“ The Candy House,” out this week, expands the world of “Goon Squad.” It’s part sequel and part prequel, but it’s not a return Egan never left. Critics and readers love to pronounce the death of the novel, but “Goon Squad” - with all its formal acrobatics and jumps in time and point of view, imbued so fully with our own yearnings - emphasized the form’s vitality. Perhaps best known (at least in circles of writers) for its chapter-as-PowerPoint presentation, it felt exciting not because slideshows were particularly new in 2010 but because the book was able to synthesize this oddity of life back into art. Yet it was her 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel-in-stories “ A Visit From the Goon Squad” that catapulted an already very good career into the stratosphere. But for Egan, it was still a formal stretch and, she says, the toughest to write. “ Manhattan Beach,” the 2017 historical novel that plays it straightest - her uncle loved it “I have never heard from him about other books” - felt like a departure because it was so familiar. She once described the image she held in her mind while writing her novel “ Look at Me,” about a model, a teenager and a terrorist, as a figure eight. She’s written a coming-of-age and a gothic novel. The rare writer for whom each book has been an entirely different gambit, Egan has continually worked to stretch what both the novel and the novelist are capable of. “I also really know that sadness, loving something whose cultural power is waning, but I’m not giving up.” “I believe in novels very much,” she said. Her books are filled with artifice, devices, doubles, spies and sinking ships.

It’s the thing that struck me, rereading her work.

In a moment of cultural wariness of the novel - evident in the proliferation of narrowly constructed autofiction and the supremacy of television - Egan remains a true believer.

The candy house jennifer egan review