He’s among the most famous people on the planet, a regular visitor to Obama’s White House. In the almost-middle of this is Bix Bouton, a Mark Zuckerberg-like figure, except that he’s Black, romanticizes the ungentrified East Village of his early adulthood, misses his dreadlocks and is - in certain flickering lights - sympathetic. The novel is about music, New York’s East Village, magazine journalism, San Francisco in the 1970s, Gen-X nostalgia, the digitalization of everything and the search, in the face of that vitality-sucking digitalization, for forms of authenticity. Among its central characters is Bennie Salazar, a flailing record executive, and Sasha, his assistant. That book tells more than a dozen interrelated stories and absolutely defies neat summarizing. “The Candy House” is a sequel to “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 novel.

It makes you feel a bit high, drugged, and fitted with V.R. Jennifer Egan’s new one, “The Candy House,” is one of these novels. You’ve entered elite head space of one kind or another. Sometimes, though, you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle - not necessarily because it’s a great novel qua novel, which you can’t know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions. I tend to side with Barry Hannah, who said in his Paris Review interview, “You don’t have to be an intellectual to write, you just have to wonder about things and want to know.” God knows the number of Mensa types who can’t write their way out of a paper bag.

tests and read a book about how to improve his score, but it remained about the same.

to be a good fiction writer? John Cheever worried about his, which was under 110 - too low to qualify him for the Army’s Officer Candidate School during World War II. THE CANDY HOUSE By Jennifer Egan 334 pages.

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