![]() ![]() Martin Aircraft Company to help with the War effort. Hamilton, Tennessee didn't have very much to offer young people as far as employment was concerned so most of them drifted off to other locations. Neither of these two girls wished to become housewives raising children and to be stuck in the Cove for the rest of their lives. Anna Marie had read an article in a newspaper she found giving details of employment in Baltimore. She begged and pleaded with her dearest friend Margaret Fay about leaving, telling her since Jeb, her boyfriend and a tobacco farmer that had been drafted into the Army and was serving overseas and her boyfriend Jim had been killed at Pearl Harbor on Decemit was their patriotic duty as citizens to do what they could to help with the war effort. With very little money and a lot of nerve these two young, inexperienced country girls from Tennessee left the Cove for Baltimore not knowing if they would be hired to work, if they could find a place to live or if they would even get there. With a lot of determination, their life long friendship and lady luck riding on their shoulders they started a new life for themselves. With the help from newfound friends they were able to achieve what would turn out to be a very interesting and exciting adventure.Jennifer Egan’s 2010 “ A Visit From the Goon Squad” was, depending whom you asked, a novel, or a collection, or a story cycle. But you could also call it a concept album. Following a tangle of characters in and adjacent to the music business across decades, it switched voices and techniques in a kaleidoscopic extended-family portrait. “The Candy House,” which passes the microphone to a number of peripheral “Goon Squad” characters, is similar in its anti-chronological structure and chameleonic virtuosity. But given its subject matter, it might be better to describe it as a social network, the literary version of the collaborative novel written by your friends and friends of friends on Facebook or Instagram, each link opening on a new protagonist. It is a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes. Tech may not be the new rock ’n’ roll, but it serves an analogous function in “The Candy House.” It’s the world-shifting phenomenon that defines an era and connects strangers. It is also, though it wears the fine cloth of idealism, big business. The killer app that defines the alternative reality of “The Candy House” is dreamed up in 2010 by Bix Bouton, briefly introduced as an early-90s internet obsessive in “Goon Squad,” now a social-media mogul. His next big idea, built on an experimental technology that can digitally capture animal consciousness, allows people to upload a life’s worth of memories - even long-forgotten ones - share them in a collective archive and access others’, as if traveling in a cranial time machine. The name of the product, Own Your Unconscious, suggests a lofty, even spiritual aspiration, as does the name of Bix’s company, Mandala. We’ve seen how that kind of vision plays out - surely the more we know about one another, the better we’ll understand one another? Right? - and so has its creator. Bix, who is Black, imagined the internet in the ’90s as a “new metaphysical sphere” where “Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world.” The idea, he concedes, “looked comically naïve from a 2010 perspective.” Nonetheless, we try, try again. ‘The Candy House’ takes its title from a repeated metaphor for temptation: the lures of amusement and nostalgia that Hansel-and-Gretel us into a spun-sugar edifice upon which we are invited to gorge and in which we - our desires, our memories - are also on the menu.Ĭontemporary fiction often treats this sort of “Black Mirror” premise (specifically, it has shades of the episode “The Entire History of You”) skeptically the technology is an oppressor, or, to the novelist, a competitor.
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