The Candy House

In Part 3, Egan explores how people make connections with one another that are meaningful, if not long-lasting. She also explores the issue of playing a role, and how the stories we tell ourselves and others are often determined by those roles.

In Chapter 9, a teenager named Molly identifies herself by her friendships. At her age, she is easily influenced by her peers and has viscerally emotional reactions to being excluded. Egan captures the petty anxieties of adolescence through Molly’s first-person point-of-view. Her voice is written like a teenager writing a diary; Egan employs little punctuation and capitalizes words that wouldn’t typically be capitalized. Egan’s playfulness with grammar conventions gives Molly a voice that is distinct from the other characters and emphasizes the rise and fall of her narrative voice, which parallels the highs and lows of her emotional state.

Chapter 9 also introduces Colin and reintroduces Chris Salazar as a teenager. This chapter captures an age of innocence before social media, smartphones, and Own Your Unconscious. Without the distraction of technology, the kids in this chapter rebel in small but meaningful ways. They smoke pot in the forest, ditch the bubble of the country club, and enjoy the ease of each other’s company. The experience of adolescent ribaldry is in direct juxtaposition with other chapters, in which technological jargon and culture have taken over how characters view themselves and the world around them. Molly has a moment of deep peace at the end of Chapter 9. Alone, in between the time she has with her new friends and the time she will have with her family, Molly gets to live wholly in the moment. Through dramatic irony, the reader knows that Molly’s ability to live in the moment will not last. Tragedy will rupture her new friend group (the reader knows from earlier chapters that Colin will die of a drug overdose), and technology will replace real-life experiences with virtual ones.

Lulu is first introduced in Chapter 9, but Chapter 10 depicts her complex adulthood. Chapter 10 is written through Lulu’s second-person perspective. This chapter is narrated as a list of directives, written both about and presumably by Lulu. In this chapter, the reader gets the sense that Lulu is talking to herself as though she is someone else. The tone of this second-person narration is foreboding because it reveals that Lulu has lost her sense of self. Seeing herself in the second person is a way of dehumanizing herself, but this tone matches the content of the chapter. Her role as a Citizen Agent is stressful and requires that she give up her body as both a sexual object and an object of espionage, literally implanted with spyware to facilitate her role. Along with being dehumanized, her physical safety is tenuous at best. Egan doesn’t reveal what exactly Lulu is spying for and why. This chapter is a warning of how external pressures can lead to disembodied identity formation and deterioration. The Importance of Human Connection and Understanding extends to one’s connection with themselves; in becoming less human through implants and dissociation, Lulu effectively severs her connection with herself.

In Chapter 11, readers are introduced to Jules Jones, a stranger who disrupts the fragile peace of the Salazar’s neighbors. Jules’s presence and the havoc it wreaks on Noreen proves that human connection also comes with human alienation. It is difficult to trust people, and Noreen’s feud with Jules demonstrates that community is not guaranteed until individuals find ways to come together. In a way, Noreen and Jules are brought together in violation of the algorithm of their human behavior. Their conflict, which is chaotic and based on foolishness and paranoia, is a projection of their own internal insecurities. But the true meaning of Chapter 11 is the unpredictability of human connection. No one would have predicted that Noreen and Jules would become friends, and the end of Chapter 11 implies an intimacy between the two that threatens Noreen’s already deteriorating marriage. Notably, Chapter 11 is told through the point-of-view of Noreen’s older daughter, Hannah. Unlike her little sister Molly, Hannah has a logical and rational perspective of the world around her. She is mature for her age and can understand the nuances of adult behavior. Hannah’s perspective shows the reader that her mother is dealing with her own mental illness as she becomes obsessed with Jules, to the detriment of the security of her household.

Because Chapter 11 is told through Hannah’s point-of-view, the reader is given only one perspective of Jules’s and Noreen’s dynamic. There are necessarily limitations to this story; because Hannah doesn’t know what exactly her mother or Jules are going through, the reader is also not given this information. Still, the story is riveting and symbolic of the conflicts that make us human. This type of story, in which the narrator has a blind spot, is in direct juxtaposition with the influence of Own Your Unconscious. Own Your Unconscious would allow people to access memories that would shed light on what Noreen was really thinking and seeing during this turbulent time. But knowing all these facts wouldn’t make such an interesting story. What’s more, this story about Noreen as told through her daughter’s interpretation is really a story about how Hannah sees her mother and develops an understanding of the perplexing world around her.

In Chapter 12, Egan again experiments with narrative voice. This chapter is told through messages written between various characters. It is a complex, multi-plotted story in which people are more interconnected than they think. Through this unknowable network, Egan exposes how people help each other in an effort to achieve their individual goals. Lulu is the main subject of the chapter. She returns from a failed mission as a Citizen Agent traumatized and unstable. Her husband, Joseph, arranges for her mother to help her, and he falsely believes that Lulu regains happiness because of this family support. But Lulu keeps the true source of her happiness a secret from Joseph and her mother; she has discovered the identity of her father, a famous movie star, and she has eradicated her body of weevils. Weevils are a symbol of government abuse and interference with the human body. Lulu sacrificed her physical and emotional health, and the weevils remain a corporeal reminder of her trauma, even though it no longer works. Lulu must go through underground networks to have the weevils removed. Once removed, Lulu becomes happier. This represents the tension between the human body and technology; while some technology can be lifesaving like pacemakers, technology that intends to instrumentalize the body runs the risk of dehumanizing people.

Chapter 12 is about people reconnecting, emphasizing Egan’s message about the importance of human connection. Lulu finally meets her father, the Conduits reunite, and Dolly is forced to reckon with her past. These reunions are a mixture of joyous, fabricated, happy, dangerous, and frightening acknowledgments of the ways people need and hurt each other.

Finally, Part 3 sets the reader up for Part 4, in which Egan makes her stance on the power of storytelling clear. Part 3 navigates different stories with a variety of narrative structures to expose the ways storytelling can teach us more about the human condition than access to knowledge. In Part 3, Egan’s readers must analyze the story between the lines and search for what isn’t said. In withholding information, Egan intends to make her stories more interesting and human.