Some of “Goon Squad’s” people reappear here, but perhaps more to the point is the appearance in passing of someone from Egan’s 2001 novel, “Look at Me.” To the point, because that startlingly prescient novel anticipated the conundrum of digital reality, with a model selling her reinvented self online to viewers craving “authenticity” - and the question of authenticity is central to “The Candy House,” which speculates further down the digital line, to a time when people can “externalize” and save and share their experience and memories. Midway into Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House” you may find yourself moaning, “Why don’t novels come with an index?” A “sibling novel” - per Egan - to her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” this book takes a similar form, with a considerable cast of intricately connected characters shifting through different configurations in interlocking stories set in the recent past and not so distant future and told in a dizzying variety of ways.
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