People who achieve great things are not to be envied.

At some point the applause falls silent and the once revolutionary idea gathers dust.

At best, fans will come up and say, "So what, champion?" Worst-case scenario, someone will come up with something smarter.

Then you have to grit your teeth, move on, and ignore that penetrating voice in your head: "I'm afraid I can't do this a second time."

Bix Bouton whispers this into his mother-in-law's phone at night.

Secretly, because actually he could lean back.

He has a good marriage, children and money.

Everyone knows him in a suit and leather cap and calls him by his first name.

As unusual as this one is, it can only mean that he has achieved extraordinary things.

The black Internet visionary founded Mandala, a social network that's doubly similar to Facebook: First, it fundamentally changed the way people interact online.

Second, it's not cool anymore.

Own your subconscious

Bix's question as to whether he would succeed in such a litter again could fill entire seasons of series and novels.

Jennifer Egan covers them in the first 38 pages of her new novel Candy House.

It succeeds.

Mandala's newest product is called Own Your Subconscious and allows people to offload their memories.

If you feed your data anonymously into the so-called collective consciousness, you get unlimited access to the memories of others.

Egan himself might sound familiar with Bix's doubts.

Not because she knows the inner workings of uniformed tech giants — she dated Steve Jobs for a while — but because she won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.

Egan refers to Candy House as a "sibling novel" to Pulitzer Prize-winning The Greater Part of the World, and the new book actually feels like its second book.

She has since published other books, the tweeted Black Box and the highly acclaimed Manhattan Beach.

But none had to measure up to such high expectations.

Although The Greater Part of the World says "novel" on the cover, the book reminds some of intertwined but independent short stories.

Another interpretation has been added over the years: the concept album.

13 chapters – or tracks?

– outline a constellation of characters, with music producer Bennie Salazar at the center.

The chapters are narrated by his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha, his rocked-out ex-bandmate Scotty or Mindy, the far too young girlfriend of his mentor Lou.

Junkies, Lost, Fallen

It is a textual kaleidoscope of characters, timelines and locations.

It soon becomes clear that Salazar is more of a starting point for the book's actual subject: how the zeitgeist brings people together who would otherwise never have known about each other.

In fact, one has to speak of zeitgeists, as the novel accompanies its characters from early hippie trips through the new wave phase to an alternative year 2020. Everything is accompanied by rock music, Sasha appears again and again.

But the true protagonist is Egan's prose.

It is experimental and light at the same time, sometimes written in the second person, sometimes as a power point presentation and at most a bit pretentious: “There was nothing behind the desk but a view – the whole city was spread out in front of us, like street vendors do on theirs blankets with cheap,

make glittery watches and belts.

This is what New York looked like: a beautiful item that was easy to get, even for me.”