Jennifer Egan’s Disciplined Restlessness

“Stories like Jennifer Egan’s make me want to continue my subscription to The New Yorker and discontinue my prescription to anti-depressants,” a reader once wrote in. “Stories so bleakly wrought that they make me eerily happy.” Egan’s latest book, “The Candy House,” from 2022, now out in paperback, is just what that reader described: a series of sometimes bleak, interlocking narratives of unloved childhood, struggling adolescence, confused youth, and wary or regretful adulthood which are nevertheless shot through with a soul-warming sense of compassion.