And it’s about novels themselves, what we get out of them, and - you feel for Egan here - how incredibly intimidating they are to write. It’s also about technology, that “candy house” that keeps enticing us to give up little pieces of ourselves to anonymous companies.

The Candy House depends for its emotional oomph not just on your having read Goon Squad, but on your memories of Goon Squad being crisp and clear - which makes sense, because while Goon Squad was about time, Candy House is about memories. If you approach it that way, however, you will most likely find the climax, which sees multiple Goon Squad characters briefly falling back into their old configurations, landing a little flat. Technically speaking, The Candy House stands on its own, and if you read it without ever cracking the cover on Goon Squad, it will all make sense. In 2010, Goon Squad dazzled readers with its famous PowerPoint chapter in Candy House, Egan’s great format twist comes with a chapter told as a field guide for spies.

We hopscotch across time, meeting the same characters again and again, refracted through the lenses of dozens of different points of view. It’s the novel as daisy chain: Each chapter picks up the point of view of a supporting character from a previous chapter, taking us from the mind of a strung-out record producer to his recovering addict daughter to her annoying D&D-playing sober companion. The structural innovation Egan made with A Visit From the Goon Squad and repeats here with The Candy House is deceptively simple. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark You already know she can do it, so now the pleasure is in watching the details. Reading this book is like watching Simone Biles execute a trick that she’s crafted and polished and honed to perfection. But where reading Goon Squad felt like watching a circus acrobat pull off a flip you’ve never seen before, The Candy House has a subtler joy. Now Egan has released what she’s calling “a sibling novel” to A Visit From the Goon Squad titled The Candy House, which borrows its sprawling structure and a number of its characters from its predecessor. Playful, ambitious, and formally inventive, Goon Squad stands as a model for what the contemporary novel could be and often isn’t: a book that sets out to express something new, and builds itself a wholly new form with which to do so.

But the 12 years that have gone by since Jennifer Egan published her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad have treated that book with kindness. Time is a goon, marauding and thieving and vicious.

Jennifer egan the candy house