The algorithms were patented and sold to social media companies, including Mandala, who applied the formulas’ predictive powers to modern society.įor the renegade “data defiers” who want to preserve their privacy, there is Mondrian, Chris Salazar’s nonprofit that is “widely credited - and blamed - for coordinating a web of bafflers and proxies that help people elude their online identities.” Interestingly, Mondrian’s most sophisticated proxies are usually fiction writers, who impersonate multiple identities at once. And in Egan’s speculative universe, it’s all made possible by “Patterns of Affinity,” anthropologist Miranda Kline’s slim but seminal text containing algorithms that explain what makes members of a remote Brazilian tribe like and trust one another. This is oversharing writ large, a massive internal data dump driven by the self-obsession that 21st-century technology unleashed.

Can’t you just see it glowing on the desk of your home office?) Mandala’s ancillary offering, Collective Consciousness, goes one step further: By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to this online collective, you gain “proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead,” who has done the same. In chapters that slide between the 1960s and the 2050s, give or take a few years, we learn that Bix Bouton’s media company, Mandala, has released Own Your Unconscious, which allows you to externalize your consciousness into a Consciousness Cube and tap into your memories at will. Like “Goon,” “Candy” presents a fictional universe eerily adjacent to our own. Among its overwhelming questions: Why are we so willing to relinquish ourselves to technology, to give away our privacy?

This is a cautionary tale about the dangers of codifying human experience, ultimately a darker and more disturbing book than “Goon.” Despite the influx of young characters, “The Candy House” has an old soul. Jennifer Egan’s new novel, the itinerant offspring of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (2010), returns to the characters whose intertwined stories built the formally fragmented, wholly absorbing “Goon.” “The Candy House,” though, shifts the focus to their children, whose unconscious lives are threatened by the growing omniscience of social media.

The candy house plot