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To think of plot alone, though, in a novel as richly constructed as The Candy House is reductive, a mere math metaphor, points on a line to represent relationships between A and B. Movie stars and rock stars making comebacks linguists and sociologists making surprising impacts on the culture. A woman trying to understand her father another trying to find hers. A man trying to rebuild his life another taking his apart. “Plot” has become synonymous with story, sure, and there is plenty of plot-or, really, plots, plural: about new technologies. Yet as good as the summary sounds, its plot isn’t its point at all. The Candy House is also a network of shareable, explorable, and exploitable linked memories. But the Cubes turn out to be shareable in a form called the Collective Consciousness, so that, when merged, they form a new kind of network of shareable, explorable, and exploitable linked memories.

Its next breakthrough technology is called the Mandala Consciousness Cube and Own Your Unconscious, which allows users to upload their minds for exploration to an external hard drive built for human, rather than computer, memory. In Jennifer Egan’s brilliant 2022 novel The Candy House, tech billionaire Bix Bouton is the founder of social media company Mandala, a far more evocative and symbolic name than, say, Facebook, although there are certainly parallels.