Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House is a smart book, and an entertaining book, but it is also a prescient book, sympathetic in its preservation of the cultural practice of play, and reassuring in its human scale. Its stories evoke what it is to live now, at a time when new dilemmas concerning the line between experience and capital are just dawning, and when the definition of what it is to be dispossessed is acquiring a new, sometimes metaphysical, dimension.