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A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

by Jennifer Egan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2010

Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while...

“Time’s a goon,” as the action moves from the late 1970s to the early 2020s while the characters wonder what happened to their youthful selves and ideals.

Egan ( The Keep , 2006, etc.) takes the music business as a case in point for society’s monumental shift from the analog to the digital age. Record-company executive Bennie Salazar and his former bandmates from the Flaming Dildos form one locus of action; another is Bennie’s former assistant Sasha, a compulsive thief club-hopping in Manhattan when we meet her as the novel opens, a mother of two living out West in the desert as it closes a decade and a half later with an update on the man she picked up and robbed in the first chapter. It can be alienating when a narrative bounces from character to character, emphasizing interconnections rather than developing a continuous story line, but Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy that we remain engaged. By the time the novel arrives at the year “202-” in a bold section narrated by Sasha’s 12-year-old daughter Alison, readers are ready to see the poetry and pathos in the small nuggets of information Alison arranges like a PowerPoint presentation. In the closing chapter, Bennie hires young dad Alex to find 50 “parrots” (paid touts masquerading as fans) to create “authentic” word of mouth for a concert. This new kind of viral marketing is aimed at “pointers,” toddlers now able to shop for themselves thanks to “kiddie handsets”; the preference of young adults for texting over talking is another creepily plausible element of Egan’s near-future. Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us.

Pub Date: June 8, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-307-59283-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010

LITERARY FICTION

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE LITTLE BLUE KITE

by Mark Z. Danielewski

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reviews visit from the goon squad

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Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan - review

T ime is the goon in this sparkling novel of change and decay that ranges from the late 70s to the near future. Ageing, loss and compromise are explored in all their universal predictability and piercing individuality: we're all getting a visit from the goon squad.

Appropriately enough, Jennifer Egan has set her novel in a milieu predicated both on nostalgia and the race for the next big thing: the music business. In punk-era San Francisco, teenagers in mohicans and safety pins take over from the greying hippies begging on street corners; by the 2020s, in a postwar baby boom, the quest for the youth market and the ubiquity of mobile technology reaches its logical conclusion, with all pop songs directed at toddlers ("pointers", so called for the ease with which they download songs on their handsets). The intervening years have seen the digitisation of music and the mainstreaming of rebellion, and now the youth of tomorrow eschew piercings and tattoos. "And who could blame them, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?"

Egan's sprawling cast of loosely linked characters and episodic narrators are a vibrant collection of dropouts, survivors and misfits; they include record producer Bennie Salazar, Sasha, his kleptomaniac assistant, and various friends and family members. As we dip into their lives at critical points, not always in chronological order, the web of connection becomes ever more complex: Bennie's wife's brother assaults a movie star he's meant to be interviewing, who later works with a PR whose daughter ends up running a viral media campaign for Bennie . . . Mines laid early on in the narrative detonate after hundreds of pages: the book demands, and repays, a second reading.

When we first meet Bennie he's already inured to his success, yearning nostalgically for the muddy authenticity of analogue recordings (digitisation is " an aesthetic holocaust ! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud") and sprinkling flakes of gold into his coffee in an attempt to get his mojo back, a habit more ostentatiously expensive than coke. But the "deep thrill of the old songs" lies, of course, in their power to return our youth to us: the Dead Kennedys are his aural equivalent of Proust's madeleine.

The next section jumps back in time to the era of Bennie's teenage punk band, beautifully sketching their adolescent combination of posturing and sincerity, as well as developing currents of mismatched desire among a group of friends who've "done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, Quaaludes".

That list conveys a keen, sweet flavour of time passing, as does the sad wonder with which these baby-faced punks regard their younger siblings, still playing in the lost kingdom of childhood. Throughout the novel, characters strain to apprehend time and its effects on the flux of personality – that desire, as Sasha puts it, to be able to say " I'm changing I'm changing I'm changing: I've changed !" Egan's chronologically jumbled structure is the perfect vehicle to express this, shuttling the reader between prophecy and hindsight. "So this is it – what cost me all that time," says one narrator, reunited with the music mogul, now on his deathbed, who seduced her as a teenager and derailed her future plans. "A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty." What looked at 17 like the beginning of her life story became its dominant narrative.

The desire to step outside time is symbolised in Sasha's autistic son's obsession with pauses in old songs – Bowie's "Young Americans", the Four Tops' "Bernadette", songs that are themselves pockets of frozen time. This section of the book, set in the future, is presented as a series of PowerPoint-style slides produced by a young girl for whom writing a diary in continuous narrative would be utterly old fashioned. Egan conjures a mood of poignant immediacy with these discrete, disconnected statements, as she does with the text messages that stud the final section.

Such formal playfulness and variety is found throughout the book – a celebrity interview peppered with subversive footnotes; episodes narrated in the second person or first person plural, to conjure the disassociated mindset of a depressed college student or the camaraderie of the teenage band – but always used to increase its emotional power.

This is an incredibly affecting novel, sad, funny and wise, which should make Jennifer Egan's name in the UK and is already picking up prizes. As well as being longlisted for the Orange prize , it recently won the US National Book Critics Circle fiction award, an event widely reported in terms of the surprising news that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom hadn't won.

In fact, the two books have a lot in common: poignantly comic social novels told from multiple viewpoints which set up a nice tension between authorial omniscience – Egan often steps back to make casual reference to future events – and the doubts and confusion of their cast. Egan even includes the Franzenesque trope of sending a restless character on an unlikely money-making foray abroad, flexing free-market muscles in an exotic environment where corruption and danger are rather sharper threats than in middle-class America.

While Franzen's last two novels ventured to Lithuania and Paraguay, Egan dispatches a down-on-her-luck publicist to Africa on a mission to improve the global standing of a genocidal dictator by linking him romantically to an American celebrity. (Imagine Charles Taylor doing a Hello! spread with Britney Spears.) It works as a highly coloured satire on PR ("Dolly had worked with shitheads before, God knew") but, like Franzen's similarly OTT interludes, jars with the rest of the book, in which daily life is colourful enough already. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel to relish, and Egan is a writer in her prime.

  • Jennifer Egan

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Time, Thrashing to Its Own Rock Beat

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By Janet Maslin

  • June 20, 2010

A music mogul named Lou is one of the many characters who drift through Jennifer Egan’s spiky, shape-shifting new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Whether this tough, uncategorizable work of fiction is a novel, a collection of carefully arranged interlocking stories or simply a display of Ms. Egan’s extreme virtuosity, the same characters pop up in different parts of it. Lou is a case in point. He appears early and then burns through a few of Ms. Egan’s adjacent (though not consecutive) chapters, ending up very much the worse for wear.

Lou is the fulcrum of “Ask Me if I Care,” a section of the book narrated by a high school girl named Rhea. “Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God,” she says, setting this particular section’s time, tone and intergenerational hostility. “The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We’re sick of them.”

But the slick, successful 40-something Lou, “a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally”, is no burnout. He’s living the high life, snorting cocaine and using his show-business clout to seduce teenage girls. When Rhea glimpses pictures of Lou’s children in his apartment amid the electric guitars and gold records, she has the guts to get angry at him. Lou taunts her by announcing that he’ll never get old; Rhea tells him he’s old already.

In “Safari,” the story that immediately follows, Lou is six years younger. His age can be pinpointed by a reference to the age of his daughter, Charlie, who is 14 in “Safari” but was 20 in “Ask Me if I Care.” Lou is accompanied on a trip to Africa by a couple of his children and also by his young girlfriend, a graduate student named Mindy. And Mindy is enough of a provocation to rattle other members of the “Safari” group, particularly Rolph, Lou’s teenage son.

Lou makes his exit in “You (Plural).” Here he is an old man dying in a hospital bed, and Rhea and a girlfriend from “Ask Me if I Care” come to say goodbye. They were high school students when he met them; now Rhea is 43, married and a mother of three. The encounter is sad but not poignant. All the people in these three Lou-related stories have been mugged by the goon squad of Ms. Egan’s title.

Ms. Egan uses goon as a synonym for time, as in: “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Taking some of her inspiration from Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” as well as some from “The Sopranos,” she creates a set of characters with assorted links to the music business and lets time have its way with them. Virtually no one in this elaborately convoluted book winds up the better for wear. But Ms. Egan can be such a piercingly astute storyteller that the exhilaration of reading her outweighs the bleak destinies she describes.

It’s an understatement to say that every character in this book has a dark side. Sasha, the young woman with whom “A Visit From the Goon Squad” begins, has a compulsion to steal, and the array of objects she has filched looks “like the work of a miniaturist beaver.” In a book eager to incorporate the technology of its times into what its characters think and do, 35-year-old Sasha spends “Found Objects” on an awkward date with a man she met online. She winds up with his wallet.

Sasha has worked for 12 years for the Sow’s Ear record label as the assistant to Bennie, another recurring character. And Bennie is seen from his youth (eager to get into the record business, and wowed by Lou) to his prime, and then on a downhill slide. This book’s single most startling section describes Bennie’s encounter with Scotty, a damaged kid and former band mate of Bennie’s who has turned into a dangerously embittered failure. When Scotty wangles an audience with the all-powerful Bennie in Bennie’s New York office, he arrives armed with a fish that he caught in the East River.

Sasha figures tangentially in this story, “X’s and O’s.” She’s the gatekeeper at Bennie’s office, and she must spend some awkward moments with Scotty and his dead fish before Bennie saves her. As Scotty, narrating this chapter, reports, Sasha is visibly relieved when Scotty is whisked away and is not her problem anymore. “I gave her a wink whose exact translation was: Don’t be so sure, darling ,” Scotty says.

The showiest part of this acrobatic book is the part that doesn’t look like fiction writing at all: Ms. Egan spends 70-odd pages on PowerPoint charts meant to reflect the rogue thoughts of two adolescents, who turn out to be Sasha’s children. The passage of that much time moves “A Visit From the Goon Squad” somewhere into the future, but Ms. Egan clearly enjoys tackling such challenges. And if the PowerPoint ploy seems risky, it winds up being no less welcome than any of her other methods. She also makes chillingly weird use of text-message-ese: “if thr r childrn, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?” It takes temerity to even ask, let alone text, that question.

The children of the future give the book a flash of science fiction. Ms. Egan’s vision is mostly dystopian, but what makes it most memorable is the eccentricity. She imagines that the aftermath of 15 years of war have led to a baby boom. And technology has eagerly leapt to accommodate a new demographic group: gadget-loving children. Pity the poor rock stars who find themselves at the mercy of toddlers who have purchasing power. Ms. Egan slyly turns one “Goon Squad” recurring character into one of those stars.

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

By Jennifer Egan

Illustrated. 274 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

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The story begins in the late ’70s California punk scene and ends in a near future where tattoos and piercings are outmoded and babies are proficient at text messaging. In the 50 or so intervening years, a set of characters drift in and out of the pages, their lives intersecting in often surprising but poignant ways. Brought together by music and concerned with personal expression, art and experience, the characters who populate Jennifer Egan's thoughtful new novel, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, are all dealing with the passage of time and the effects --- positive, negative and neutral --- it has on their lives, beliefs and relationships.

Readers first meet Sasha as she lies on her therapist’s couch discussing her compulsion to steal. From sunglasses to keys, expensive pens to scarves, she has an ever-growing collection of disparate objects taken mostly from strangers (never from stores). In her therapy session, she recalls a date, many years ago, with a man younger than herself. The one-night stand would've been forgettable but for an incident with a stolen wallet, her date's appropriation of one of her trophies and his memory of the night decades later.

We meet another central character in the next chapter. Bennie Salazar is an aging music producer who has a euphoric musical experience while listening to two sisters record a song in their basement while his son joins in on tambourine. The moment brings back for Bennie what he loves about music, but it ends in a humiliating anxiety attack and he is tended to by Sasha, who is, at this time, his assistant. Bennie's story, like those of the other figures in the novel, shifts back and forth in time. Next he is a teenage musician whose friend's inappropriate affair with music executive Lou Kline not only gets Bennie involved in the business end of music, but also introduces a whole group of other characters whose stories are entangled with Bennie, Sasha and their friends.

Some of these relationships are tenuous, others are confusing, and often the novel feels like a connection of interrelated short stories drawing from the same host of characters and themes. Yet Egan moves easily between stories and settings, and in time. We find Sasha as a young adult, in the midst of several formative relationships. Her best friend will soon be dead, and she is years away from the settled mother and wife we know she will become. We are also treated to a chapter told from the point of view of Sasha's young daughter, who explains her autistic brother's fascination with musical pauses in chart and graph form. Bennie emerges later in a second marriage confronted by the closest friend of his youth and an opportunity to make meaningful music once again.

There are so many characters here --- friends, children, business associates, the children of business associates --- that Egan always appears in danger of dropping threads. But that tension serves the story well because tension seems to be at the heart of it. We readers know what the characters don't: how it turns out and how time treats them in the end. We know who survives, who is radically changed, and who loses the battle against time. There are elements of satire here as Egan looks critically at journalism, the music industry, public relations and more. But even as she casts doubts on intentions and integrity, she is never mean-spirited. In fact, the characters she creates are sympathetic. Because we see some of them as children or young adults, we have a sense of what brought them to the point where --- for example, after witnessing their mother try to improve the image of a genocidal dictator with a fuzzy hat and a hug from a down-on-her-luck starlet --- they would attempt to manipulate public interest in the music of a reclusive janitor through guerrilla text messaging.

If it all sounds convoluted, it is and it isn't. A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD is complicated and complex, but because it addresses some of life's big questions, it is philosophically compelling and universal. The particulars of each character are unique, yet the themes remain the same. Despite the occasional fragmentation of the story, the exploration of identity, music and time make for a melodic and intelligent novel.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on January 24, 2011

reviews visit from the goon squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

  • Publication Date: March 22, 2011
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Anchor
  • ISBN-10: 0307477479
  • ISBN-13: 9780307477477

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Reviews of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

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About this Book

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Book Summary

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

Chapter 1 Found Objects

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman's blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that at, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand-it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

  • A Visit from the Goon Squad shifts among various perspectives, voices, and time periods, and in one striking chapter (pp. 234–309), departs from conventional narrative entirely. What does the mixture of voices and narrative forms convey about the nature of experience and the creation of memories? Why has Egan arranged the stories out of chronological sequence?
  • In "A to B" Bosco unintentionally coins the phrase "Time's a goon" (p. 127), used again by Bennie in "Pure Language" (p. 332). What does Bosco mean? What does Bennie mean? What does the author mean?
  • "Found Objects" and "The Gold Cure" include accounts of Sasha's and Bennie's therapy sessions. Sasha ...
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Rock music is notoriously difficult to write about, especially in fictional form, where literary platitudes and rhapsodic discursions often fall short of the transformative experience of actually listening to the music. Egan succeeds, though, by offering pithy observations on the sterility of digital remastering ("The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh") and the overwhelming power of listening to music over head phones ("...the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage.."). Music lovers recognize these sorts of truths as gospel, and Egan's obvious affinity with music, especially punk and post-punk, gives the book all the magic of a favorite song... continued

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(Reviewed by Marnie Colton ).

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Beyond the Book

California punk.

Although Jennifer Egan now lives in New York, she grew up in California, and her knowledge of the Bay Area/Los Angeles music scene gives the book a gritty authenticity, with references to bands rarely mentioned in the pages of literary fiction: the Dead Kennedys, the Nuns, Black Flag, the Avengers, the Germs, and Negative Trend are all name-checked. "Nineteen-eighty is almost here, thank God," sneers Rhea, scoffing at the Haight-Ashbury's burned out hippies and reveling in her identity as a green-haired punk. Bennie plays bass while Scotty sings lead in their band, the Flaming Dildos, and Rhea and Jocelyn, attired in dog collars and ripped stockings, attend thrillingly aggressive shows at venues like San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens...

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Book Review: A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The Good Squad by jennifer egan book cover banner

A Visit from the Goon Squad  is certainly not the average book. With so many interesting and humorous characters and stories woven together, this novel creates a compelling narrative deserving of attention.

TEACHER REVIEW | by Cindy Sabik

A Visit from the Goon Squad   is a dense, courageous novel about the music industry in the 1970s. I was taken with its experimental writing style, the humor and the compelling characters. Among my friends and colleagues, opinion was divided. Some wanted more consistency and character development, while others found it a compelling and significant book (a rare declaration). I believe that the reader will find it energetic and inventive, as it is most definitely not a traditional narrative.

That said, I was not immediately smitten. In the opening chapter, I was afraid I would be stuck with Sasha, the assistant to a record producer, who seemed to be emerging as the protagonist, for the entire book. I did not find her particularly likeable or compelling. As I reached the end of that first chapter, advice from another reader to keep track of each of the characters put me in the right frame of mind for the rest of this innovative book.

I was smitten by record producer Lou’s kids in the chapter where he takes them on an African safari. I loved those kids, and I loved the “montage” method Egan uses in that chapter. It reminded me of the film Run Lola Run, with the photomontages that flash forward to tell a life story in a few seconds. Egan, astonishingly and cleverly, manages to do that with text.

I loved the biting humor. A ruined publicist tries to save her career by attempting to change the global image of a third-world genocidal dictator-worrying about his cute hats and bringing in an aging starlet to soften his image. Too, too funny.

The final chapter was futuristic and dystopian, in the tradition of Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 . While Huxley and Bradbury were critiquing culture and society, Egan targets our use of social media. Instead of painting an entire futuristic world, she focuses on technology and social media, showing us a glimpse of the future in one moment, 20 years later. You don’t often see contemporary authors predicting the future (although I’m anticipating some from Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart -next on my reading list). And who says your prediction has to be a whole worldview? Didn’t we learn from Virginia Woolf and James Joyce that looking closely at one day or one hour in a character’s life can reveal as much as an epic tale?

This is, I believe, a significant work of literature, deserving of the 2011 Pulitzer that it won. The Pulitzer, as often awarded for cleverness as it is for literary merit, found here a book worthy on both counts.

Cindy Sabik, English Department Chair, Gilmour Academy, Gates Mills, Ohio.

TEEN REVIEW | by Sarah Spech

A Visit from the Goon Squad ,  by Jennifer Egan, is easily one of the top three novels that I have read in the past year. In the last month of my AP Literature course, we decided to read and discuss a novel that was recommended to us by our teacher. As you may have guessed, it was  Goon Squad.  From reading reviews, we understood that this was not a typical narrative. Because it was clearly different from anything we’d ever read before, we were that much more excited to crack open our brand new books.

From the get-go, it didn’t disappoint. Far from it. I was completely drawn in. The voices of the characters and the story line in the very first chapter had me hooked.

As each chapter jumped to a new character and a new point in time – sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, and without any explicit way of knowing-I grew more engrossed, searching for clues (that were easily found) and trying to connect the complicated lives and relationships of all the characters.

With a cast of 13 main characters, Egan never gives the reader a moment of rest. Each chapter is a snippet of a life that you must piece together to gather the whole story. I was taken with how remarkable this book was in showing the complexities of human relationships and how much of an effect one being can have on another. Right now, the  Goon Squad  is on the top of my “read again” list that, should the senior year workload ever give me a chance, I will happily pick up again in order to peruse the intricacies of both the specific and grander stories that Egan masterfully wove into one.

By Sarah Spech, senior at Gilmour Academy.

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Book review: ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan

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A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Alfred A. Knopf: 278 pp., $25.95

Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” is a lively novel in stories about Sasha, an assistant in the music business, and her boss, Bennie Salazar. It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer.

We start with Sasha, a wry 35-year-old with sticky fingers. She’s extremely competent at her job, bored, nonplussed by the date who marvels at her old-style bathtub-in-the-kitchen New York apartment. Her only thrill comes from stealing; she doesn’t profit from it, instead keeping her take — a wallet, a child’s scarf, a seashell — as relics. She’s in therapy — she knows she’s in a bad way.

Punker-turned-executive Bennie Salazar is also in trouble. He’s been dumped by his wife, can’t seem to communicate with his son and, worst of all, has fallen out of sync with the music business. To Bennie, today’s music is “[t]oo clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh…. Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.” His failures resound in his head so loudly that he writes down a litany of humiliations, hoping to excise them.

Bennie and Sasha’s intersecting paths are illuminated by the subsequent chapters. But this is an oversimplification. What follows is no set of cause-and-effect flashbacks: Scattered across time, the narrative spins freely apart, like an uncapped centrifuge.

Each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view; Sasha and Bennie are pushed to the margins. Sometimes they’re not even present: One chapter, set in Africa, focuses on the adolescent son of Bennie’s musical mentor Lou, years before Bennie was in the picture. Another follows a disgraced publicist who used to employ Bennie’s ex-wife, while a third is narrated by a college friend of Sasha’s. Sound tangential? Sure, but the strategy succeeds, because these characters move so fully into center stage. Given voice, they become the main players.

These stories, even as they bend away from Sasha and Bennie, draw us in. Two teen girls’ lives are irrevocably changed by the charismatic Lou, with his red convertible and purple crushed velvet bedspread. A bitter celebrity journalist writes an article — with exacting footnotes — describing his ill-fated interview with a dewy starlet. A now-obese singer, once as lithe and explosive as Iggy Pop, tries to convince his publicity team that an aggressive tour — which will probably kill him — is his only choice. An adolescent girl, a decade or more hence, does her homework in Powerpoint; the tensions between her father and brother wrench, even in a chapter written entirely in slide form.

Egan has created, instead of an arc, a narrative constellation, one in which Sasha and Bennie have weak gravitational pull. Lou, Rob, Jules, Rolph, Dolly and others each take their star turns.

Scattered across time, free of chronology, the stories in the book nevertheless have a careful and deliberate structure. The novel is divided into two parts, A and B, much like the title of the singer’s new album, “A to B.” “That’s the question I want to hit straight on,” he says. “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat [jerk] no one cares about?” The answer isn’t about a sequence of events as much as the cycle of fame into whose orbit he’s swung. There are other orbits: individual tragedies and their passing, barely remembered encounters and their unexpected importance.

Yet in these cycles, the characters assert themselves. Over and over, they turn toward the sun, as if to stop time. A woman remembers when she betrayed Lou by sitting with another man on top of a pool house at sunrise. Parents, striving for balance, watch their toddler stagger along a wall of people gathered to watch the sunset. A teenaged Sasha, all but lost in a rambling Italian boarding house, counts among her meager belongings a wire she’s looped across her window; when the setting sun passes through its circle, it brings an unwanted visitor a moment of surprise and delight. “See,” she mutters to him, “it’s mine.”

Sasha’s inclination to possess things that don’t belong to her is not so unlike a novelist who, in rewriting another’s story, can give it a new tenor, push it into a new curve on the cycle. In the novel, Sasha grabs Bennie’s list of private humiliations, reading aloud, to his agony. “‘Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.’ … ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘They’re titles, right?’” Once he hears his fears recast as mundane song titles, Bennie feels a sudden peace; his darkness is made light.

Kellogg is lead blogger for Jacket Copy, The Times’ book blog.

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Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.

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Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Home » All Reviews » Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

“I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away—I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad , is (in)famous for its penultimate chapter, which is written as a PowerPoint presentation. While polarizing among reviewers, this is actually my favorite chapter in the book. I find it amazing how Jennifer Egan could capture such a wide range of emotions in a PowerPoint presentation, which centers on the intra-family dynamics of one of the main characters, Sasha.

Sasha’s son, Lincoln, is neurodivergent and obsessed with slight pauses in rock music, such as in “Young Americans” by David Bowie or “Supervixen” by Garbage. Lincoln is unable to articulate his emotions directly, but he does so through his obsession with pauses in his favorite songs. This obsession leads to my favorite quote of the novel, as Lincoln explains why he is so enamored with pauses:

“The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”

This quote is also a metaphor for the lives of our two main characters, Sasha, and her record company boss, Bennie, who is also a former punk rocker. Rock music lionizes the young, and the relationship of the characters to the music business only exaggerates their inevitable aging. This brings me to my second-favorite quote for the book:

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”

A Visit from the Goon Squad is structured as a series of short stories that bounce around in time and perspective, some focusing on Sasha and Bennie and others providing a voice to several different side characters. The stories featuring Sasha and Bennie were by far my favorites. They are both such compelling characters in their good-hearted brokenness.

The opening chapter tells the story of Sasha’s kleptomania, and how she couldn’t stop herself from stealing a wallet from a public restroom while on a date. The second story tells of Bennie’s obsession with consuming gold flakes in his beverages as a very expensive panacea for all his troubles.

The stories that feature the side characters are less compelling; I would have preferred spending more time with Sasha and Bennie. Also, the stories kept shifting among first-, second-, and third-person narration for no apparent reason other than for Jennifer Egan to flex her narrative muscles.

Overall, I really enjoyed A Visit from the Goon Squad but would have preferred a more consistent focus on the main characters.

A Visit from the Goon Squad •

John Mauro

John Mauro lives in a world of glass amongst the hills of central Pennsylvania. When not indulging in his passion for literature or enjoying time with family, John is training the next generation of materials scientists at Penn State University, where he teaches glass science and materials kinetics. John also loves cooking international cuisine and kayaking the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

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About the Book

Themes and Analysis

A visit from the goon squad, by jennifer egan.

In ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ Jennifer Egan tries to explore the theme of time and how quickly it can flash before our eyes, often leaving us reminiscing about some good memories from the past or regretting having lived less than we planned to.

Victor Onuorah

Written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Throughout the book, readers will notice how time takes its toll on the majority of the leading characters – starting with the most frontal ones in Sasha Grady Blake and Bennie Salazar but also extending to Lou, Bosco, Jocelyn, Mindy, and the others. As the story progresses, more and more themes of aging, death, unrequited love, technology, and mental health, among others play out. This article will analyze the frontal themes from Jennifer Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ and discuss the key moments, writing style, figurative expressions, and symbols therein.

A Visit from the Goon Squad Themes

Time passage.

More than just a theme but also a sort of character, time is arguably the biggest villain out to hunt all the characters in Jennifer Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad .’ From Sasha to Bennie – stretching down across to Scotty, Jocelyn, and all the other characters, the readers will find these characters, at one point or the other, lashing out and venting their frustrations on either the fact that time came flying past their hay days too quickly, or that it took a complete detour on them. 

Mental Health 

The issue of mental health among the youth is another vital thematic focus of Jennifer Egan her book, ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad. ’ These issues seem to come as a direct or indirect consequence of the traumas of the time theme. 

Nearly all the characters battle with mental health issues in their own time. Sasha struggles with kleptomania – while Bennie battles over impotence, loss of confidence, and self-esteem. Some – like Jocelyn – suffer devastating heartbeats, while others like Rob become self-destructive and lose their lives as a result.  

Aging and Death 

Aging, and eventually death, is the reason ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ characters have shared malice with the time character – as these themes are the strongest, most imposing, and most fearful instruments it has on humans. After wasting a significant part of her youth living by the edge as a punk rocker, she comes to the realization that she hasn’t really achieved any meaningful thing in her life, and age is not on her side. 

Once this happens, she begins planning the remainder of her life for the better, first by going back to school, then seeing a therapist, and so on. A similar thing happens with all the other characters.

Infatuation, Love, and Unrequited Love 

Incidental themes from the novel, these trios are typical for every book, film, or work of art that focuses on young adults. ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ isn’t different, as there’s no shortage of drama on these three fronts. 

In the first three chapters, we see how Bennie and his clique are caught up in a bizarre love (or infatuation?) circle. Rhea wants Bennie, who wants Alice, who wants Scotty wants Jocelyn, who wants Lou. None seems to be loving another who loves them back, and this unrequited love, and hits devastatingly more on the character Jocelyn (and a bit on Rhea), who becomes miserable over Lou’s games. Thankfully she realizes later and attempts to fix her life. 

New Media Technology 

Technology, particularly social media, is at the center of things in ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad .’ This is written all over Part B, chapter 13 of the book, when Alex and Lulu work with Bennie to promote Scotty as a music brand to the world, and people actually bought it even with they not having prior knowledge of Scotty’s work or personality.  

The Music Industry 

The entire narrative of ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ is built around the music industry. All the characters know or have something to do with someone who knows about music, more specifically, punk rock music. As kids from the 70s, Bennie and his friends vibe to the trendy punk rock music of the era. However, for Bennie, it becomes much more than just a vibe but a passion; that’s why unlike the others, he pursues it as a career – learning everything about it: the best, the production, the music. 

While the whole plot revolves around this genre of music, Bennie and his mentor Lou Kline seem to be the only two people who run a successful business out of it, selling the talents of people like Scotty and Bosco. 

Key Moments in A Visit from the Goon Squad

  • Sasha visits her therapist and recalls stealing a woman’s purse – and later – Alex’s wallet. 
  • Bennie goes to watch his band’s indoor performance – accompanied by Sasha and his son Christopher. 
  • It’s the 1970s, seventeen-year-olds Rhea and Jocelyn convince Lou to come to watch Bennie and his band – ‘The Flaming Dildos‘ – perform. 
  • Lou goes on a vacation on safari – accompanied by his family and girlfriend Mindy. 
  • Many years later, Lou is old, sick, and dying and is visited by old friends Rhea and Jocelyn (now forty-three-year-olds). 
  • Scott, who is leading a reclusive life as a lowlife janitor after his divorce and hiatus from music, visits old friend Bennie.
  • Bennie moves to the affluent Crandale neighborhood with his wife, Stephanie, but they struggle to fit in.
  • PR guru Dolly Peale, after her fall from fame, tries to rejuvenate her career by selling the genocidal General. 
  • Stephanie’s brother Jules Jones publishes his magazine piece about the assault incident with Kitty Jackson.
  • Rob, Sasha and Drew’s friend drowns in the East River following a fit of mental health issues. 
  • Sasha’s Uncle Ted Holland tracks Sasha to Italy and convinces her to come home. 
  • Allison, Sasha’s daughter, shares her family experiences, her brother Lincoln’s struggle with autism, and her defeatist inclination. 
  • Alex and Lulu help Bennie promote Scotty’s concert on social media. The show is a success, and they make history together. 

Style and Tone 

Jennifer Egan’s writing style goes in tandem with her postmodernism inclination . She typically utilizes nonlinear plot-style narrative to lend as many eyes to her readers so that her work goes beyond being a mere subjective read but also a multi-perspective experience.

Her book, ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is a perfect depiction of just how composite the author’s writing can be. In this book made up of thirteen chapters – cut in parts A and B, like a phonograph disk, the readers will experience an abundant flush of backstories and foreshadowing, diverse points of view (in the first, second, and third person), and thirteen complete, single story knotted together at their tail end. 

In terms of tone and mood of ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ,’ there are over a dozen of them extractible, and this is because every story is told by different characters based on their distinct mental and emotional state. However, the common tone and mood found in the book are mostly satirical and include; expressions of regret, shame, disappointment, failure, and hope.

Figurative Languages

Egan’s use of figurative language in ‘ A Visit from the Goon Sqaud ’ is thorough and starts well within the book’s title – which is a metaphor for being a merciless bully and tormentor of man. 

Beyond the use of metaphors, there is also a wide usage of devices like satire, allusion, simile, personification, foreshadowing, and so on. 

Analysis of Symbols in A Visit from the Goon Squad

Symbolism plays a major in Jennifer Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Sqaud ’ and so can be found at various important events of the book. Some of the most prominent ones have been explained.

Music is the heart of Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ and it symbolizes an instrument of unity for all the characters across the different stories. Despite its changing nature, it still stands as the connector between Bennie and Sasha’s generation to that of Lulu and Alison’s. 

This instrument, as seen deployed at strategic intervals by Egan, connotes different meanings at different points in the book. Sometimes it presents a glimmer of hope for what is to come – like in Ted and Sasha’s scene in her Italy apartment, while other times, it represents an event filled with dread and terror – like in the chapter where Sasha’s friend Rob dies. 

Water’s symbolic depiction in ‘ A Visit from the Goon Sqaud ’ is unconventional – meaning that it is painted as harmful and destructive as opposed to the conventional literary connotation of being the source of life and tranquility. Rob drowns in the East River while swimming with Drew, Jocelyn visualizes drowning Lou when she and Rhea visit, and so on.

In ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ,’ pauses – especially in punk rock music – underpin the activities of time in relation to the characters throughout the book. From point to point, pauses progression of time in the life of these characters – detailing how much things have changed over time. 

What are the primary themes in ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ by Jennifer Egan?

The story of ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ communicates lessons through several vital themes: from themes of mental health to time passage, and technology use in the punk music industry. 

What figurative element is prevalent in ‘ Goon Squad ’?

Among a plethora of figurative elements used, the metaphor seems quite prevalent throughout the book and even exists in the book’s title to start with. 

What narrative technique does Egan use in ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’?

Egan uses multiple narrative styles for the book, ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad. ’ Across the book’s thirteen chapters, the reader can find the first, second, and third-person perspectives. 

What does sunset symbolize in ‘ Goon Squad’ ?

Sunset in ‘ Goon Squad ’ is like a gate that opens up a little of what is to come; sometimes it’s hopeful and optimistic, and other times it’s hopeless and grim. 

Victor Onuorah

About Victor Onuorah

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

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Onuorah, Victor " A Visit from the Goon Squad Themes and Analysis 📖 " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/jennifer-egan/a-visit-from-the-goon-squad/themes-analysis/ . Accessed 4 March 2024.

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Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

This article was published more than 13 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

reviews visit from the goon squad

Jennifer Egan

Bennie Salazar is having a bad day. Executives at Sow's Ear Records in New York City's TriBeCa want to dump a band he discovered, he's lost his mojo and, after consulting a book on Aztec medicine, now mixes flecks of gold with his coffee to resuscitate his sex drive. While listening to the band to see if their sound is still gritty, Bennie is flooded with shame memories. These are no simple recollections, rather a visceral "raking over … and leaving gashes," a reliving of each moment when the image of his best self was shattered and soiled, colliding with the underbelly of reality.

In her brash beauty of a novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad , Jennifer Egan understands the power of shame, simply because it makes one present in the moment as effectively as fear or desire. One of the novel's themes is the loss of that vitality in our world, which is beset by sterilization and digitization, "which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh." It is not only music that is at risk, but also art, film, photography, literature and, most important, the self.

Bennie decides to list his catalogue of shame on a parking ticket, hoping this will puncture its power. His humiliations are embarrassing, albeit very human. His barber discovers lice on his son's scalp. A girl Bennie lusts after walks in on him while he is on the toilet. He kisses a Mother Superior on the mouth after signing the nuns for a record deal.

Bennie's assistant, Sasha, a fetching, russet-haired kleptomaniac, asks him, "Why do you keep scribbling on that ticket?" She reads the list aloud: "Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can."

Bennie is in agony, then Sasha says, "Not bad. They're titles, right?" It's a great moment: real, cleansing.

Bennie and Sasha are the novel's most compelling characters, and Egan turns them inside out. In contrast to her contemporary, Mary Gaitskill, who probes her protagonists with scalpel and magnifying glass, Egan does so with tenderness and humour.

We also follow the interlocking fates of a dizzying number of people who circle the lives of Benny and Sasha. There is Benny's high-school crowd, who form a rock band, The Flaming Dildoes, in the late 1970s during San Francisco's punk scene, as well as a seductive, devouring music executive who becomes Bennie's mentor. The secret lives of Sasha's parents, her uncle, and a suicidal college friend, are also laid bare. Vertigo and exhilaration result: Remember Spin Art?

Egan is a fearless writer, game for risk. In A Visit from the Goon Squad , she employs a kaleidoscopic spin of styles, switches up points of view and emotional tones, even creating a dazzling 75-page interlude in PowerPoint. Time is a Möbius strip, not a line.

Interestingly, in this boundary-bending book, Egan chooses two epigraphs from Proust's In Search of Lost Time . Despite her innovations, Egan's themes are classic: our human longing to master time, to escape its inexorable passage through fame, immortality, or redemption. "Time's a goon," observes one character, who has become more of a relic than a rock star. Yet, time not only wounds heels, it heals some wounds.

Egan's handling of time can be jarring or brilliant. An irritating habit of lurching out of a scene to project what happens to a character is distracting and defuses power. Spending too much time on peripheral characters also diminishes this otherwise exceptional book. Yet, the risk of including the lengthy visual "slide journal" of Sasha's 12-year-old daughter (the interlude in PowerPoint) is unnervingly moving. The graphic element not only depicts time's passage, it also embodies it; this is new media redeemed and redemptive. The novel's climax, which zooms into the future to 2021, is a stunner.

What is wonderful and bracing about Egan is that she cares about freedom, risk and venturing into new territory more than about producing the perfect, pretty package. Many well-crafted novels are dead; many wonderful novels have ragged edges. Remember, novel means new. Though contemporary life can be numbing, Egan's edgy novel is flexible and alive, the perfect antidote.

Ami Sands Brodoff writes to the backbeat of her teen's basement band practice. She is nostalgic for vinyl and The Who, and is at work on a new novel, Faraway Nearby. Her latest book is, The White Space Between, winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction.

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  6. Looking Back at ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’

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COMMENTS

  1. Book Review

    Check. Although shredded with loss, "A Visit From the Goon Squad" is often darkly, rippingly funny. Egan possesses a satirist's eye and a romance novelist's heart. Certainly the targets ...

  2. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

    Egan has said that the organising principle of A Visit from the Goon Squad is discontinuity; this may be true, but the reason the book works so well is because of the continuities she has also ...

  3. A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

    The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. 6. Pub Date: March 6, 2000. ISBN: -375-70376-4.

  4. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

    A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction ...

  5. Amazon.com: Customer reviews: A Visit from the Goon Squad

    "Goon Squad" is certainly a worthy novel rife with literary innovation, which is, of course, very good for the genre of the novel. Hence, I must highly recommend this literary novel with a 4.52 Star Rating. "Novel Criticism" Critical Performance Indicators (CPIs) Review of: "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan 1. Stylistic Invention ...

  6. A Visit from the Goon Squad Review: Rhythms of Connection

    A Visit from the Goon Squad Review . Written by Jennifer Egan, 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' is a Pulitzer-winning book that captures the harsh reality of how time flashes so quickly before our eyes - forcing us to watch our dreams and aspirations fizzle out. The book is gripping and engaging and leaves helpful tips for all readers in ...

  7. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

    A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan - review. This article is more than 12 years old. ... A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel to relish, and Egan is a writer in her prime.

  8. A Visit from the Goon Squad: Pulitzer Prize Winner

    Jennifer Eganis the author of four novels: A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus; and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.

  9. Jennifer Egan's 'Visit From the Goon Squad'

    June 20, 2010. A music mogul named Lou is one of the many characters who drift through Jennifer Egan's spiky, shape-shifting new book, "A Visit From the Goon Squad.". Whether this tough ...

  10. All Book Marks reviews for A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

    Expect to inhale Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. Then expect it to lodge in your cranium and your breastbone a good long while. I expect this brilliant, inventive novel to become enshrined. Such rash speculation is foolish, I know -- we live amid a plague of bloated praise. But A Visit From the Goon Squad is emboldening. It cracks ...

  11. A Visit from the Goon Squad

    The Boston Globe. As thought-provoking and entertaining as Egan's speculative projections are, A Visit From the Goon Squad is, in the end, far more than a demonstration of the author's skill in bending time, form, and genre. It's a distinctive and often moving portrayal of how — even when their inhabitants don't realize it — lives ...

  12. A Visit from the Goon Squad

    A Visit from the Goon Squad. The story begins in the late '70s California punk scene and ends in a near future where tattoos and piercings are outmoded and babies are proficient at text messaging. In the 50 or so intervening years, a set of characters drift in and out of the pages, their lives intersecting in often surprising but poignant ways.

  13. Review of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

    More by this author. From one of the most celebrated writers of our time, a literary figure with cult status, a "sibling novel" to her Pulitzer Prize- and NBCC Award-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad - an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private.

  14. Reviews of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

    A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers. Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the ...

  15. Amazon.com: Customer reviews: A Visit from the Goon Squad

    Though it is concerned with being relevant and modern, A Visit from the Goon Squad fails to have anything truly new to say, and is therefore completely forgettable.Rating: 2 starsMediocre writing, lack of characterization, no discernible meaning, self-conscious, labored, forgettable. Read more.

  16. Book Review: A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

    A Visit from the Goon Squad , by Jennifer Egan, is easily one of the top three novels that I have read in the past year. In the last month of my AP Literature course, we decided to read and discuss a novel that was recommended to us by our teacher. As you may have guessed, it was Goon Squad. From reading reviews, we understood that this was not ...

  17. A Visit from the Goon Squad

    A Visit from the Goon Squad is a 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction by American author Jennifer Egan. The book is a set of thirteen interrelated stories with a large set of characters all connected to Bennie Salazar, a record company executive, and his assistant, Sasha. ... The novel received mostly positive reviews from critics and ...

  18. Book review: 'A Visit From the Goon Squad' by Jennifer Egan

    Alfred A. Knopf: 278 pp., $25.95. Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad" is a lively novel in stories about Sasha, an assistant in the music business, and her boss, Bennie Salazar. It ...

  19. Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

    Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is (in)famous for its penultimate chapter, which is written as a PowerPoint presentation.While polarizing among reviewers, this is actually my favorite chapter in the book. I find it amazing how Jennifer Egan could capture such a wide range of emotions in a PowerPoint presentation, which centers on the intra-family ...

  20. A Visit from the Goon Squad Themes and Analysis

    The issue of mental health among the youth is another vital thematic focus of Jennifer Egan her book, ' A Visit from the Goon Squad. ' These issues seem to come as a direct or indirect consequence of the traumas of the time theme. Nearly all the characters battle with mental health issues in their own time. Sasha struggles with kleptomania ...

  21. A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread

    12 ratings5 reviews. Jennifer Egan described her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad as a combination of Proust and The Sopranos. In rereading the book, Ivan Kreilkamp takes Egan up on her comparison, showing how it blends a concern with the status of the novel in the twenty-first century with an elegiac meditation on how ...

  22. Book Review: A Visit From The Goon Squad

    I picked up A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan with high hopes. After all, this book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. People LOVE this book. The cover brags about the dozen awards and those judging panels couldn't be wrong, right? Well, it's bound to happen. Lists are off. Opinions differ.

  23. Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

    In A Visit from the Goon Squad, she employs a kaleidoscopic spin of styles, switches up points of view and emotional tones, even creating a dazzling 75-page interlude in PowerPoint. Time is a ...