Jennifer Egan – A Visit from the Goon Squad

Finished: January 24th, 2012

2012 Book Count: 3

Conversation held in the Lunch Room:

So what are you reading today?

A Visit from the Goon Squad. I started it because somewhere I read that fashionable literary people liked it. I’m not sure if I like it enough to finish it yet.

It’s good – I read it and really liked it. I’m not a fashionable literary person, though.

Anyway, this co-worker gets huggs tomorrow for encouraging me to keep on with this book, because I really, really liked it.

I have a particular weakness for non-linear storytelling, and I think that Jennifer Egan does a bang up job of it here. There is something about getting the little pieces one at a time and slowly letting them click together that I find intensely satisfying. I’m not sure I liked how it ended – which is a the future outcome of the events of the first chapter. I kind of think this is cheating, but I understand the appeal to keeping everything insular and contained like that. I think that maybe there are better ways of doing it, but I’m not sure the book would have been a best-seller in those cases. It would just be more appreciated by me. And really, I would prefer an author have a best-selling book which naturally leads to the financial security so she has an opportunity to make it up to me.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is about time, and the way that it moves on and the things it does to all of us. Once again, Ms. Egan does a really stellar job of using a non-linear format to emphasize how forward moving time is, and if you can’t swim with the current you’ll get towed along by it.

I really appreciate this book for not keeping any of the characters the same all the way through – they all grow and change and become many other things, just as people do in ‘real life’. Teenage punks become mothers of three, run away drug addicts get clean and try to study Spanish at night school, publicist to the stars become publicist to a genocidal general and then a gourmet food shop owner.

Something that is really interesting, that just occurred to me now as I was making that list, is that all the truly memorable characters were women. They are the ones that went through the most changes, the most living. There were lots of men and boys, but some how they lost some of the impact that the female characters had. I don’t know if this was intentional on Ms. Egan’s part, or if I’m just imagining it. The thing is that she is not around to correct me or give me any context, while I have a copy of her book and a laptop, and so therefore an think pretty much anything I want about it.

So, read this book, and keep reading beyond the first chapter. I think my impatience with it stemmed from not knowing anything about this book before I read it, and assuming that the whole book would be like that. A whole book like the first chapter would not be a good book, but the first chapter as a part of this book is genius.