Wednesday, May 11, 2022 — 3
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Plotlessness paradoxically drives ‘The Candy House’
Upon reading the words “a novel”
on the cover of Jennifer Egan’s latest
book “The Candy House,” one wonders
whether this is true. When “novel” seems
nearly synonymous with “story,” can this
semi-plotless book be considered a story?
When does a story stop being a story?
The book’s opening pages take us
to an alternate 2010 as seen through
the eyes of Bix Bouton, who invented a
technology that allows people to store
their memories and upload them to a
“collective consciousness.” Once fleeting
and forgettable, experiences can now be
permanent. Reviewing another person’s
memories allows access to pertinent
information in court cases or satisfies
personal desires to see an interaction
from another perspective. Life is shared
and stored.
After being with Bouton for several
pages, during which he is followed home
by a young woman named Rebecca, we
leave his perspective for that of Rebecca’s
son, now a grown man. The book never
repeats a perspective; instead, it is broken
into sections between tangentially-
related characters with no real unifying
plotline, spanning decades into the
past and future. The connections are
not always clear when we switch. We
spend time with a young girl for many
pages before realizing her mother is the
author of a book that inspired Bouton
in his invention. The transition from
one perspective to the next is less a
continuation and merging of a single
thread than a brief touch between
disparate stories — each complete, if
not fully detailed in the book, without
the other. What unites these stories is
this idea of a “collective consciousness,”
which the book itself creates.
In literary fiction especially, a
straightforward plot — if there is any plot
at all — is not a requirement. Many books
in this genre choose to focus more closely
on characters’ psyches and relationships.
Joy Williams’s “The Quick and the
Dead” comes to mind, lollygagging in
its desert setting, showing us the depths
of various characters without much
actually happening. Sally Rooney’s
“Normal People,” too, concerns itself
with a relationship more than an exterior
plot. But “The Candy House” doesn’t fit
into the “character study” category,
jumping as it does between such a large
cast of characters. If anything, the
book studies an entire society — a set of
characters which, had Egan wished to
continue writing, almost certainly could
have included everyone in this fictional
world who had and would ever exist.
A comparable work might be Richard
Linklater’s 1990 film “Slacker,” in which
we follow characters until they pass by
or interact with someone else, at which
point the camera holds on to this new
subject and lets the original character
walk out of the frame, never to be seen
again. But where the switch between
characters in “Slacker” is due to chance
physical proximity, in “The Candy
House,” the switch from one perspective
to the next feels more pointed.
The relationship between adjacent
characters, even if small, is of utmost
importance. They need never have met
each other, but they have in some way
influenced each other’s lives.
Despit the success of some works
that reject linear storytelling in favor of
mulling over a question, making a point
or being experimental for their own sake,
readers tend to like a story. When we get
100 pages into a book and realize we still
aren’t sure what the point is or where it’s
going, we tend to become uneasy. How,
then, does “The Candy House” get away
with having so many different characters
and barely any plot? A part of the answer
is Egan’s prose, which is endlessly
descriptive and captivating. “You will
be lodged too far inside the action to
wriggle free,” says one character midway
through the book. She is describing her
dissociation technique as a spy, but the
feeling is similar to what the reader feels
when inside each vignette.
The characters tend to feel complete
and quickly identifiable as well, and they
are impressively different from each
other. They think differently. An analyst,
Lincoln, relates everything to probability
and numbers, even when detailing a
love story. Lulu, the aforementioned
spy who has a weevil implanted in her
brain to record her thoughts, narrates
in the second person, as if instructing
a future woman in her situation. Their
eccentricities and senses of humor differ,
as do their opinions of Bouton’s invention.
Despite knowing each character for only
a short time, we care about them, and by
the end of each story, they feel human —
fully-formed lives that stay with us as we
meet the next character.
However, what truly coheres the
novel into something that builds and
evolves — basically, what makes it a
story — is that, despite the development
of each character only going so far as
their individual sections, a singular idea
is solidifying inside of the web of people,
strengthening continually throughout
the book and waiting to become clear
to us. The collective consciousness, we
realize, is not just an invention within the
story but is the nature of the book itself.
As we see different people interact with
the collective and revisit their and others’
memories, we feel it there, at the heart
of the book, and each character adds
something to it.
Near the end of the book, Bouton’s
son, Gregory, now an adult, lies in a
snowdrift and stares up at the snow
flying down around him. In a moment
of epiphany, he sees the snowflakes as “a
galaxy of human lives hurtling toward
his curiosity. From a distance they faded
into uniformity, but they were moving,
each propelled by a singular force that
was inexhaustible. The collective.” This
is much the same feeling the reader
has upon finishing the book — those
lives, rather than snowflakes, are the
characters in whose stories they have
been briefly submerged.
Being able to see the connectedness
of humanity without needing to actually
view everyone’s memories or store one’s
own — basically, without technology
— is what gives this moment so much
power for Gregory. The manufactured
“collective” exists as a way of making
the reader see that such a thing
already exists, and it doesn’t need to be
manufactured — it is enough for our
connections and memories to exist in
other people’s minds without needing
every detail to be preserved.
Midway through the book, Roxy,
a woman in her mid-50s in treatment
for opioid abuse, uploads her memories
to the collective and immediately feels
their value vanish. She recalls a single
memory as she uploads them, which
she had been hoping to see again, but
having remembered it herself, she no
longer feels the need to relive her past
more vividly. Instead, it is the present,
currently unfolding without being stored
anywhere — alive, unpredictable and
temporary — that matters. This conflict
is at the heart of the book: the pull
between wanting control over every part
of ourselves and the desire to live fully in
the present. We can’t possess all of time
at once, but if we could, the memories
that comprise it might no longer matter.
Returning to the “what makes a story”
question, memory’s ephemerality is what
allows us to construct our own ideas of
ourselves — the stories of our lives that
would fall apart should everything be
remembered equally. This comes up
again at the end, when Egan writes that
“knowing everything is too much like
knowing nothing; without a story, it’s
all just information.” She is aware that
writing a story from the perspectives of
every person possible, justified only by
their often-minute connections, while
perhaps effective in making a point,
would render the story meaningless. It
would be difficult to call that a story at all.
ERIN EVANS
Daily Arts Writer
U-M’s 2022 creative writing thesis writers: the novelists
All Creative Writing and Literature
majors in the University’s Residential
College have the option to write a
thesis over the course of their senior
year, where they work with a faculty
advisor to produce a polished body of
work. These theses can take the form
of novels, novellas, collections of poetry,
short stories or essays. The 2021–2022
school year saw eleven students take on
the challenge, and The Michigan Daily
interviewed them about their work.
First up: the five novelists.
Marlon Rajan, “Black Bird”
Marlon’s thesis, titled “Black Bird,” is
a 55-page novella. They were originally
planning on doing a collection of short
stories but said in an interview with The
Daily that they realized, “My pieces all
had a few through lines that I could use
to combine them and streamline my
process. Throughout my four years, I
exclusively did short stories in fiction,
so it seemed like a more long-form piece
would suit my style nicely, as well as give
myself a challenge.”
They described their writing as
“personal” and hoped that people who
read their work “feel that it moved them
or helped them understand aspects of
their own lives.” While this is a common
goal for writers of all sorts, Marlon’s
style of storytelling is unique in that
it “doesn’t have a clear trajectory, so
it’s more about the process of reading
it than the end result.” They focus in
on the “small, mundane actions of
everyday life,” rather than conforming
to the emphasis placed on “having a
beginning, middle and end that wrap
up nicely and fit together into our idea
of a typical story.” Marlon said that they
“often got the feedback that my stories
aren’t ‘about anything,’” but they like it
that way.
Marlon also said they don’t feel
compelled to share their writing like
some writers do. Instead, they said, “I
have a vision of the world that (I would)
like others to interact with … I want
others to see the world through my eyes
and get to thinking.”
When asked about the future of their
writing, Marlon broached the idea of
putting writing on the back burner to
focus on “the other ways I’ve learned to
tell stories through sculpture, graphic
design, fashion, etc” instead. Writing,
they said, “served as a platter for me to
stack my other skills on top of and is the
basis for my other ideas that follow it.”
However, they do acknowledge that
writing is “a huge way to interface with
our society and world at large,” and
that literature can be a formative force
in people’s lives. “We’re all a little bit
like sponges that soak up the energy
and knowledge of those around us,”
Marlon said. “What you read has a huge
influence on how our personalities
develop.”
Even though the going was not
always steady, Marlon is glad they took
on the challenge of a thesis. “I struggle
with endings and wrapping things up,
so it feels good to have this story done.
It’s a testament to all the time and
energy I put into my degree.”
BRENNA GOSS
Daily Arts Writer
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