But there are lots of other great crime stories. The Slate Group LLC. Group, a Graham Holdings Company. But at least Id have got some work done. Does that one have a contemporary setting? Thats whats so sad about it. And then, if they wish, they can share all or part of their memories to a collective, the Collective Consciousness, and that ends up being an important development that plays out through the course of the book. The way that he managed to accommodate this potentially large amount of work that might come on any particular night was that he would stop people when he felt the room had heard enough. Jennifer anchors NewsCenter 5s Weekend Do you think that there is something inherent to your voice, no matter which book it is? Jennifer Eagan is an anchor and general assignment reporter at WCVB Channel 5, Boston's News Leader. Jennifer anchors NewsCenter 5s Weekend EyeOpener (Saturday & Sunday 5:00AM, 6:00AM, 8:00AM, and Sunday 10:00AM) along with Rhondella Richardson. She is a Wrentham native and has been a reporter in New England for more than a decade. So I did that. But I was physically in a place that so much of the publishing world was moving through, and that was kind of wild. Their emotional lives need to feel immediate and accessible. In one form or another, yes, because I was working on my first novel, The Invisible Circus, when I joined the class that became the writing group. friends, Drew and Rob, he walks with them to the East River to watch the sunrise. I dont think so, no, because its going to take so much research. . So my literary pole stars would be Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellisonspecific books, like The House of Mirth, Invisible Manand probably The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare. I feel like I am more myself on the page than I am any other way. It was not a story of, like, No one is acknowledging my greatness! There was no greatness to be acknowledged for quite a while. I was going to say that you often sound like your own fiercest critic; I havent heard many writers be as hard on themselves as you are. People will say, Are you interested in writing a think piece about something? And Ill think, You dont understand. So Ill keep a list of structures that Im curious about, but my entry point is always the physical environment. Jennifer Egan wants to save literary fiction from itself By Lynn Steger Strong April 3, 2022 5 AM PT To do something fully, you have to believe it will change Likewise with Twitter, I had the sense that a sort of Homeric Mediterranean as the site of a spy mission in the twenty-thirties could maybe live in short utterances, which I envisioned as a list of lessons learned, meaning that the protagonist is listing what she has learned from each step she takesrather than listing the actual step that she tookso its sort of indirect storytelling. In retrospect, thank God. What makes real success happen is actually continuing to do better and better work. So the machine was an empowering tool for me as a fiction writer. So when I decided that I wanted to write it was never with a sense of the tremendous potential that I would unleash on the world. Id been to Mexico, but that was really the only foreign country I had visited. But our mental processes aremore mysterious than we realize. When I think about having to look things up in an encyclopedia from the library when I was a kid. Moving back in time to the years between Goon Squad and The Candy House: in 2017, you published Manhattan Beach, which is a very different kind of novel. Me, too, although there are appealing things about it. Because, if Ive figured out how to do something, my first goal is to not let myself do it. Its almost unbelievable that people were allowed to publish these books, because the casual sexism is just impossible to metabolize for a contemporary sensibility. I think my whole generation has been so shaped by his work. I had never heard of her, but Ive read a number of her books now. I thought, If I could just use facial recognition, and there were some way to view these people in the world, I could find them, and that would be great. It had to have been a fluke of timing. And I actually did a creative thesis. And, when I wrote Black Box as a series of tweets, I was not good at using Twitter at all. I wrote a creative thesis, which was a story collection, very conventional stories. WCVB - Boston. It doesnt come easily to me. Dostoyevsky was someone I really loved at an earlier age. In fact, I had been quickly hacked and had spewed vitamin ads to my beleaguered handful of followers, so Twitter was not working well for me as a creator, but it was fascinating to me as a consumer, because of the storytelling that I witnessed unfolding, especially when tweets were limited to a hundred and forty characters. The challenge is finding people who genuinely want the work to succeed and yet will be honest, and some of us in the group have been working together since the nineties. In other cases, I did keep working on them, but realized in the end that I couldnt make that particular version work. Im thinking a lot about the nineteenth century right now, the eighteen-seventies in particular, and about what catastrophic loss most people had experienced by adulthood at that time, and how different that must have been from now. And so that hope for transcendence actually undermines improvement. One character, the junkie daughter of a music producer, uses the device to relive a dearly remembered trip to London she made with her dad at age 16, only to learn that he occasionally regretted bringing her along. In terms of style, I dont know. Egan was born in Chicago, and her parents divorced when she was two. This was a strange interlude in my life. That place wasnt communal the way a lot of youth hostels were. No, it wasnt, but it just goes to show that there were a lot of years of trying to learn how to do it while trying to support myself. And then you imagine new technologies for the future. How did you get from there to the first book? I really hope The Candy House wont come true. You know, I dont know how it happened. I think I read it very sociologically as a teen-ager, maybe anthropologically. And I think the reason that I dont write about myself or people I know, ironically, is that I cannot identify with us on the page. I hate it. Anyway, I assigned it to my class at Penn, having not reread it, and my T.A.s were horrified at first. And that was how I began to have a sense of what this machine was. I mean, it was while working for her that I really got into a serious writing routine. I was living that hook-or-crook kind of New York existence, but it turned out that that took all my time. So it was very disappointing to find not only that people didnt like it but that ultimately, when I could sort of gather my courage to read it, I found it pretty unreadable, too. It fuelled this constant desire for information. Thats so interesting. It was the first sign that in no way was I finished with the Goon Squad world. Its packed with ideas, it offers brutal social commentary, and yet its hard to say exactly what that commentary is. I feel so grateful to the ones who stick with me. Jennifer Egan is not only publishing a new novel but its a sibling sequel to her Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Critics Circle-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad.. Like Goon Squad, The Candy House features a cast of intersecting characters: a tech tycoon who spearheads a new era of online sharing, an anthropologist who Its so unreal in its coloration and so shiny and appealing. As I told you, when I was working on Manhattan Beach, I had all kinds of ideas about narrative tricks that I would use to connect the book to the present. So that all felt really close to me, and I used my itinerary from my doomed European trip, which I had documented so extensively in my journal. In Phils workshop, where emotional rawness was the focus and the goal, I had ended up writing a lot of stories about adolescent girls with complicated backstories, and these were very emotional stories because, even though Ithen as nownever wrote about myself, that adolescent moment of girlhood will always be very available to me and powerful. 2023 Cond Nast. He went on this adventure in the California woods, where he smoked marijuana and got a sense of a cultural change that was imminent, and he returned home having basically decided to walk away from the conventional life hed made for himself and his family. It begins with one woman seeking a private conversation with an aging movie star and spreads to nearly a dozen participants, each trading favors to get what he or she wants, a web of transactions that ultimately results in the joyous reunion of the Conduits, a rock band that appears in Goon Squad, and a documentary film. I read a lot of Shakespeare in England, and his storytelling abilities, putting aside the poetry and all the rest of it, were just so extraordinary. Inside the house is a witch who wants to eat them. What I feel is critical about my characters is the ways in which they are different from me; that is essential in order for me to continue with curiosity and interest. But to go to college before having an answering machine and then to witness whats happened since has been absolutely staggering. I think there was an advantage to having pretty low expectations for myself, and having the wish to write come more from a sense that it would complete my experience of reality than that it would bring me acknowledgement from the outside world. Nowadays, everything is so diagnosed and pathologized and categorized. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. And it was on that trip that somehow the goal of writing became very clear. It wasnt like dying. I thought, These people are real, Im not, lets find out what its like to be real. Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, in which what happened depends on whos telling the story. You know, there is a gigantic collective of information out there. I dont like everyone staring at their phones. And I guess all of it speaks to the main thing I feel, which is that incremental success is absolutely the way to go, because that way you dont get ahead of yourself. Theres no mystery about this creature: a human boy. When the expression comes up again, its used in a different way, by an aging rocker who wants to remix the old hits of a defunct band as a kind of candy house to lure in a new generation of listeners, so it has a much more benign vibe. In terms of technology, its so hard for me to evaluate what is good and what is bad, because I am kind of afraid of all of it. And even then a lot of the people I was interviewing, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, were already in their eighties. And then how did you get them to a publisher? Boston, MA 02114 repudiate is too strong a word, but, if Ive got used to doing something, I like to cut off that possibility to see what happens next. Stories so bleakly wrought that they make me eerily happy. Egans latest book, The Candy House, from 2022, now out in paperback, is just what that reader described: a series of sometimes bleak, interlocking narratives of unloved childhood, struggling adolescence, confused youth, and wary or regretful adulthood which are nevertheless shot through with a soul-warming sense of compassion. Thats kind of what it boils down to: I had this face that reminded people of other faces, but there wasnt something striking there, which I took as a personal failure. Theres another one that Im hoping to publish first, which Im a little stuck on, but Im still hammering away. Its important to me to hear about these very extreme experiences that I will never have but that enrich my understanding of the world and give me material that I can access later imaginatively. With you, if I read a page of Manhattan Beach and I read a page of The Candy House side by side, I would not know that they were by the same writer. I had sent things to The New Yorker, and they would always come back with a form letter. But Tom was kind of nonplussed. Except that youre unusual in that you think your story wasnt real. A Visit from [] And Im now feeling like maybe I can. Data-as-a-Service Data Management Data Enrichment API & Webhooks. I think it did, actually. Yes. Photo by Pieter M. Van Hattem / Vistalux. . The second took place on a dark and rainy afternoon in January in Egans high-ceilinged but homey living room in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, after I had displaced one of her three catsThats Cuddles, our dim beautyfrom her spot on the couch. Never trust a candy house is also the advice of Miranda, who becomes an eluder, part of a movement of individuals who install a robotic proxy in their existing digital identity and then vanish into the offline world. 7 Bulfinch Place And then I also have people who read whole drafts and an editor whos incredibly helpful as well. And I think thats somewhat true. And one thing I know from experience is that, in order to do new things, I have to do them in new ways. Egan repeatedly breaks down the walls of form and genre to play with conventions and the readers expectationsone chapter of The Candy House, for instance, is written in paragraphs of a hundred and forty characters or less, and was first published as a Twitter thread. I realized that Phils focus was on getting at emotional truth, which, in a way, matters more than anything else. And the idea of those two worlds coexisting in time is really interesting to me. Also, Joyce Carol Oates, someone Ive read for a very long time and really admired. I came with a suitcase on a plane alone. Egan isnt especially interested in spinning out all the potential ramifications of the Collective Consciousness, which are considerable and bit distracting. It was carefully written to run that way, but I didnt realize it when you first sent it to me, in 2012. So its a deeply uncomfortable process, always, but just essential for me, because at the beginning I dont always know what Im trying to do, and when I ultimately do know what Im trying to do I dont know if Im doing it, and I like to find out while I still have time to close the gap. The novel is broken up in time, the earliest chapter being set (sort of) in 1965 and the latest in the 2030s. Is that a matter of principle or just how it works for you? I think it was just what we would call anxiety, you know? I love eavesdropping on people. But it turned out that those tricks were ineffectual and actually irritating. Its so clichd to express anxiety about things being different than they were when one was young. I still dont. Egans outputshe has published seven books of fictionis notable not for its uniformity of style and approach but for its ever-shifting ambitions and obsessions. Its not polemical. All you need to know is that I was born in 1962. I doubt it. 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