62 pages • 2 hours read
Jennifer EganThe Candy House
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Formation of Identity Based on Memory
In The Candy House, Egan explores the power of memory to help build individual and communal identity. Memories are tricky; they can be repressed, hyperbolic, or long-lasting. Memories are especially important to the characters of this novel as they get older and try to understand how their lives became what they are.
Bix Bouton’s development of Own Your Subconscious is inspired by his wrestling match with memory. Although already a successful tech icon, Bix feels that something is missing in his life. He yearns for the past, when he was younger and not successful and when everything was in front of him. The ambition and drive to create and discover make Bix return to his past, but his past is fraught with unreliable memories. He can’t quite remember the details of the day his friend, Rob, drowned in the East River. To trigger memories that might serve his present reality, Bix walks along his old New York City haunts. He visits the park by the apartment he once shared with his now-wife, the location where he first met Rob. But the park has been transformed by time and development, and the setting itself doesn’t give Bix the answers he wants. He recalls endless existential conversations with his college friends, so he disguises himself as a graduate student and seeks to replicate communities of conversation. This suggests that Bix must manipulate his present in order to revisit his past and solve questions he has about the future. The link between the past, present, and future is an internal conflict that bothers all human beings; it is natural to look back and wonder, “what if?” Bix’s own conflict with his memories inspires him to create a way for people to upload their subconscious and analyze their memories as though watching a movie. This program is a massive hit, which highlights how much a longing to understand the past informs the human experience.
Roxy is another character who looks to the past to form her present-day identity. Roxy has struggled with trauma, drug abuse, and maintaining relationships. She is certain that access to her memories can reveal repressed rationales for why she became the person she is. If she can understand herself, she reasons, she can be more at peace with herself in old age. But revisiting her memories proves to be problematic. She relishes the memory of her trip to London with her father, but access to his memories reveals that he was not excited to have her come along on the trip. Thus, Roxy’s happiest memory of her father turns into an exposed fallacy. Ultimately, revisiting the past gives her nothing but more pain. Therefore, Egan suggests that our memories might not hold the same connotations for our identities when we erase our interpretations of our memories. Because humans, like Roxy, can only understand their lives through their own muddled perspectives, they project their desires and anxieties onto their memories. Dissolving these projections can be healing in some cases, but memory is not necessarily a safe foundation for building an identity.
Memory is both a blessing and a curse. Roxy’s sister Charlie is also interested in revisiting memories of her father to understand her own identity. She accesses his memories but finds few revelations. Confronting the past is sometimes just that: an acknowledgment of what happened. The point of building an identity off our memories is that we can pick and choose, subconsciously or consciously, the memories that determine who we are and why. But this keeps characters in The Candy House, like Charlie and Roxy, distanced from their present and future selves. In constantly looking to memory for identity, characters are less able to nurture their present selves and create inspiration for their future selves. People change, but also, sometimes they don’t. The flaws of human existence partly lie in our insistence that our pasts are the most meaningful narratives for our futures. But characters who embrace the past do so to the detriment of living in the moment. This can lead to dissatisfaction and a more heightened identity crisis.
The Possibilities and Limitations of Collective Consciousness
In The Candy House, Egan explores the possibilities and limitations of collective consciousness. Collective consciousness in this novel refers not to a shared set of moral codes between people, but rather a literal collection of people’s consciousnesses. In this novel, consciousness is collected through technology and distributed in an online database. People can share their memories anonymously or directly with certain people. Thus, family members and friends can bear witness to their loved ones’ memories.
One of the limitations of this collective consciousness is that these memories are facts of life but without a narrative voice. The memories can be illuminating, but they can also be boring. People search these memories for signs and reasons, but facts don’t necessarily produce deep understanding between humans. These memories are a source of knowledge, but it is sometimes unclear what unlimited knowledge about human consciousness can give people. This is because memories are personal, and the brain makes associations with memories that can create or hide interpretations. Some memories fade with time, and others persist for entire lifetimes. On the other hand, one of the positives of the collective consciousness is that people can feel less alone.
A collective consciousness provides endless knowledge, but Egan asks what knowledge Is without imagination. She explores this tension in Gregory’s narrative, in which Gregory rejects the collective consciousness in order to embrace an imaginary consciousness. Gregory is a fiction writer, and he believes that his father’s technology weakens the human desire for storytelling. Gregory’s literature actually taps into its own kind of collective consciousness, as fiction seeks to capture the human condition through nuanced and imagined narratives. In fiction, it is the development of theme, plot, and characters that evokes a collective human experience. Fiction necessarily draws from life but interprets it through imagination. This presents a counter to Bix’s technology because it relies on creativity rather than pure knowledge. In Chapter 13, Egan calls fiction the greatest machine. This is a celebration of Egan’s own craft. It reminds the reader that technology can give us access to knowledge, but knowledge isolated from storytelling is essentially meaningless.
Egan’s novel is a symbol of the human thirst for knowledge. Knowledge is a constant dilemma; people are naturally curious and want to have unlimited knowledge, but they must necessarily give something up for this knowledge, and it might not be worth it. A collective consciousness provides endless knowledge, but this comes at a price. People give up their privacy, their autonomy, and their control over their memories in order to participate in the collective consciousness. When the collective consciousness proves too overwhelming, people turn to “eluding” their society by escaping into a virtual world. The possibility of endless knowledge via collective consciousness is the inspiration for Egan’s title. The Candy House title refers to Hansel and Gretel, in which the children are seduced by the candy house and give up their journey and their scruples for a façade. This is also known as the Faustian bargain, in which people give up their moral codes for the promise of knowledge. Human beings are in a constant push and pull with the Faustian bargain, and candy houses metaphorically abound in society. In this novel, the candy house is the sacrifice of imagination and autonomy for access to the collective consciousness.
Ultimately, Egan and her characters understand that it is futile to try to stop technological advancement. Humans are bound by nature to continue progressing, and technology is our new frontier. But this novel serves as a warning that technology may give us access to knowledge by robbing us of the very qualities that make us human.
The Importance of Human Connection and Understanding
To combat the isolation of lives spent online, Egan highlights the importance of human connection and understanding. Characters in this novel turn to technology to ease their loneliness because they struggle within their human relationships. But human relationships are meant to be messy, complicated, and often painful, so the coping mechanism of turning to the collective consciousness or an online avatar is not the solution to natural human conflict.
The proof that human connection is crucial to understanding oneself is Bix’s story. In Chapter 1, Bix struggles to find his vision of a new frontier through technology. Rather than turn to the technology itself, he turns to people. He craves the existential conversations of his past, so he makes new friends with a group of intellectuals who are passionate about discourse. Bix also turns to his mother-in-law for advice, not a search engine or social media. Bix’s experiences being inspired by people prove that technological advances are projections of human loneliness, not substitutes for human connection.
In Chapter 9, Molly undergoes the painful transition of adolescence. Her friendships are fraught with drama, and she is in a constant loop of impressing Stella, who is mostly mean to her. Molly has a sharp but misguided sense of what certain people can do for her, namely, help her feel less alone or less worthy. Molly doesn’t have social media in her life yet, so she has no recourse but to turn to other people when external conflicts impact her life. She relies on her mother’s support, even though her mother is flawed. Flaws on social media are unforgivable, but flaws in real life are part of how people endear themselves to each other. Molly has a formative experience hanging out with Lulu, Colin, and Chris while they smoke weed. The kids are doing something daring and edgy, and being included in this adventure is meaningful to Molly because she doesn’t have to do anything to prove that she deserves kindness and inclusion. She is impressed by how easy it is to tear away from the bubble of her country club, a microcosm of her strict society. These are not experiences that can be replicated online; they are born from staring at the sky, breathing in the air, and lying down with your new friends.
Miles’s story, developed in Part 1, is fundamentally about human connection. Miles seeks perfection, so all his relationships—professional and personal—are born from a desire to construct a façade. It is impossible to keep up the fallacy of perfection in the long term, and Miles’s perfect life implodes through his drug addiction, affair, and mistakes. Miles starts resenting other people, like his cousin, for being happy. He can’t figure out the key to happiness and is jaded by the loss of the life he once strove for. He attempts suicide but is rescued by Drew, who is like a stranger to him. The shared experience they endure on the hot-air balloon brings them closer together, and they become close friends. Friendship with Drew helps Miles get his life back on track. He passes the bar and becomes a popular politician. Miles’s second chance at life—his redemption story—is not made possible by technology; it is only possible because human beings decided to have empathy for him and accept him for his flaws. The community he discovers is a real-life one full of human connection and support.
In The Candy House, characters are destroyed by their parents’ divorces, their own breakups, and their self-destructive tendencies. No matter how much they turn to technology, it never truly heals them. Egan’s characters demonstrate that the human understanding of self and others is built up through authentic human connection.
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