The Candy House

“But Alfred was already savoring the two opposing forces at work in his fellow passengers: a collective wish to shrug off the unaccountable sound, and a contrary intimation of dread. Thus the Suspension Phase, when everyone floated together on a tide of mystery whose solution Alfred alone possessed.”

This quote reveals that Alfred’s social projects are manifestations of his desire to hold control over others. Because Alfred believes he is elevated above the socio-normative behaviors of other people, his social experiments are all about causing discomfort in other people. In this quote, Egan writes that Alfred “savors” the “two opposing forces at work,” highlighting his lack of empathy for human fear and comfort. The “Suspension Phase” brings Alfred great joy, but it is also petty. Mystery frightens people, but Alfred’s control over that mystery gives him power. Thus, Alfred exercises his own version of inauthenticity without being aware of it.

“My family and work—so long the crux of everything I did—became thin topsoil over a deep, bitter root system where my real life took place. Once I’d entered that system, it was all I cared about.”

This quote reveals how Miles is socially pressured into creating his life. Though he is aware that his self-image is based on an external depiction of perfection and is a thin disguise for his inner turmoil, he fixates on society’s expectations and approval as a survival tactic. Miles doesn’t know how to be happy within himself; therefore, the way he navigates and builds his life is informed by fallacy. Importantly, everyone wants to believe in this fallacy. Miles and his family embrace it as truth because it is easier than questioning the depression with which Miles struggles.

“I don’t want to be a creepy voyeur. I want to be an actor in my own drama. And there are reasons to believe that I could be, although listing them involves dangerous immodesty, because although I always preferred math to English, I know what hubris is and where it gets you.”

Lincoln wants to be “an actor in my own drama,” which is a human desire for autonomy that all people crave. Lincoln embodies the very real human issue of feeling that one is constantly on the outside of a possibly exciting life. As the “creepy voyeur,” Lincoln is relegated to analyzing everyone and everything through statistical probability and numbers, which takes him away from truly experiencing his life. In this quote, he refers to hubris, which is a quality of the Hero’s Journey or the Quest Myth in literature. Hubris can be good but when abused turns into a life-threatening flaw. Lincoln’s hubris is that he is smart at analyzing the world through numbers, but that intelligence prevents him from truly understanding people, thus dooming him to loneliness.

“Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery?” 

In this quote, Egan reminds readers that mystery is only a result of ignorance. This theory is as ancient as Greek mythology. The idea that we already collectively know everything there is to know and we’re just not aware of our untapped stores of knowledge is an existential and intellectual issue. This quote captures Egan’s criticism of technological advancement as fallacies of progressivism.

“In the end, a proxy’s job isn’t deception so much as delay, like leaving a body-shaped pillow in bed before a prison break. The goal is to buy enough time before you’re found (through facial recognition or some other sleuthing) that you can rightly claim: I’m not that person anymore. She doesn’t exist.”

In this novel, a proxy is a fabricated online identity that mimics an individual’s behavior so closely that it can trick people into believing that the proxy is that individual. Proxies are dangerous because they expose the ease with which people can manipulate others online. Notably, this quote identifies that the proxy’s goal is not deception. Instead, the proxy misleads people for long enough to lead them off their track. Thus, the proxy doesn’t work in the long run; it is a short-term solution. Proxies (as symbols of the internet) can also force an individual out of the picture as though that individual doesn’t actually exist. The proxies emphasize the dangers of social media and online identity.

“Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this?”

Melora identifies the meaning behind Egan’s title. This novel is named after Hansel and Gretel, in which children are led away from their moral codes by a physical candy house. The candy house is a seduction and a façade that distracts people from the reality of their existence. Candy houses are also constructed by others to develop this distraction and trap their victims. Here, Egan compares the candy house with the ease of accessible knowledge on the internet, stressing that modern technology is used to trick people into stepping away from their true selves and falling for the façade.

“How dare I invent across chasms of gender, age, and cultural context? Trust me, I would not dare. Every thought and twinge I record arises from concrete observation, although getting hold of that information is arguably more presumptuous than inventing it would have been. Pick your poison—if imagining isn’t allowed, then we have to resort to gray grabs.”

Egan uses the character of Charlie to question the limited relationship between knowledge and imagination. If people know everything or think they know everything, then imagination is less able to flourish. Imagination becomes hindered by access to universal and endless knowledge. While knowledge is important, imagination is integral to human desire.

“She feels a whirring deep within her body, the gush of her consciousness pouring onto the Internet: a torrent of memories and moments, many painful—some actual memories of pain—all emptying into a cosmos that writhes and twists like an expanding galaxy. Her father is there, somewhere. Roxy feels their memories conjoin at last, like their two arms swinging on that long bright night. The whole of her past whirls through a portal and vanishes onto a separate sheet of graph paper.”

Roxy’s experience uploading her memories into the collective consciousness is described here as a physically elevating experience. In sharing herself with the world, she becomes part of the universe in a disembodied but wholly physical manner. There is an existential crisis that faces human experience; namely, that we are specks in the grand scheme of the universe. The Own Your Unconscious software makes people falsely believe that they are connecting with the greater universe rather than feeling apart from it. This reveals how badly people want to be immortal, to be a part of something that surpasses the smallness of their lived experiences. Human lives, like Roxy’s, can be complicated and traumatic, but the physical experience of placing the history of an individual life into the endless universe is like a candy house; it’s real, but it’s also a façade of human connection because it deconstructs the complexity of human life onto “a separate sheet of graph paper.” 

“Chris didn’t smoke; his attraction to the smokers was a consequence of his own narrative function—Enabling Sidekick—which he’d become sheepishly aware of in his two years of stockblock codification.”

Egan uses irony to emphasize the ways people view their lives as stories that they can’t write. Chris is a sidekick in his own narrative; he is not his own main character. This is ironic because he is literally a side character in the larger narrative as it exists in Egan’s novel. This irony extends to the reader’s experience because people often feel out of control of their own lives. This lack of control can lead people to the abysses of social media, where they can construct their personas as the characters they wish they could be.

“Nowadays I find it painful to have a mom who’s widely perceived as unhinged—a mom my friends laugh at. But when I was young and she was all I knew, I lived inside a force field that shielded me from every danger without concealing it. She made me strong.”

This novel explores family dynamics as fundamental to how individuals identify themselves. Furthermore, this identity is created both in the moment and in hindsight, as can be seen in this quote. As children, we perceive our parents differently than when we become adults, and so our self-identities shift as well. Furthermore, the “force field” in this quote is a metaphor for the protection and unconditional love of a mother, which highlights the powerful necessity of human relationships over digital ones.

“Here it is, the world that made me: a fantasy I get to believe in for one more year, according to Mom. This, too, is a fairy tale, and after I grow up, these parties will become part of the lost mythical land of my childhood.”

This quote includes dramatic irony because, unbeknownst to the narrator Hannah, the reader knows that the memories of Hannah’s childhood will not turn into myth. Technological advances will allow Hannah to upload and revisit these memories whenever she so chooses. This dramatic irony is important as Egan explores narratives of pre- and post-Mandala. Pre-Mandala, childhood became nostalgic almost instantaneously. Technological advances threaten to erase that nostalgia, which also takes something away from the experience of childhood itself.

“‘Gut reaction’ is such a very American phrase: grotesque, yet somehow apt. Mine includes a recollection of the deep and dark silence beside the lake where you live, and the pointed fir trees surrounding it. Their pine scent was both sweeter and saltier than any I have smelled before, or since.”

Arc’s observation that “gut reaction” is a distinctly American phrase reveals a couple of things about American culture from an outsider’s view. Americans rely on intuitive feelings and utilize corporeal vocabulary to explain reactions. Arc’s observation is seen in other Chapters, such as when Chris’s grandmother instantly distrusts the suitcase story, or when Drew saves Miles’s life. Americanisms and American culture are important to the thematic developments in this novel. This quote is also notable because Arc brings up his memories of small from a moment in time. In Egan’s narrative world, in which people can revisit their memories, can Own Your Unconscious enable the intimacy of scent memory?

“The only route to relevance at our age is through tongue-in-cheek nostalgia, but that is not—let me be very clear—our ultimate ambition. Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.”

Bennie Salazar identifies yet another version of the candy house. Here, Bennie wants to construct a candy house that seduces people into what they believe will be nostalgia so he can relaunch his career in a new way. The symbol of the candy house is important because many ideals in society are constructed as candy houses, emphasizing Egan’s message on authenticity.

“It was Athena who had first made them aware, in the workshop where Gregory and Dennis met, of word-casings and phrase-casings: gutted language she likened to proxies…’Give me the bullet, not the casing—fire it right in my chest. I’ll die gladly for some fresh language’.”

Despite the technological advancements that have made an enormous collective consciousness, this quote reveals that there are still people who seek out experiences that are new, not recycled, and words that are not formulaic. This attitude, expressed by Athena in this quote, is radical in the context of how Own Your Unconscious and other sophisticated online programs have limited imagination. This quote is also an ode to and a celebration of the written word, Egan’s own creative form. Words can be so powerful that they can kill, and so moving that people would die for them.

“They always held hands, which meant they were likely using Mandala’s new Skin-to-Skin™ tool that let people access each other’s consciousness directly if their flesh was touching. ‘The End of Aloneness,’ the advertising said—now you could share another person’s suffering and confusion and joy immediately and wordlessly. Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both, and grossly inauthentic.”

Egan introduces yet another technological development. Skin-to-Skin allows for a more intimate sharing of consciousness, experiencing someone’s feelings literally as your own. This technological advancement, like others, has implied pros and cons. On the one hand, such a tool can alleviate loneliness and develop empathy for others. On the other hand, there might be a necessary limitation of sharing emotions between humans, and a limit to empathy. Everything is always in motion, so the fall of social media as described here is a foreshadowed possibility of our society’s oversaturation of self-absorption and false online identities. Tools like Skin-to-Skin make experiences more about the other person involved, stepping people away from that sense of narcissism.

. “Everyone loved a rivalry, and Mandala vs. Mondrian had been cast by the media as an existential battle whose very terms were decided by which camp you belonged to: Surveillance vs. Freedom (Mondrian); Collaboration vs. Exile (Mandala).”

Mondrian and Mandala are two competing brands, two competing notions of what technology can or should be used for. Both have their benefits, but both pose significant dangers to their users. The competition between them creates divisions between people because each brand represents something different, highlighting certain desires in people.

“…what miracles Own Your Unconscious had performed in its nineteen years of existence: tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer’s and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a drastic decline in purist orthodoxies…”

This quote shows the concrete benefits Own Your Unconscious brought to society. Despite its flaws and dangers, social media and other technology platforms are capable of promoting good in the world and solving certain problems. Much repression occurs in the human subconscious, so access to that subconscious can heal people with trauma or consciousness-related disorders. Massive memory storage can solve problems, mysteries, and even crimes. Empathy can be developed through confrontation and enmeshment in other people’s consciousnesses. Thus, there are many benefits to modernized progressive technology.

“Gregory had stopped writing on the day he learned of his father’s diagnosis. What began as an interruption had hardened, in the eight months since, into renunciation. He doubted he would ever resume. Still, he pretended sometimes that he was the omniscient narrator of the scenes he witnessed through the windows across the street: a novel about the secret lives of adjacent New Yorkers. He’d titled it Contiguous.”

Gregory is a living juxtaposition to his father because of his passion for creativity and writing. Bix’s death alleviates this juxtaposition, causing Gregory to become unsure of his identity. This quote is also important because it reveals that Gregory’s idea for a writing project parallels Bix’s software, exploring the differences between accessing random people’s memories online and gazing out at random people living their lives around you. Both require some imagination because witnessing memory and witnessing action are only facts, not stories. Gregory subverts his father’s legacy, but he also embodies it in his own way. In drawing inspiration and narrative from other people, Gregory bears witness to his own version of Own Your Unconscious. This also proves that the ability to look around you and see how other people are living is possible by looking in your natural environment, not online. Though Gregory doesn’t know what his neighbors are thinking or feeling, he can use his imagination to fill in the narrative, which is harder to do when one has access to people’s memories.

“Gregory had the Affinity Charm, according to his father, which was a fancy way of saying he’d been taken for Greek, Latino, Italian, Native American, Jewish, Asian, and Middle Eastern, as well as Black and white, depending on some alchemy of perceiver and context. But it wasn’t alchemy, his father always insisted—it could be predicted with algorithms created by Miranda Kline, an anthropologist he invoked with annoying frequency in what had turned out to be the final years of his life.”

Gregory’s “Affinity Charm” is the mutable perception of his race and heritage. Bix claims that Kline’s algorithm can determine who would see Gregory as which race or ethnic heritage and why. This implies that even sources of racism, bigotry, or ignorance are calculable and mathematical, insinuating that algorithms can take all the mystery out of human conception and misconception. Egan poses the question as to whether having an algorithm that can determine how people perceive Gregory is useful.

“He knew what the vision meant: human lives past and present, around him, inside him. He opened his mouth and eyes and arms and drew them into himself, feeling a surge of discovery—of rapture—that seemed to lift him out of the snow. He wanted to laugh or shout. Finish your book! Here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity.”

Just as Bix begins the novel with his own craving for a vision, his son helps conclude the novel with a vision of his own fiction. Gregory is moved by the notion of being a part of the larger universe; his presence in this larger community can help him write a story about other people, thus bringing their stories into the universe as well. The relationship between writer, story, and world is described here as an out-of-body elation. The inspiration to return to writing is born from feeling at once a part of and distanced from others, such as his father. Thus, Egan demonstrates that the writer’s purpose is a natural part of the human experience; storytelling cannot be replaced by pure knowledge.

“How can the love and dread she feels for her middle son be converted into something tangible, something that can help him? One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others. There are so many boys in the world.”

In this quote, Egan explores the helplessness of when people don’t see their loved ones the way they do. Perception is different for everyone, and even the perception that no one notices Ames is an example of this. Because so much of the dynamic-building that happens in this novel is within family units, Ames’s mother’s horror that other people can’t see how exquisite her child is is a poignant reminder of the uniquely unconditional bonds that tie families together. This quote ends with “There are so many boys in the world,” highlighting the eternal human paradox: We want to be special but can’t be because we are one speck in the universe. We are, however, special to the people who see and love us the most.

“There are moments when Ames’s own startled face in the bathroom mirror looks unnervingly blank, like nothing. Should he exist? What could he be worth, if he is nothing to himself?”

Ames internalizes the way people ignore him in favor of his other brothers. Ames has become accustomed to not being noticed, which gives him the anonymity of blankness. This suggests that Ames is not getting enough stimulation from the world around him. Crucially, Egan points out that no matter how others perceive us—virtually or physically—we must be worth something to ourselves.

“It became a myth, that hit, a topographical feature that glowed in certain psyches for the rest of their lives, melding with the geography of fairy tales.”

Egan uses the imagery of storytelling to emphasize the importance of memory. Humans experience so much stimulation in their lives that memories are impossible to keep track of. The ones we can recall—especially the ones we can recall vividly—are significant, which is why they take on “the geography of fairy tales.” This quote also celebrates big and small moments, kept alive through memories, as echoes of fairy tales. This highlights that collective memories are important; they keep us connected in certain contexts. This memory is one that exists in the mind as a myth rather than in Own Your Unconscious, so it takes on a narrative form full of emotion.