David Remnick: The author, Jennifer Egan, is out with a new book this month, and it's called The Candy House. It's a kind of follow up to her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and that book from 2010 won a Pulitzer Prize. Now, Candy House revisits some of the same characters, and it's definitely one of the most anticipated novels of the year. Goon Squad was largely about the music business, and that's not a surprise because Egan herself is a tremendous music fan and her ideas about structure and form often owe something to the albums that shaped her as a young listener.
[music]
Jennifer Egan: You know, I came of age in the great era of concept albums, and they were so literary. First of all, there were pages, there was paper. We, my friends and I poured over the lyrics and the images and the very nature of a concept album is that it tells one big story in small pieces that sound very different from each other and that collide.
David Remnick: I invited Jennifer Egan to tell us about three concept albums that may have influenced her over time, and she started in 1973 with the Who's Quadrophenia, which tells the story of a disaffected working-class kid in the 1960s.
[music]
Jennifer Egan: I think Quadrophenia is really one of the greats because it tells an enormous story. It has such an epic, the music itself has such a lush, epic quality. I think for me also part of it was that I fell madly in love with Roger Daltrey. I felt that somehow England and the rock and roll version of England really held my future.
I grew up in San Francisco, I had never left the country. For me, this idea of getting to England and somehow merging with the world that seemed to exist there, which did include Roger Daltrey in some way tingled as a goal for me and it really had a huge impact. I took a gap year before college and I bought a ticket on Freddie Laker Airlines. I packed up a backpack and I went to London.
David Remnick: To Visit Roger Daltrey?
Jennifer Egan: Well.
[laughter]
David Remnick: To the doorstep.
Jennifer Egan: I knew that part was a long shot.
David Remnick: What's your favorite track on Quadrophenia?
Jennifer Egan: I think Love, Reign O'er Me, which, as I recall, is actually the last one.
[music]
Jennifer Egan: Again, I think it's sort of in a way, it captures my narrative impulse, which is always to try to go big if you can. It's pretty over the top.
David Remnick: Totally.
Jennifer Egan: It's just a sort of wild, romantic, the ocean is crashing and again, you have to remember that love was part of this for me. It's just a big, epic vision. It's storytelling, Anna, on the highest note.
[music]
Jennifer Egan: I'm sorry, what 15-year-old girl would not fall in love having heard this song?
[music]
David Remnick: Okay. Now we go to 1975, one of my favorites of that period and even now she's still working, Patti Smith.
Jennifer Egan: Oh my God. I don't even know where to start with her. My two best girlfriends and I, freshman year of high school, fell in love together with Patti Smith. It felt to me that for that year, she was the narrator of the soundtrack of My Life actually. We just would, frankly, get stoned, lie on the rug, close our eyes and listen to Horses.
David Remnick: The album is Horses. What's the cut that did it for you?
Jennifer Egan: Well, the song Horses is just amazing. It's a very narrative song. Although what story it's telling is not completely clear but it's a song that feels almost like a concept album in itself because so much happens narratively, and it starts with a boy who seems to be shooting up.
[music]
Jennifer Egan: We're not really sure, and we end in this very different place. It's just a totally transporting, for me, piece of music to this day. It's a frequent, it's something I listen to a lot actually
David Remnick: While stoned and on a rug.
Jennifer Egan: I kind of cut out that part.
David Remnick: You live longer.
Jennifer Egan: I like to run to it.
David Remnick: Let's listen.
[music]
Jennifer Egan: Her work has such a deep awareness of language as a tool, as a sound. It has such a propulsive force to it, and the force is obviously musical, but it's also narrative. It's certainly for A Visit from the Goon Squad and my new book, The Candy House, I'm very interested in the relationship between musical narrative and literary narrative, and Patti Smith embodies that.
David Remnick: How does that come to play in the new book?
Jennifer Egan: Well, it's different in that the new book is not really about music per se or the music industry in the way that A Visit from the Goon Squad is, but I found myself thinking what as I moved into the new book, I was struck by certain musical tendencies that I would hear in different songs. One was by Nada Surf, which is a band, an indie band that I really like.
In this case, I was noticing that a rhythm, I hadn't been paying attention to, asserts itself very gradually and then the song ends. I love that. I thought, "Okay, how would I do that narratively?" I asked myself that all the time. Then actually I was reading an article in the New Yorker by a woman who worked in Silicon Valley.
David Remnick: Right? That's Anna Wiener.
Jennifer Yes. She talked about how listening to electronic dance music was the perfect soundtrack for the kind of work she was doing, which was completely screen-driven. She'd be sitting in her apartment with headphones on and listening to one song, kind of one beat yield to another. She described the moment when the drop would occur. I remember the moment that I read that because I thought, "Oh, that is exactly the kind of musical principle I want to use to organize this new book that I was just working on the beginnings of at that point."
David Remnick: Were you a writer or are you a writer that only took up fiction because the rock star life wasn't going to work out? Would you have liked to have been on stage performing in that way?
Jennifer Egan: No way. I can't sing, I don't play an instrument. I had a terrible public speaking fear that I had to tackle with Beta Blockers for some years when I first started to publish, no way. However, I have had my good times in the mosh pit, loved rock concerts and I am just a fan. That's really it, I'm a music fan.
David Remnick: Now, your third and final pick is who?
Jennifer Egan: My third and final pick is Eminem's Recovery.
[music]
Jennifer Egan: Possibly a surprising choice, but what I loved about Eminem's Recovery, which interestingly came out the same month as A Visit from the Goon Squad. My older son was then an enormous Eminem fan. He was nine. I have to hasten to say, because I think he would not like me to be telegraphing this about him, but we would often listen to music with an ear pod in each of our ears.
[music]
Jennifer Egan: What I realized, listening to Recovery, was that the concept album was still alive. I don't think I had really known that. There had been a long gap during which I had not really thought much about the form, but I was now thinking about it because I had published a book which had used it as a genre. I listened to Recovery and I thought, "Oh yes, okay. He is absolutely telling a story in pieces that sound different from each other, and it's tremendously language-based." Of course, Eminem is a guy who has made a movie that has a soundtrack and is extremely aware of the storytelling possibilities of his work. That was really heartening actually to discover. [music]
David Remnick: Well, the new novel is just terrific, and I really appreciate you sharing your musical history and your time in the mosh pit with us.
Jennifer Egan: [laughs] It's been a pleasure, thank you.
[music]
David Remnick: Jennifer Egan's new novel has just been released, and it's called The Candy House. She talked about the Who's Quadrophenia, Patti Smith's song Land, a selection of which is called Horses, and Eminem's Recovery. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.
[music]
Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.
