傻瓜小队再次访问。

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.

这是一个关于编纂人类经验的危险，最终比“傻瓜”更黑暗，更令人不安的书。尽管年轻角色涌入，但“糖果屋”还是一个古老的灵魂。父母的灵魂。在其压倒性的问题中：我们为什么如此愿意放弃自己的技术，赠送我们的隐私？

Like “Goon,” “Candy” presents a fictional universe eerily adjacent to our own. 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. (Come on. 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.

This is oversharing writ large, a massive internal data dump driven by the self-obsession that 21st-century technology unleashed. 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. The algorithms were patented and sold to social media companies, including Mandala, who applied the formulas’ predictive powers to modern society.

对于想要保留其隐私的叛徒“数据辩护者”，克里斯·萨拉萨尔（Chris Salazar）的非营利组织“被广泛赞誉，并指责）协调了一个帮助人们揭露其在线身份的Bafflers和Proxies网络。”有趣的是，蒙德里安最复杂的代理通常是小说作家，他们一次模仿了多个身份。

我刚刚提供的这个简短的情节摘要与阅读小说的经历不像是读出更广泛的故事情节的经历，这些故事情节略微滴落到章节中，这些章节深入研究了不同角色的生活。“糖果屋”中充斥着故事，富有跳动的心。埃根（Egan）的所有小说，包括传统上建造的“曼哈顿海滩”（Manhattan Beach）（2017年），都是由人类，同理心和经常hillity的锚定。“糖果屋”本身没有恶棍，只有几个天才，他们的发现被滥用或滥用，以及许多普通人，他们在寻求真实性/隐私的追求与表演/宣传的魅力之间进行了切换。

Lincoln, for example, is a “counter,” a “senior empiricist and metrics expert” who cannot help but use his data-gathering acumen to try and win the love of M, a co-worker. He explains his approach in agonizingly humorous detail, down to calculating the number of primary and secondary freckles on M’s nose, even as he admits an X factor of unknown value: X being the “ineffable, unpredictable detail that makes one person fall in love with another person.”

Alfred, another character, is so intolerant of fakery that he has taken to screaming in public, to elicit “genuine human responses rather than the made-up crap we serve each other all day long.”

“ Goon”的正式创新引起了对Egan的广泛赞扬，但在“糖果”中重复出现，但效果减少了。她的写作仍然令人眼花the乱，她的观察能力仍然很敏锐。但是我们已经知道，她可以从小故事的碎片中构建一个大故事，因此完全由电子邮件构建的章节，或写为培训手册的章节，或者由焦虑的青少年讲述的章节，他们花了一个难忘的下午，违反了社交她的小宇宙的层次结构并不意外。埃根（Egan）的创造力较少，因为她提高了自己的标准。

必须说，“糖果”询问了很多听众。这部小说从“ Goon”中汲取了数十个松散的线索，这本书本身就是一本发明而复杂的书，然后将它们朝不同的方向旋转。我敢说故事太多了吗？雄心勃勃的读者必须在这两个文本之间不断地划分，以跟踪伊根（Egan）众所周知的庞大社交网络。我知道这样做的唯一方法是保持两本书中每个角色的统计以及有关社交和家谱联系的注释，因此我至少可以保持情节和背景故事。

All of which is to conclude that consuming “The Candy House” is active, challenging work. I suspect Egan knows this, and I suspect this is her way of reminding 21st-century readers of the beautifully designed computer between our ears, quietly whirring with imaginative possibilities. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that a novel exploding with stories ultimately curls back into itself with ruminations from an omniscient narrator, who observes that fiction, alone, “lets us roam with absolute freedom through the human collective,” because “knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story it’s all just信息.”

玛姬·盖莱豪斯（Maggie Galehouse）is a Houston writer.