Louisa Ermelino at The Millions:
“I knew in Goon Squad that Bix would invent social media,” Jennifer Egan says of her character Bix Bouton, who returns from her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad to take up a central role in her new novel, The Candy House, coming April 5 from Scribner. “When I know something the reader doesn’t know, I know there’s a future story,” she tells me.
The Candy House begins in 2010 with Bix wandering the New York City streets, afraid he will never have a new idea, when he sees a flyer on a lamppost about a discussion group in an apartment near Columbia University following a lecture by anthropologist Miranda Kline. It was Kline’s theories of algorithms explaining trust and influence among members of a Brazilian tribe that Bix adapted to become a very rich and famous tech mogul.
More here.