Now disillusioned and disaffected, Bix has become so famous that he has to go incognito - posing as a graduate student - in order to attend a Columbia University discussion group about a lecture by anthropologist Miranda Kline, whose book, “Patterns of Affinity,” had been crucial to him as he developed Mandala. Disconnected from his wife and children, fearful that he may never have another brilliant idea, Bix is feeling nostalgic for the early ‘90s when the Internet was new and he was in the “thrall of his Vision, which burned with hypnotic clarity.” Then, he “could feel the vibrations of an invisible web of connection forcing its way through the familiar world like cracks in a windshield.”

student in NYU’s engineering lab,” Bix has become an immensely wealthy tech guru who’s developed a social media company called Mandala. “The Candy House” begins in 2010 from the perspective of Bix Bouton, who was an NYU classmate of “Goon Squad” character Sasha. Even more structurally experimental than its predecessor, the novel unfolds from a slew of perspectives and in a wide range of styles as it ruminates on the allure and perils of technology and social media, bids for intimacy and threats to privacy, the fragility of identity, and the yearning for authenticity in a world of pretenders and simulacra. Now Egan has published a follow-up, which she calls not a sequel but a ‘sibling’ to the original.Jennifer Egan’s new book, “ The Candy House,” which she’s called a “sibling novel” to her Pulitzer Prize-winning “ A Visit From the Goon Squad,” is a dizzying and dazzling work that should end up on many Best of the Year lists. Small surprise, though, that the multi-million dollar television series which was promised in the wake of its success has yet to appear it’s tough to imagine how so convoluted a nest of stories could ever translate effectively and recognisably into even the most elaborate Netflix maxi-series. The book caused a splash, in both critical and commercial terms, striking for a project of such unabashed complexity. It’s as much a short story collection as it is a novel, the author happy to break literary rules without compunction and always keen to nudge the reader into doing as much work as possible: to make connections between disparate episodes, to build up a larger narrative for themselves.

I t’s been twelve years since Jennifer Egan published A Visit from the Goon Squad, a polyphonic and unceasingly inventive sprawl of a text, which remains both her best-known creation and her most celebrated, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011.

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