Jennifer Egan: ‘I was astonished to find I made a lot of factual errors’

Writer on latest novel The Candy House, book promotion and the aesthetics of gaming

Jennifer Egan: ‘My career has been very incremental, and I know how hard it is to reach a point where anyone gives a damn what you do.’

Jennifer Egan: ‘My career has been very incremental, and I know how hard it is to reach a point where anyone gives a damn what you do.’

Jennifer Egan exudes energy. When we speak, she is in the middle of a book tour to launch her new novel The Candy House, sitting in her sister’s basement in Chicago (“I shouldn’t say basement, it’s a beautiful guest room, it’s just a little bit under the ground, so that makes me worry about the wifi”), and talking to me ahead of a live stream event (“so you’re my guinea pig”) while eating breakfast and discouraging the household dog from joining the chat.

But she is not flustered, seems in fact to thrive on this sort of busy way of being. It’s an energy readers of her novels will recognise, particularly from her breakthrough novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and dazzled readers with its buzzy energy, multi-format structure and interlocking characters. Her new novel is described carefully by her publishers not as a sequel to Goon Squad but a “sibling novel”.

Please subscribe or sign in to continue reading.
only €1 first month

Insightful opinion is just a away.