Humans use tech to connect. A novelist explores whether it’s working.

I first met author Jennifer Egan in late September at the Festival America, a Paris book fair celebrating some 70 North American authors. Hundreds of literary fans milled around the mazelike configuration of tables, stacked books, and writers at the salon du livre, in hopes of making a brief but meaningful connection with their favorite authors.

Ms. Egan was seated calmly amid the flurry, a lighthouse in the storm, and asked if we could speak later, over Zoom, so that she could “stay present” for the people who had shown up to see her.

It was apropos, given that her latest book, “The Candy House,” delves into our deep need for connection, but also, authenticity, as we are increasingly overwhelmed by technology’s slow but steady takeover.

It is also fitting, then, that the first thing that happens when she and I speak again is that my Wi-Fi cuts out. As I sit devising the few choice phrases I’d like to say to my internet company, Ms. Egan doesn’t mince words about our relationship to tech: “We can’t go back.”

In “The Candy House” – a sibling novel to her 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Visit from the Goon Squad” – the reader follows some 14 characters’ twists and turns as they navigate a world dominated by Own Your Unconscious, a technology created by Bix Bouton – a demigod à la Mark Zuckerberg – that uploads users' memories onto a cube, so they are then available to others.

"The Candy House," by Jennifer Egan, Scribner, 352 pp.

Told in a dizzying array of narratives and styles – from first person plural to epistolary to an instruction manual for spies – each chapter of “The Candy House” is an exploration of our interconnectedness, but also our desire for real connection.

The book delves into the dangers of mass surveillance, the performative pressures of social media, and the consequences for “eluders” – those who go to great lengths to reject this brave new world.

But lest you think “The Candy House” is in the same dystopian realm as Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic, Ms. Egan is here to set you straight. This is not a dystopian novel and was never intended to be.

“Dystopia is kind of uninteresting to me,” she says. “I feel weary of a post-apocalyptic landscape in which everything has gone wrong. ... [This book] is such an environment of humor and even hilarity and absurdity, and one in which it’s pretty optimistic.”

But that’s not to say she isn’t perplexed by our current relationship with tech. In fact, it was a driving force when she wrote this book. “I ask the question again and again whether we are being changed internally by technology,” she says.

If “The Candy House” is any indication, the people developing the internet, cell phones, and social media are probably not part of a master plan to destroy us. Thanks to technology, she writes: “tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer’s and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a sharp decline in purist orthodoxies – which, people now knew, having roamed the odd twisting corridors of one another’s minds, had always been hypocritical.”

Ms. Egan’s own relationship with technology would appear to be love-hate. Despite her fascination with our interactions with it, she says she regularly stashes her cell phone in another part of the house and is not tempted in the slightest by social media. As for misadventures down the internet rabbit hole, she does it like everyone else, but, she says, “I rarely feel good about a lot of time spent noodling around online, and I don’t know many people who do feel good about it.”

She cites “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” the 1962 work by Daniel Boorstin, as eerily prescient about the performative, curated nature of social media today. Mr. Boorstin essentially coined the term “famous for being famous” (a celebrity is “a person who is known for his well-knownness”) and claimed that press conferences and presidential debates were manufactured events, with the singular goal of gaining press coverage.

Today, according to Ms. Egan, “a lot of what we see on social media is people trying to know each other’s interiors and trying to share the content of one’s own interior because that’s such a human wish and a human need.”

Cue society’s almost painful desire to be “seen” on a mass scale and social media’s ability to deliver – from the “humble brag” of the friend on Facebook who simply can’t figure out where he should donate his economic stimulus check, to the exhausted mother who posts a wholly unflattering Instagram selfie showing her futile attempts to put the kids to bed.

“I’m fascinated by the desire for authenticity ... [but] I literally never say to myself, ‘How can I live an authentic life?’” she says. “The minute you’re trying to do something authentic, it’s a sign that you’re in territory that is preventing you from doing that.”

The desire to cut the act is so strong that it pushes some characters in “The Candy House” to the extremes, most spectacularly Alfred, whose “intolerance of fakery” has led him to releasing a primal scream in public places, in search of genuine human reactions and authenticity.

But perhaps resistance to technology’s pull is futile. As the character Chris Salazar – the head of an entertainment startup fighting to preserve people’s privacy – says about externalizing one’s consciousness, “The collective is like gravity: Almost no one can withstand it. In the end, they give it everything.”

Ms. Egan’s own advice on how to exit the “paradox of authenticity” is an obvious one: Get off the screen.

And so it is that as I am saying goodbye to her, I find myself trapped in a brilliantly ironic moment of life imitating art. There’s me, shamelessly seeking connection by relaying an anecdote that would link Ms. Egan and me through one of my closest friends, and my Wi-Fi once again going on the fritz.

“I’m losing you again,” she says, as the line cuts in and out. “I think it’s a sign that we have to end.”