If cinema is dominated by the idea of ??the universe, the common fictional space in which dozens of stories fit, adding pieces to the total, why not literature? In recent months we have seen literary authors as diverse as Elif Batuman, Tom Perrotta, and Marlon James revisit some of their earlier books with various sequels. Jennifer Egan (Chicago, 1962) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 with a novel, Time is a multi-character scoundrel in which each fragment was an exercise in formal virtuosity, including the famous chapter narrated in Power Point. After a classic historical novel, Manhattan Beach (Salamander) and a book that she wrote in the form of tweets, the author revisits the universe of that novel in The Candy House (Salamander). This is also a protean and capacious book, in which great themes fit (solitude in an interconnected world, the inflationary value of beauty), slightly sci-fi futurism and new formal challenges, such as a chapter with a protagonist, a spy. a la James Bond, written in the form of instructions.
It is not necessary to have read the first to enjoy the second, although together they multiply. Egan, who briefly dated Steve Jobs in college—a silly fact that haunts her: it’s on her Wikipedia—isn’t particularly interested in the gizmos that connect us, despite having written about a titan of the tech industry. The only machine that she is interested in is the novel.
In one review they referred to The Candy House as a twin novel to Time is a Scoundrel. He prefers?
Yes, twin is perfect, because it is not a sequel. There is no chronological sequence and the material further back in time is in this second book. Also “twin” suggests that there will be only two and the truth is that I would not be able to write a third.
Which characters did you most want to revisit?
I only revisited the ones I felt like. There were different reasons that led me to repechage them. On the one hand, those characters that he knew more about than the reader. For example, Bix, who has a very small role in El tiempo, is a scoundrel. When I wrote it, I already knew that he had invented social networks, but the reader had no way of knowing. He was someone I wanted to go back to. I also do not want to keep information to myself and not share it with readers. In these books there is a very high failure rate. I would say that 50% of what I write does not make it to the final version.
In other words, he has a computer full of documents with discarded chapters.
I have a full office! I write by hand. In general, almost all the characters, if they are important in Time is a Scoundrel, are minor in The Candy House, and vice versa. Minus the character of Lou Klein [a successful music producer], someone who destroys lives and has everything under control, even on his deathbed. He re-emerged in this book because his character was so objectionable that he wanted to find out what he had done to her. He knew that it would be his two young daughters who would manage to tame him in the end. We know that the mother of these girls is a woman who gave up all her ambition in the first book and also wanted her story back.
Are you the only one who decides what works and what doesn’t, or do you have a group of close readers who go through the drafts?
The book is dedicated to my writing group. I am a person who receives a lot of feedback when writing. There were maybe a dozen people who were reading my drafts, not counting my editor and my agent, the people who get paid to do it. Sometimes I think that what I do is difficult to judge, so I need to know if the reader is receiving it as I have conceived it. With failed chapters, the usual thing is that they fail at the beginning. I use a kaleidoscopic method. Each of the chapters is written as if it belonged to a different book. That’s one of my goals with these books, which are not interrelated story books at all. This is fine, those books are fun and that is a very common method, but for me it is not enough. My way of doing it is that each chapter has a different technique. And the moment you decide that, you have just complicated your life. It only works if I find a story that can only be told that way. It is very far from what people believe, that I sit down and say: I’m going to tell it in tweets.
The character of Bix Bouton, the inventor of social networks, had all the numbers to become a villain. However, a lot of empathy and intellectual respect towards him is detected…
There are no villains in my books. Perhaps the closest thing to it was Lou Kline in Time Is a Scoundrel and that is why I had to revisit it. For me, villains just live in the world of the cliché. Even if you write within the parameters of the genre, if someone is just bad, you’ve missed an opportunity. Because nobody is. A villain is an artistic failure. A failure to find the nuance and humanity in that person. The idea that a titan of the tech industry would be a bad person is a stereotype. The people in that sector, the ones who go far, often think they are doing good. With the best of intentions, they try things that are used in a different way than they thought, and that’s what happens to Bix. His story is a bit tragic actually.
In real life, do you find the Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerbergs narratively interesting?
The truth is that no, not at all. Power itself is not that interesting to me. Sure they have nuances, but perhaps because we’ve been told so much of their stories that it’s hard for me to be curious about them. They also come covered by a layer of fame and fame puts a kind of shiny cloak over people that complicates the possibility of finding their humanity. Elon Musk is very reminiscent of Donald Trump and I am bored with those types of personalities. Anthony Trollope, an author I love, described power very well, and he was very interested in women because in his era they didn’t have that kind of power. The candy house has the answer: what interests me about someone like that is his fear of replicating innovation, and the horror of seeing his invention perverted and turned into something destructive. Right now, for example, it’s funny to see all this hysteria about AI and ChatGPT. Even the people who created it are alarmed, and this is the first time this has happened: usually a new invention comes along first and then comes the “oh my god what have we done” moment. But here the oh-my-god moment has come first.
On the other hand, with the character of Bix something else happens: he is a black man. I’m interested in how he did it, because it’s not easy. I asked many black friends to read it and I learned a lot, including from his friends. And the character evolved a lot thanks to his comments. Someone said to me: how did he do it? What is it about him that could have circumnavigated crushing racism that should have prevented this outcome? This is an example of criticism that led to something interesting. Almost all criticism does.
This makes me think of the “sensitivity readers” debate. In the literary world, there seems to be a consensus about the fact that they are something negative, that they only produce more cowardly and devious fictions, but perhaps another aspect is being forgotten, that a sensitive reader can simply provide another angle that the author does not have. Just like your black friends did to you.
I have no problem with its existence. If you write fiction from the point of view of someone with a different life experience and also includes the experience of a marginalized minority, it would be very rare to get to the time of publication without having done that work. I don’t write about myself, ever, so I always ask myself if I’m getting it right. There’s a chapter in Candy House about academics. I am not an academic, so I made my friend read it, who is a professor of History, and she corrected me on a few things. It was interesting and revealing. I am very used to this process. I hate the idea that you can only write about your own experience. For god’s sake! It’s called fiction for a reason. Toni Morrison, when she was a professor at Princeton, she would tell her students, almost all white: leave your boring lives behind and write about something else. Take the leap Even the most angry people with cultural appropriation are unable to offer a good argument for the imagination police. What are we talking about? We talk about doing things responsibly and simply well. If you’re writing from the point of view of a black man being a white woman, as I was, and you haven’t even tested it, you’re going to find that you’ve made a lot of mistakes. It’s just good practice. And, on the other hand, you have to let people make mistakes. I understand that it is irritating, but we should never come to suppression, which is the tool of dictators. All of this was to say that I’m all for sensitive readers if their role is to enhance a text, not tame it.
You were president of PEN America for a few years. I would say that this job is much more complicated now than 20 years ago, when it was clearer what was threatening freedom of expression.
Literature is threatened from many sides: the left, the right, and technology. My goal as president was to remind people who care about literature that no matter how much we disagree, we have more in common than differences, because we are dedicated to something that is in jeopardy. Trying to entertain an audience that is deeply distracted is difficult. If everyone is careful what they write because they fear that if they make a mistake they will be deleted, the result will be lousy fiction. You can’t think big if you’re watching every little mistake.
I think the candy house started during the Obama years and continued into the Trump years. Did it even reach those of Biden?
Yes, yes, three presidents.
How was that altering his mood? Many Americans still now report post-traumatic stress from the Turmp years, when there was a crisis every day.
I started it in 2010 and the first chapter I wrote is Lolou the spy, which is very dark. And he was well aware that she was out of step with the national climate. She was pinning these nefarious intentions on the United States government and she was not how she perceived herself at the time. I, too, felt a benign and even benevolent presence in Obama. I left the book for a few years to finish Manhattan Beach and when I returned, in 2016, Trump had not yet won but already given everything a lot of fear. You could see a whole faction of America raging and how things were becoming unstable. Somehow, the national climate caught up with what I was writing about. So, this material seemed much more appropriate. Then the pandemic came and then we already entered the field of madness. I had Covid in those first two months, when thousands of people were dying, and I was pretty bad. The funny thing is that with all this the book is quite optimistic, it is not a dystopian novel. There is a lot of faith in human possibility. Dystopian fiction has its merits, although I don’t really like it. That Biden arrived at the end helped me because it justified the optimism that exudes. The flow of presidents worked well for my interests [laughs].
In the novel there are several technological inventions, such as a system that allows access to the consciousness of others. How far did you want to take them? How realistic or far away did you want these creations to be?
He invented them for me in a completely playful spirit. I don’t like technology, nor new machines, I adapt late to them. I use the same computer until my cat spills a glass of water on it and I have no choice but to change it. My happy place is where I come up with something that is totally ridiculous but seems right. Normally, if I invent a machine, it’s because I find it useful narratively. A machine that allows me to write in the first and third person at the same time? That is a machine that interests me. The machines are narrative machines. The machine is called a novel, and I believe a lot in it. Actually, within science fiction they would be quite dumb. Science fiction authors have come up with much better ideas! As I’ve been told millions of times since the book came out. It doesn’t bother me because I’m not working in that genre. If you are writing in genre, then yes you must know it from start to finish.
Also, what does it mean to register consciousness? When I teach, I ask my students to write a list of the things that are going through their consciousness at any given time, and it’s a very difficult thing to do. We have no idea, we don’t even know what’s going through our heads. The machine is nonsense, it is a toy. That’s why I’m not a techie or sci-fi writer, if I hadn’t paid much more attention to them, but I don’t care. I only care about my machine, which is the novel.
