Discussed in this essay:

The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan. Scribner. 352 pages. $28.

She put a PowerPoint presentation in a novel, and the world said: OMG. It was 2010, and PowerPoint had been around for twenty-three years, but that didn’t matter, because no one had put one in a novel before, or at least no one who had already written four relatively successful works of fiction. It wasn’t just about the PowerPoint, though; in retrospect the PowerPoint seems to have been given the right amount of attention, which is to say a moderate amount. You can’t…