficient. His logic fails. First, O’Brien betrays their work, even though Lincoln determined that was statistically improbable. Second, even though Lincoln is in love with M, he incorrectly predicts that she will marry Marc, and she marries Lincoln instead. This proves that no computer, whether in the human mind or a physical object, can predict the future or access the intricacies of human motivation.

At stake in Part 1 is Egan’s criticism of the battle between technology and human existence and whether technology enhances or minimizes the human experience—The Possibilities and Limitations of Collective Consciousness. There are pros and cons to each side of this debate, and in the readers’ 21st-century reality, these questions are ever pertinent. Technology that supposedly captures human identity, such as social media, is interpreted as a representation of people’s actual lives. But social media is easily manipulated, creating a culture of isolation and false appearances. On the other hand, Bix’s software is meant to give people access to the most authentic pieces of human identity: their unfiltered memories. Bix, who experiences America as a Black man, hopes that the internet can dissolve the physical differences that divide people. He sees the internet as a democratic space in which anonymity can breed true connection. These two dueling perspectives are in tension with each other throughout the novel.