One of the characters, Miranda Kline, is an anthropologist famous for mapping: “'the genome of human inclinations’ and creating algorithms for predicting behaviour”. Technology is at the heart of this book, but although it can be classed as “speculative fiction”, it feels entirely real. It does a million things for us, and it was a big help to me imaginatively in The Candy House, but the fact that all roads lead there just closes off a lot of dramatic possibilities.” It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the internet. It’s really refreshing to imagine in the pre-internet period. In an interview at the Mississippi book festival earlier this month, Egan said: “I was in my 30s before I ever got online. It’s a bit like doing late-night research on the internet, when you spot something of peripheral interest on one site and go to that page, which offers something else you want to look at, and so on, until you have wandered so far from your starting point that you can’t recall what it was you were looking for in the first place.Įgan contrives to keep all the ends together, although when I get to a second reading (it’s that good) I’m going to keep notes of family trees and dates to try and work out how she did it (it’s that clever). Jennifer Egan’s new novel skips joyfully back and forth between characters, plots and timelines at a hair-raising pace.
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