Oh my, this book. This author. Part of me is put off because there is so much going on, that it takes work to track all the characters. Oh, but Jennifer Egan is such an excellent writer! The Candy House is a brilliant and absorbing tale. Again, much like A Visit from the Good Squad, it is akin to a collection of short stories in which a minor character in one assumes the primary voice in another. These people are so real and relatable in their search for authenticity, for connection and meaning, for identity. The pull to conform versus the wish to be unique. What we give up in exchange.
Choosing quotes was difficult, as every other sentence was worth keeping. I decided to not think too hard about it:
Page 22: Had there been a clue Bix had missed, when he said goodbye, of what would happen next? He felt the mystery of his own unconscious like a whale looming invisibly beneath a tiny swimmer. If he couldn't search or retrieve or view his own past, then it wasn't really his. It was lost.
Page 50: Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing--being right--gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.
Page 54: 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.
Page 86: Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.
Page 97: Not that it matters; it's all just retroactive math. The random walk of a drunk is of geometric interest, but it can't predict where he'll stagger next.
Page 125: 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?
Page 152: But friendship risks the end of friendship, and Roxy has moved through too many friends in her life.
Page 298-9: 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.
Page 322: Snow swarmed like honeybees in the golden glow of the old-fashioned streetlamps; it slathered tree trunks and sparkled like crushed diamonds at his feet.
Page 326: One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others.
Page 333: But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it's all just information.
