They can also deposit them anonymously in a crowdsourced repository called the Collective Consciousness, where they can access other people’s memories. They can edit these externalised memories with MemoryShop software, excising traumatic events before they ‘reinternalise’ the memories and replace the originals. This allows users to upload their memories onto a device called the Consciousness Cube, where they can rewatch past experiences as if they were streaming TV, fast-forwarding through the boring bits or muting the sound.
But there’s also a new service, Own Your Unconscious. All the familiar technologies are present: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, bitcoin. In A Visit from the Goon Squad, the characters stand on the precipice of the digital age and long to return to the past in The Candy House, now firmly in the brave new world, the characters – many of whom we met in the earlier book – find that they can return. T he Candy House, Jennifer Egan’s companion to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), appears to be part of the trend for fiction premised on interventions – computational, pharmaceutical, viral – in human memory.
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