The Candy House is Egan's followup to her award-winning 2010 novel, A Visit from the Good Squad. It revisits many of the same characters while expanding on the world established in the first book. It also uses the same structure of linked stories to jump back and forth through time, genre, and perspective. Candy House stands on its own as a work of speculative fiction, but some familiarity with the events of A Visit from the Goon Squad provides helpful context.
The novel follows music producer Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha Blake as it delves into different moments in their lives. It opens with Sasha on a boring first date in New York City, which takes a dramatic turn when she steals a woman's purse that was left in the bathroom, revealing her inclination for kleptomania. She returns the purse, reflecting on how she is trying to improve. The novel then goes back in time, depicting her time at NYU through the perspective of her friend Rob, who recently attempted to commit suicide. Further back, another chapter features Ted, father of Alfred, Miles, and Ames, as he goes to Italy in the vague hope of finding Sasha who, as a teenager, has run away from home. Finally, the reader sees Sasha through the eyes of her daughter Allison. In a chapter written using Microsoft PowerPoint, Allison describes her mother as happily married to Drew, who runs a local clinic for impoverished people in their California desert town.
In Bennie's sections, he first appears as a stressed-out music executive, checking out a local band while reflecting on his recent divorce and health concerns. The novel then flashes back to Bennie as an adolescent, a young musician playing bass in a punk-rock band. He reencounters his bandmate Scotty in a later chapter, discovering that he has now fallen on hard times, spending his days fishing in the East River and working night shifts. Moving closer to recent events, a chapter about his ex-wife Stephanie reveals that he had an affair with her friend Kathy Binghamton. It is implied this is a result of his feeling insecure and unwanted in their wealthy New York suburb. The novel's final chapter finds Bennie remarried and trying to build artificial hype for Scotty's comeback concert. Like Sasha, he appears more content at this point in his story.
A Visit from the Goon Squad showed how this innovative approach to narrative could piece together a composite portrait of these two characters and many others. The reader watches Bennie and Sasha appear to be almost unrecognizably different at various moments in the plot, as their characterizations are shaped by perspective, place, and time. This distinctive choice allowed Egan to show how profoundly time shapes people and how the past continues to resurface in unexpected ways, a narrative strategy and thematic she revisited (and built upon) in The Candy House.
