The Candy House

Part 4 is a celebration of the human desire for storytelling. There are several important structural parallels between Part 4 and Part 1, creating a circular conclusion to this otherwise winding novel. Like Part 1, Part 4 is subtitled “Build”. The purpose of this parallel title is to show how humans build in different ways. In Part 1, Bix builds technology, Alfred builds authenticity, and Miles rebuilds a new life. In Part 4, “Build” refers to building a narrative voice through human imagination. In Part 1, Gregory is mentioned as a baby, a piece of Bix’s background. In Part 4, Gregory becomes a central voice. In Part 1, Ames is referred to also as a background character to the dramas of his brothers’ lives. In Part 4, he is celebrated for his own mythology.

In Chapter 13, readers meet Gregory, Bix’s youngest son, now in his late twenties. Gregory is engaged in work that counters his father’s legacy because he looks for more authentic and original ways of being. His passion for literature and creative writing is presented as an affront to Bix’s work in collective consciousness. Rather than search the internet for recycled ideas, Gregory wants to invent new ideas and illuminate the nuances of the human experience. He is also on his own journey of identity reformation. His father’s recent death taught him that time runs out in human relationships; he always planned to build a deeper relationship with his father, but ALS interfered, and now it’s too late. Gregory’s grief pulls him away from his writing, a separation from his creative vision that parallel Gregory’s character development with Bix’s in Chapter 1.

Important pieces of the novel’s puzzle come together in Chapter 13. It is revealed that Miranda Kline, whose mysterious disappearance confounded her family and the public, excluded herself from society. Miranda became a recluse of online alternate realities, dying in Brazil without reuniting with the real human world around her. Her death is crucial to Gregory’s story because of Bix’s fascination with Miranda and her theory of human algorithms. This chapter also reveals that society has grown tired of technological advancement’s controversies. Social media has gone out of fashion, implying that companies like Mondrian and Mandala might also one day lose their influence in society. With the loss of technological influence, the influence of literature has more space for rebirth. Notably, it is also revealed that the limitation of Own Your Unconscious is death. Despite the sophistication of the technology that records human consciousness, the moment of death, in which a human being loses their unconscious, is impossible to record. This reveals that there is still mystery in the human experience.

Ironically, Gregory’s role as a fiction author is a different way of doing what Bix has done with Mandala and Own Your Unconscious. Bix wants to connect with the universe and with humans, so he creates a forum through which collective consciousness can be shared. Gregory also wants to connect with the world around him, but he does this through writing fiction. Both are inspired by the lives of other people. The origin of Bix’s technology is the idea that people want to share their memories and also have access to other people’s lives. The difference is that Bix uses facts, while Gregory uses imagination. Gregory essentially makes art out of collective consciousness. The novel he wants to write is about various people living in New York City. Gregory doesn’t know the facts of these people’s lives, but he doesn’t need facts to create a real and meaningful story.

Chapter 14 concludes the novel with an example of how storytelling can be more impactful than knowledge. Knowledge without imagination is simply a series of facts that don’t get to the heart of the human experience. Egan uses her skills as a fiction writer to exemplify how weaving a story is more valuable than giving recorded facts. Ames is a background character throughout the novel, often forgotten by his family and hovering in the margins of other characters’ dramas. By contrast, Chapter 14 places him front and center. Egan tells the story of a formative experience in Ames’s childhood: his unexpected home run. This is a memory that is treasured by everyone in Ames’s family and is one of the few memories people have of Ames. Because of the nature of memories, this particular story turns into a type of myth because it doesn’t define who Ames is for the rest of his life. Thus, the memory exists but doesn’t ultimately matter. Egan articulates that one can know the facts of Ames’s life without truly knowing the nuances of his lived and narrated experiences. She asserts that the facts of Ames’s life without a story are inherently meaningless. The limitation of knowledge without the context of a story is that people won’t understand Ames or develop sympathy for him with only the facts of his life. It is the imaginative voice used in storytelling that connects a reader to Ames’s character development.

Part 4 is only two chapters long because it wraps up Egan’s novel-long argument that fiction is the ultimate vehicle for human connection. There may be a scientific basis for collective consciousness, and there may be algorithms for human behavior, but only stories can expose the soul of the human experience.