From Punk to Cyberpunk: History, Time, and Nostalgia in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and The Candy House (2022)

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) is a highly self-conscious, often playful, postmodern literary romp that nevertheless takes on some serious issues. Of these, the one that is most central to the text is the issue of time and the ways in which time ultimately takes us all down. However, the novel is no mere meditation on aging and mortality; it inserts its exploration of a seemingly universal human experience into a very specific historical context spanning roughly from the 1970s into the 2020s. Meanwhile, its coverage was extended with publication of a 2022 sequel in The Candy House, which also overlaps with Goon Squad in ways that make it as much a companion as a sequel. Indeed, it makes sense to read The Candy House less as a sequel and more as a new installment in what is becoming a long-term serial novel. Still, The Candy House is much more critical than Goon Squad of the nostalgia with which aging and the passing of time tempt us all, while tilting generically much more toward science fiction. In particular, the punk rock music around which Goon Squad revolves is replaced in The Candy House with a cyberpunk emphasis on new technologies that offer dramatic new possibilities for human experience while also threatening to erode human experience altogether.