A Visit from the Goon Squad

Nov 21, 2011 Jeanette rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Crackheads

Shelves: started-it-hated-it, pyoo-litzers

Um, this is just BAAAAAAD. Bold-face, capital-letters BAD. Absolutely awful!
What.....were.....they.....thinking????? Oh, I forgot, they weren't!
When did the Pulitzer become the Puke-litzer? I'll never again trust that prize designation except with books from a long time ago.

Don't be fooled by the first chapter, which is not too bad. Sort of an interesting start, about a kleptomaniac aging punk rock chick. After that, FORGET IT! Dumpster filler.

A lot of people make a big mention of the PowerPo...more

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Aug 17, 2011 K.D. Oliveros rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: Pulitzer 2010

Shelves: pulitzer

I attended a novel-writing workshop last week and one of the things that I took home with me was: write to express and not to impress. I have a feeling, and I could be wrong on this since I am just a paying reader, that Jennifer Egan wrote this novel A Visit from the Good Squad mainly to impress. Well, it won the nod of the Pulitzer jurors so the trick worked!

Each of the 13 chapters is told in different points of view mostly by people who the two main protagonists, Bennie, the gold-eating recor...more

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Apr 27, 2013 Nataliya rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013-reads, pulitzer, recommended-by-my-colleagues, favorites, excellent-reads

Time is a strange old fella, isn't it? It creeps up on you and changes you bit by bit until you the new you and the old you are barely more than strangers to one another.

You can see time as a continuum, a line stretching from the past into the future, a long straight road to travel along with occasional proverbial 'road not taken' splitting off to the side - where barely perceptible changes accumulate one by one.

Or else you can look at it as a series of snapshots, a deck of cards randomly and c...more
Time is a strange old fella, isn't it? It creeps up on you and changes you bit by bit until you the new you and the old you are barely more than strangers to one another.

You can see time as a continuum, a line stretching from the past into the future, a long straight road to travel along with occasional proverbial 'road not taken' splitting off to the side - where barely perceptible changes accumulate one by one.

Or else you can look at it as a series of snapshots, a deck of cards randomly and carelessly shuffled, each one showing a face different from the rest - life in snapshots.

And these snapshots are so different from one another, separated by the years of smart choices and poor choices, pain and happiness, gains and losses, laughter and tears, having formed an invisible network of scars that forever preclude us from following that once-long-ago good-natured yet impossible advice of 'Please don't change; just stay the way you are!' - the promise we can wholeheartedly make but no matter how hard we try we cannot keep.

"Alex imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there— his young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet. The fantasy imbued him with careening hope."

I still can easily remember being sixteen, not knowing anything besides the blissful strong-willed ignorance of youth, where everything was just beginning, everything was still about to start, nothing was decided yet, and the world was one giant untapped possibility with no way of telling where time will eventually take you.

But time goes on, and now I can almost see thirty from this point in life and occasional gray hairs are creeping onto my temples (yes, I know - thirty is the new twenty and all that bullshit we tell ourselves to feel younger and preserve that feeling of endless, overwhelming potentiality and possibility that we so took for granted half a life ago), and there's not that much connecting me to that girl in the Land of Ago (to borrow Stephen King's phrase).

Time passes, and with it we change, slowly and subtly but unavoidably, until one day, just like a character in A Visit from the Goon Squad notices, we stop being ourselves 'without recognizing it'.

And then maybe we learn to appreciate the pauses in songs, like a young autistic kid the glimpses of whom we see through a powerpoint presentation made in the future by a 12-year-old girl (oh dear, how much do I loathe the inescapable omnipresent powerpoints that have reduced public speaking to mindless reading of slides!) - because they make us think the song is over, and then it restarts and we get a temporary reprieve from the end, the real end, and it's that giddy feeling of almost having cheated the inevitable, of having gotten away with something at least for a while longer.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.”
Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. “You grew up, Alex,” he said, “just like the rest of us.”

This is a book about losses and regrets as people change with time - as well as glimpses of personal redemption, especially in the threads of the story connected to Sasha (who I really started to love after the NYU chapter - because how can you not?). It's a book full of little often unseen connections between the characters who have touched each other's lives in the ways they may never understand.

"Redemption, transformation — God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?"

This book is about people connected by time, connected by music, with moments in life captured just like the pauses in songs, full of realized hopes and shattered dreams, with constant reminders of beautiful fragility of life. The road from A to B - be it in time or on two sides of a musical record - is not always in a straight line; it curves around, zigzags madly, loops back, runs into life itself - and is a path connecting the kaleidoscope snapshots of our beings that somehow will eventually fall into the beautiful but ever-changing patterns, which before you know it will fall apart into another snapshot, something different and unrecognizable - because time is a goon, after all.

“I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B.”

And in the meantime, while the unrelentless goon is mercilessly dragging us along, we can look around at the fragile beauty of life around and try to remember the world for what it is now - because it will never be the same again. Because time is a goon. But for now, it's not yet over. “Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.”

And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he’d felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire. Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light.
“See,” Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. “It’s mine.”

(less)

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Jul 08, 2012 Lee rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A must-read for "creative writing" types interested in POV/style variation. Otherwise, for the second consecutive year, the Pulitzer committee awards nearly empty formalism (see "Tinkers"). Both "Tinkers" and this one are formally "unconventional" and concerned with time, yet otherwise seem to have very little to say, as they used to say.

I liked the PR/General chapter. I liked a description of old tattoos on saggy flesh. I liked the big fish caught in the East River. I really liked the sudden ju...more

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Jan 09, 2011 Kemper rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, modern-lit, plain-old-fiction

Reading this book is like going into the future and eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends who haven’t seen each other in years:

“Remember Bennie Salazar?”

“Sure. He was that record producer who used to put the gold flakes in his coffee. Didn’t he used to be in a band?”

“Yeah, he was a wannabe punk rocker in the ‘80s. He was friends with Scotty back then.”

“Was Scotty normal then? Because I heard he’s completely shithouse-rat-crazy these days.”

“Oh, he’s totally insane. Hey, what was...more Reading this book is like going into the future and eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends who haven’t seen each other in years:

“Remember Bennie Salazar?”

“Sure. He was that record producer who used to put the gold flakes in his coffee. Didn’t he used to be in a band?”

“Yeah, he was a wannabe punk rocker in the ‘80s. He was friends with Scotty back then.”

“Was Scotty normal then? Because I heard he’s completely shithouse-rat-crazy these days.”

“Oh, he’s totally insane. Hey, what was Bennie’s assistant’s name?”

“Sasha?”

“That’s it. Whatever happened to her?”

“I’m not sure. I heard she was a total kleptomaniac.”

“Really? I heard some wild stories about her running around Europe back in the day.”

“Someone told me that a friend of hers drowned and really messed her up.”

“Huh. It had to be something. Oh, did you know Bennie’s ex-wife used to work for that PR woman Dolly?”

“The one who is trying to resurrect her business by helping that dictator rehab his image?”

“That’s her. Like she’ll ever get steady work again after that disaster she put together.”

“Wasn’t it Bennie’s ex-wife’s brother who attacked that actress that’s been hanging around that dictator, too?”

“That’s right! Small freaking world.”

See what I mean? You don’t really know these people, but after a while, you get to know their stories and get a feeling for the connections between them. That’s what Jennifer Egan has done in the this creative little novel. By telling a series of stories loosely based around Bennie and Sasha’s past, present and future, she builds a web of relationships that becomes large but always feels intimate.

One of her cuter tricks is an entire section told via a PowerPoint presentation written by a child in the future. It sounds like a gimmick that might be good for a few laughs, but Egan actually uses it to give us a pretty detailed portrait of the future family of one of the characters we’ve read about earlier in the book.

It’s a well-written and clever book, but the tone’s a bit sad and depressing because it deals a lot with the loss and regrets that all adults have over what gets left behind as you move through life. I might have liked it more if I hadn’t just read Super Sad True Love Story, which also dealt a lot with the down side of aging. The two books also share a similarity in depicting a future state where smart phones and constant communication have changed society. (This one is mostly set in the past and present with only a couple of sections in the futue.) So while I liked this, I got a bit of a been-there/done that flavor when reading it, and I think I hit depression overload somewhere in the middle of this.(less)

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Sep 16, 2010 Greg rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, girls-girls-girls

This is the best book ever that has a whole chapter done in power point.

I hate power point. I think it was invented by the devil and given to humanity to make us even dumber than we are now. I think teachers who use power point should be hog-tied by their intestines and then sodomized by Mary Lou Retton (and probably people in the corporate world too, but I don't know about that first hand, but I'm sure they deserve even worse). I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate power poi...more

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Oct 05, 2010 Aldrin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Originally posted here.

There are two paragraphs in Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad , that heavily hint on its fundamental theme but were not at all written by the author. One is the book’s epigraph, taken from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment...more

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Aug 22, 2011 Megha rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: its-not-you-its-me, reviews

Time is a goon? Not necessarily, I think.

( First of all, I think I may be too un-American to really get this book. The dreams, hopes, expectations, definition of a happy and content life for most Indians are entirely different from all of Egan's characters. These stories won't fit in an Indian context. This may be a reason why this book didn't speak to me the same way as it did to many other readers. )

I can't help feeling that at least some of Egan's characters were responsible for wrecking thei...more Time is a goon? Not necessarily, I think.

( First of all, I think I may be too un-American to really get this book. The dreams, hopes, expectations, definition of a happy and content life for most Indians are entirely different from all of Egan's characters. These stories won't fit in an Indian context. This may be a reason why this book didn't speak to me the same way as it did to many other readers. )

I can't help feeling that at least some of Egan's characters were responsible for wrecking their own lives. They just didn't make an honest attempt to build livable lives for themselves. Yeah sure, circumstances don't always work in one's favor. But how our lives shape up also depends on the numerous big and small choices we make for ourselves. It also depends on people around us because our lives are cross-wired with many others. It is not right to blame time and luck for everything that goes wrong. True, unfortunate circumstances can at times push one in a dark corner, for none of their own fault. Some people do have worse luck than most others. But one cannot keep using that as an excuse for every wrong step they take. At some point they have to stop grieving, pull their lives together and do the best they can with whatever cards they have been dealt. Whatever happened to time is the best healer?
Times do change. But the change is not necessarily bad. Not for everyone, at least. Some people get rude shocks, some others hit upon unexpectedly good fortune. It works both ways. We gain something new, we leave something behind. We learn to live with the flow of the time. It is one thing to have hopes and ambitions, and plan things out for future. But it is too much to expect for time to follow our rhythms and pauses and ensure that our plans are executed perfectly. No matter what Paulo Coelho says, the universe may not actually be conspiring to make every single person's wishes come true.

Another of Egan's concerns is regarding rapidly changing lifestyle, ways of communication and our dependence on technology. Yes, that is happening alright. Don't we all know it! And we also know that similar things have been happening for generations. My parents grew up without TV or (any kind of) phone. Surely they didn't expect to see a day when smart-phones and laptops will begin to be just as essential possessions as a toothbrush. Likewise, we can't know what exactly the world around us will be like when we are a generation older. Some changes will make things easier, others will give rise to anxieties. And again, we will learn to live with the times. People always have.

One more reason why Egan's thoughts didn't come across very well is that her theme had to constantly vie for attention with her stylized structure. I did really like her use of non-linear time-line and kaleidoscopic manner of presenting certain pieces of the character's lives. But the novel's form also felt like she had just come out of week-long writing workshop and was eager to show off every single style she had learnt.

However, I must say, this book is not merely popular, it also has a literary gene in it.(less)

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Jan 13, 2011 karen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: littry-fiction, favorites

hell's bells. believe this hype.

this book is the saddest, truest, wisest book i have ever read in a single day. which is not to belittle it - my tear-assing through it is because i did not want to stop reading it and resented any interruption that tried to get in my way. i am someone who plans things. i have timetables in my head - i have to, in order to get everything done. nothing important, just "at 8:00 i will untangle my necklaces while i watch my netflix. at 10:00, i will fold my laundry a...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Ian Graye rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2012, reviews-4-stars, reviews, egan

One At a Time

The thirteen chapters of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" are like lily pads on a pond.

They encapsulate the lives of a group of people, a community, a human ecosystem, over a period of 50 years (only it doesn’t seem like that long).

We start on the pad nearest to us (which is not necessarily the present or the most recent story), then we look around and jump onto the other pads, one at a time, each choice made for us by Jennifer Egan, but not necessarily dictated by any apparent partic...more

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Jan 13, 2011 Joel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, 52-in-2010, library-books, stories-no-wait-a-novel-no-wait, minus-half-a-star, vote-getters

I was going to post a really cool review of this, post-dated from the year 202X, but I couldn't get Goodreads to display my PowerPoint presentation correctly*.

*This is a lie. I did not write a PowerPoint book review because I:
am lazy/am not that clever/don't have PowerPoint. Or is it all three*?

*It is all three.

I loved this book, which is funny because it's basically short stories, and I usually don't have the patience for short stories. But these did me the favor of interlocking nicely in a way...more I was going to post a really cool review of this, post-dated from the year 202X, but I couldn't get Goodreads to display my PowerPoint presentation correctly*.

*This is a lie. I did not write a PowerPoint book review because I:
am lazy/am not that clever/don't have PowerPoint. Or is it all three*?

*It is all three.

I loved this book, which is funny because it's basically short stories, and I usually don't have the patience for short stories. But these did me the favor of interlocking nicely in a way that made me feel like I was reading a novel, and also of being published with a very pretty cover with foil stamping, printed on that textured, slightly rough paper that assures you that you are reading a classy, classy book that will probably be nominated for something.

"Time is a goon," we're told, and the older I get (and I'm not even old), the more I realize that this is really true, as years fly faster and faster and things that once sounded like a long way off are suddenly in the rear view mirror (like: it is 2010; in one year, 9/11 will have been 10 years ago). I used to think 70 seemed old. With my parents newly retired and pushing the seven-decade mark, though, anyone who dies before 80 seems like they died young. I take heart in the fact that, barring a car crash, cancer, or freak tripping-over-the-cat-related catastrophe, I'm still less than halfway done with my brief time on this planet. Is this morbid? Are you supposed to start pondering your mortality a year from 30, or is this some kind of commentary on The Times in Which We Live? Or am I just shifting my fears that I won't end up doing any of the neat things I want to do into the future, the fear that time is only going to keep getting faster, and pretty soon we'll be talking about where we were on that day 20 years ago when Everything Changed, or seemed like it would.

This isn't really about the book, but it is. Egan follows a bunch of characters who work in the music industry, ping-ponging from life to life, from the present, to the past, to the future. It makes total sense: time's a goon; it will creep up on you as quickly as turning a page. Nostalgia is a trap too: I don't miss the good old days for what they were, but for what lay ahead of me, the time I've already spent in-between then and now. This book encompasses all of that, allowing us to see it all: the way past regrets and mistakes shape our future choices, the way our lives will unfold and blossom or wither in ways we can't possibly expect, or maybe can exactly predict.

Oh, and it's also fabulously written in about a dozen different styles, from first- to second- to third-person and in newspaper articles and even in, yes, PowerPoint graphics. And it's about the music industry which is very cool but also big business and that's an interesting dichotomy, how do you commercialize and corporatize the spirit of punk rock, the primal scream of youth looking around and seeing nothing but waste, looking forward and seeing nothing but uncertainty?(less)

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Feb 24, 2013 Nandakishore Varma rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Time, you old Gypsy Man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

- Ralph Hodgson

“Time’s a goon, right?”

- Bosco, a character from A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan is a unique book which defies analysis, probably because it breaks all conventions of storytelling. In fact, it does not tell a story at all. It tells many stories, not by traditional narration but by cameo glimpses into the intertwined life of a handful of characters connected with...more

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Aug 23, 2010 Patrick Brown rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Patrick by: Edan Lepucki, everyone on the internet,

Shelves: best-of-2010, favorites

Spoiler alert: You will get old. You will die. Things will never be like they are right now. And yet, how things are right now will determine how they are in the future. This is so.

The "goon" in the title of this book is time. It opens with a quote from Proust, the poet laureate of memory, about how we cannot recapture the people we were in past the places where we were those people, but rather that those people exist within us, always. And that, it seems to me, is more or less the book, in a nu...more Spoiler alert: You will get old. You will die. Things will never be like they are right now. And yet, how things are right now will determine how they are in the future. This is so.

The "goon" in the title of this book is time. It opens with a quote from Proust, the poet laureate of memory, about how we cannot recapture the people we were in past the places where we were those people, but rather that those people exist within us, always. And that, it seems to me, is more or less the book, in a nutshell. But, oh, how it gets there. How the story unfolds -- stories, really -- is breathtaking. This the best book I've read this year.

A collection of narratives -- they aren't really stories -- centered around various record industry denizens -- an aging producer, his assistant, her college best friend, the producer's mentor, his wife's brother, a publicist, etc. -- Goon Squad is a novel about lives. It opens with Sasha, the beautiful, troubled assistant to record producer Bennie Salazar -- and continues on through a host of characters who knew them. And knew is the word here, for the lesson of the book seems to be that we are not the same people we were before. Those people are dead, and yet the people we all became -- the sagging, sad, tired, knowing people we are now -- those people are inextricably tied to the people we were. We are simultaneously incapable of recovering what was lost and yet bound to know what it is that we're missing.

Does this sound like the book is horribly, horribly sad? It isn't. It's beautiful and clever and very smart, and, okay, a little bit heartbreaking. One of my favorite aspects of the book is how it deals with technology. Facebook, in the novel, is a kind of memory, excavating lost lives from the ether, reconnecting people with the people they were before...or at least the people they knew before. And in the end, it's a burst of horrible, relentless technology that seems to save the music business. And one of the most powerful chapters of the book is told in powerpoint (To wrench soul from the teeth of a Microsoft product is truly a feat unto itself). In fact, this book may be one of the most subtly speculative works of fiction I've read. It presents a future near enough to include all of us, close enough to be recognizable, and still strangely different from where we are today.

I realize this review dances around the book. It tells you what the book is about without really telling much of what the story is. And that's because the story of the book wouldn't sound like much on its own: Some people grow up. They work in the music business. Their friends die, and then so does their business. But those people keep going. They have lives and love affairs and children. They make new friends and rediscover people they assumed were dead. Their lives cross with one another in myriad ways. And then they cross again. I keep returning, again and again to the section on Jocelyn, a girl who ran away from home to be with a record producer, a man who spit her out almost before he was done chewing her up. The passage is on page 65, and it's one of several haunting paragraphs in Jocelyn's section:

"We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?"

This book, it ambushed me.(less)

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Jul 20, 2011 Laurel rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

While I enjoy writing from time to time, I'm not an author. I wasn't an English major. I've never taken a creative writing course, nor read any books on how to write. Perhaps that's why I often struggle when I give a poor rating to a book that has received high critical acclaim. I mean, what do I know?

However, I rate books not so much on their literary merit, but on how much I enjoyed the book as a reader. I rate according to how engaged I was; how much I enjoyed the story, the characters, the t...more

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Apr 25, 2011 Elizabeth rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Elizabeth by: karen

Shelves: 2011, in-by-of-the-americas, reviewed

Last week, I created three Power Point presentations. I edited one for my boss. I reviewed two from people on my team. I viewed probably a dozen (I lose track easily) in meetings, both in-person and web conference ones. It was a slow week.

This really does have something to do with the book, I promise. A lot of the initial buzz was about the innovation of her chapter in Power Point.

The last thing that is going to make a book appeal to me is adding Power Point to it. It's a fantastic tool, which i...more

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Jan 13, 2011 Krok Zero rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: summer-2010

Probably not Egan's fault that I didn't love this one -- I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get behind any novel with this kind of pointillist structure. Maybe I'm more aesthetically conservative than I thought I was, because this year I've read two ecstatically praised novels that use this piecemeal approach (the other being David Mitchell's Ghostwritten) and found it difficult to give a fuck about either of 'em. The idea, I guess, is that the individual fragments add up to a great...more Probably not Egan's fault that I didn't love this one -- I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get behind any novel with this kind of pointillist structure. Maybe I'm more aesthetically conservative than I thought I was, because this year I've read two ecstatically praised novels that use this piecemeal approach (the other being David Mitchell's Ghostwritten) and found it difficult to give a fuck about either of 'em. The idea, I guess, is that the individual fragments add up to a greater thematic or narrative gestalt that can be observed by standing further away. But this distance seems to me antithetical to the purpose of the novel, which is supposed to be all about close engagement with a set of imagined lives and/or events. Not that I want to be prescriptive about this sort of thing, or even use phrases like "the purpose of the novel," because what do I know? But it just feels too often like a case of literary ADD. Mike Reynolds says Goon Squad is "definitely a novel," but doth he protest too much? The fact that Mike even feels compelled to make this assertion tells you that it is not "definitely" anything. (Gives me an idea for the paperback: instead of the customary "A Novel" ID underneath the title, Knopf should go with "Definitely A Novel.") This is really a story collection, I think, and I'm vaguely perturbed by the trend of slapping the "novel" label on interrelated story cycles; if they were first published today, would In Our Time or Winesburg, Ohio be pushed as novels? I'm all for the malleability of forms, but I'm also for truth in advertising. So I dunno.

And so, like any story collection, some of the stuff in Goon Squad is better than some of the other stuff -- though Egan's crisp, satisfying prose can be found throughout. Like everyone else, I loved the powerpoint chapter, excerpts from a 12-year-old girl's "slide journal," as moving as it is formally innovative. Also wonderful is the first-person account by a David Foster Wallace-esque journalist of a celebrity interview gone horribly awry. But another piece, co-starring the same celebrity, struck me as so wildly implausible that I kept waiting for it to be revealed as a fiction-within-the-fiction (no such luck); and an Almost Famous-ish section about rockin' '70s teenagers was hideously over-voiced, a fault that also occasionally tripped up Egan's otherwise deeply entertaining The Keep. It's like, I know you want to create a convincing teen-girl voice, but replacing the verb "to say" with the verb "to go" in every single instance of that verb just comes off as a distracting authorial contrivance. And some of the units, like one involving an African safari (which Mike cites as one of his favorites) might have really worked for me in the context of a proper story collection, but in the context of a novel -- with all its attendant expectations, even in non-linear fragment form -- it felt inessential. So labels do matter, I think, and this book has the wrong label. But of course there is plenty of wonderful writing here, many juicy sentences of wit and insight and elegance that jolted me out of my macro-disappointment; I'm still on Team Egan, and I appreciate her continuing efforts to engage meaningfully with the more disconcertingly salient aspects of contemporary culture. Sometimes the strings show a little too much -- the final chapter (which I basically like) strays perilously close to essayism, and doesn't seem to understand how text messaging works -- but I'm down with any writer these days who tries to chronicle The Way We Live Now without being a dick about it.

Update: I'm officially the only person who does not love this book, so I am floating to assert my independence. Shine on, you crazy me.(less)

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Mar 06, 2011 Ken-ichi rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: snoot, bay-area, nyc

I’m slowly, slowly realizing that the novels I like leave me feeling a) happy, b) sad, and c) confused, and the ones I don’t simply evoke boredom or disappointment. A Visit from the Goon Squad landed solidly in the happy-sad-confused camp. Quick summary: great characters, fragmented pseudo-narrative, much to say about time and the depredations thereof, very interesting incorporation of social networking concepts into narrative structure and the changing nature of memory. Read it. I am talking to...more I’m slowly, slowly realizing that the novels I like leave me feeling a) happy, b) sad, and c) confused, and the ones I don’t simply evoke boredom or disappointment. A Visit from the Goon Squad landed solidly in the happy-sad-confused camp. Quick summary: great characters, fragmented pseudo-narrative, much to say about time and the depredations thereof, very interesting incorporation of social networking concepts into narrative structure and the changing nature of memory. Read it. I am talking to you.

(view spoiler)[I’m going to start with the structure as that seems easiest to articulate (someone please make fun of my Mindy-like "structure" obsession). I think Egan uses the online social network as the organizing principle of the book: each chapter features characters tangentially related to those in the previous one, and all the characters connect and reconnect over time and space in much the way we do on social networking sites, where these kinds of weak ties obtain new and greater kinds of value (e.g. cool links posted by “friends” who aren’t your friends anymore, semi-random but relevant content emerging from distant edges of your network). Yes, social networks existing before Facebook and Twitter et al, but I think the relevant thing here is the focus on the loose connections.

There’s also the fragmented, multiple-perspective, somewhat non-linear storytelling that has become so common in books and film over the past decade as to be considered a trope (I know I read an article about this at one point, possibly this one). In some sense, stories like these either lack a master narrative or involve the reader in reconstructing the master narrative as part of the experience (although sometimes the nature of the underlying story is just plain laid out at the end). In a book full of characters who are striving to define or redefine themselves, I think this structural focus on assembling the pieces is kind of cool: the reader is also struggling to define how all the stories connect, and what the whole story really is.

Of course, there’s also a way to see the entire book as being about Sasha. She’s the most connected node, and gets the most chronological coverage, from precocious child to teenage runaway to reforming college kid to klepto adulthood to stable motherhood. Her story is first, and she is remembered last. I think this is part of what makes the book so satisfying to me, that all the complicated networking and time jumping and fragmentation ultimately describe (or perhaps disguise) a traditional story arc of a protagonist who struggles but eventually finds a kind of happiness (in PowerPoint).

Ok, so, content. The book is very much about time and memory, from the Proust excerpts that lead off to the concluding sentence. Most of the characters are constantly plagued by memories of their past (kissing nuns, brainwashing wives, disastrous parties), and indeed, “Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?” (p. 96). Many characters seem to be trying to escape from time itself (Lou and Sasha seem to lie about their age, or at least delude themselves; everyone is constantly on drugs), and it even seems like the crucial element of the PowerPoint chapter (which is completely awesome, btw), where Sasha’s son’s autistic obsession over extended pauses in songs culminates with her explanation,

“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.”

Anxiety over time, and time stopping in death, hoping that it can be escaped while knowing that it can’t.

I think another important time-related theme is that the past is becoming harder to escape, at least in part due to technology. Rhea marvels over Bennie’s ability to “find almost anyone on a computer” (p. 65) when he assembles his high school friends to bid farewell to Lou on his deathbed, and Bix the mid-90s computer whiz claims, “The days of losing touch are almost gone” (p. 152). Perhaps Lou’s life is intended as an example of this, since he’s the oldest character and perhaps representative of a former set of problems: in the 70s Africa story and to a lesser extent in the 1979 Bay Area story, Lou lives in the now and lives pretty hard, but when he’s dying in the late 90s, the memory of his son’s suicide still plagues him, while his old groupies can still give him solace. I don’t know, maybe this isn’t the best point. If that was the case, I feel like Lulu (Dolly’s daughter) and Allison (Sasha’s daughter) and maybe even the Pointers would have been some kind of opposite extreme, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

Anyway, I think I’m done brain-vomitting. There were actually almost no interesting words in this entire book (!) so no vocab list, though I absolutely loved the neologisms in the last chapter, like “word casings” (words that have been distorted past their original meanings outside of quotation marks, like “friend” and “real”), atavistic purism (AP), ethical ambivalence (EA), etc. (hide spoiler)](less)

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Jul 03, 2011 Monique rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, award-winners, bestsellers, buddy-read, fiction, kindle

Six degrees of separation winning the Pulitzer, with twisted characters in various states of senescence, forlorn, gloom, and devastation all at the same time, spanning several decades as time frame. That, in a nutshell, is my assessment of "A Visit From The Goon Squad".

This is no cerebral review of the novel; I do not want to over-analyze any underlying messages or meanings beneath each and every chapter which featured a different character. Instead, these are simple observations.

The shifting...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Stephen M rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mentions-mitchell

I don't think I've ever been this torn on a book. I mean three stars? four? five? I give away so many five stars anyway.... Ah, goodreads star-rating system, you can never fully capture my experience with a book.
So, what did I think of this book? Absolutely beautiful at times. Was it consistent? No. Was it sad? Yes. Was it rewarding? Yes. Did the post-modern gimmick work in this book? I'm not sure.

And that is where most of my grippes come with this one. Because I couldn't help but feel that Egan...more

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Jul 03, 2011 Kinga rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: special-place-in-my-heart

The older I get the harder it is for any book to get on my special-place-in-my-heart shelf. The last time I found myself raving about a book like it was the Second Coming of Christ was when I read Evening is the Whole Day in December 2009. I either have been reading lots of so-so books lately or I have become jaded.

Luckily, here comes this book to prove to me I am not as indifferent as I would like to believe myself to be.

Another thing this book proves is that you can have a best selling collec...more The older I get the harder it is for any book to get on my special-place-in-my-heart shelf. The last time I found myself raving about a book like it was the Second Coming of Christ was when I read Evening is the Whole Day in December 2009. I either have been reading lots of so-so books lately or I have become jaded.

Luckily, here comes this book to prove to me I am not as indifferent as I would like to believe myself to be.

Another thing this book proves is that you can have a best selling collection of short stories, as long as you pretend they are a novel. Short stories seem to be perfectly suited to our current busy lifestyles and short attention spans. It's baffling they are pushed off the literary mainstream, and judging by this book's success, it seems to be some unexplainable prejudice. After all, this books is just a collection of loosely connected episodes that could (and have been) easily published as stand alone stories.

The appeal of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" lies in its treatment of passing time and growing old, of how pople go from being the protagonists to barely mentioned secondary characters. These are all things we know about but we don't like to think about. The delicate way in which Egan presents the inevitability of all of them makes it a very sad, melancholic, and bitter-sweet read. This book is also about rock'n'roll because music is one of those things that were always better when we were young.

No matter how accomplished and powerful the character, he or she will eventually get pushed aside and left to reminisce. This is the most powerful and important message that this book delivers. However, it doesn't leave you completely hopeless. It brings a beautiful metaphor using pauses in rock'n'roll songs. Just when you think it's all over, the song comes back on after a couple seconds for its one last hurrah.

I have read a few negative reviews (most notably Sarah Aswell's one) and while I see where they are coming from, I must say this book did it for me. It was so true that all I could do was sigh for two reasons. One, because we're all gonna die, two, because there is no way I could ever write anything this powerful.

Time is a goon and life is a bitch, eh?(less)

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May 01, 2011 Michael rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: pulitzer, 2010, realistic-fiction, literary-fiction, 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die

A Visit from the Goon Squad is really unique and well written, but it left me without any form of closure. This is a collection of short stories rather than a novel; telling individual memories from people (and family) involved in a record label that is struggling to remain in touch with the digital age. The people in the book include musicians, producers, assistants, executives and publicists; but all their memories doesn’t really quiet make a complete story, there is too many holes and informa...more

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Oct 07, 2012 oriana rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2011

Shit, I had a placeholder review here forever which I rashly deleted and then I realized that there were all these comments that now made no sense.

Basically it said stuff about how suuuuper let down I was by Swamplandia because of all the hype & anticipation, and how I'd never wanted to read Jennifer Egan at all until all of a sudden I wanted to REALLY REALLY bad and I was hoping this wasn't going to be a huge disappointment. Then I got a proof of this, which was so cool, and I was kind of...more

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Jul 11, 2012 Scott Axsom rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

For me, literary fiction transcends genre by taking the technical aspects of storytelling – character, plot, dialog, tension, resolution, etc. – and delivering those things through prose that has, itself, been accorded paramount importance. As a result, literary fiction functions on levels akin to those of poetry and, accordingly, I’ve never been a fan of messing with something for which I’ve developed such an abiding reverence. As a purist, I’ve long preferred writing that lets the rhythms and...more For me, literary fiction transcends genre by taking the technical aspects of storytelling – character, plot, dialog, tension, resolution, etc. – and delivering those things through prose that has, itself, been accorded paramount importance. As a result, literary fiction functions on levels akin to those of poetry and, accordingly, I’ve never been a fan of messing with something for which I’ve developed such an abiding reverence. As a purist, I’ve long preferred writing that lets the rhythms and beauty of the language serve as a sort of liturgy. That said, I admittedly loved, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” and it was certainly experimental but not on the level of Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad”. In this book, Egan takes storytelling to its current technological extremes and manages to do so while crafting an extraordinarily beautiful literary novel - something I did not think was possible.

The main theme of the linked stories in “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is the flow of time and Egan plays with the concept throughout this work. Her most poignant, and universal, message is that time is a Goon - it sneaks in while our attention is diverted by life itself then it abducts our hope and steals our dreams. The book offers a glorious dose of scathing social commentary on the culture of celebrity and the illusions of popularity but the most touching aspect of Egan’s exquisite polemic is her sweeping exploration of age and aging, time and its mysterious, inexorable march. She accomplishes this through such a wide array of perspectives and devices that I couldn’t do justice to the variety here. Suffice it to say that she’s taken literary fiction and stretched and molded it to fit her own desire, which is clearly to smash the very concept of literary fiction to shreds before remaking it to modern specifications.

Every review of this book mentions the PowerPoint chapter and, as an avowed literary Luddite, I was dreading it. Indeed, as the novel progressed and I grew to love it more and more – as I began to genuinely cherish Egan’s prose – a hope grew within me; “This is such a beautifully told story, please don’t screw it up.” And then... the dreaded PowerPoint chapter appeared and, at its conclusion, I wept. It is, arguably (along with the chapter on the aged Lou), the best chapter in the book. This brilliantly conceived snippet, crafted around a boy's obsession with the silence in music, reaches it’s emotional crescendo with a PP slide that's blank – it contains no words, no symbols of any kind – and, with the solar plexus punch Egan delivered via that white space, all my shibboleths were decimated and she forever secured her spot among the pantheon of literary iconoclasts. Damn you Jennifer Egan and your rule-smashing, gut-wrenching story-telling.

Before reading this Pulitzer-winning novel, I would've never imagined that such delicious fiction could be decanted from such exotic fruit, but I was wrong. Literary fiction is most often identified with lyrical prose and profound character study, so how can the very absence of words achieve such heights? Read “A Visit from the Goon Squad” to find out. It’s a stunningly poignant, painfully beautiful and hilariously accurate take on the monstrous and majestic passage of time. And the story's method of delivery may be the most telling tale of all.(less)

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Sep 10, 2012 Fionnuala rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I liked the format - chapters which stand alone but also advance the story, filling in the background and the future of the main characters and allowing the reader to move about in space and time, savouring the atmosphere of the different decades and the different locations.

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Dec 23, 2012 Nikoleta rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: important

Самият факт, че давам 5 звезди, а аз почти никога не го правя, или поне почти никога при романи, а само при книги с преобладаващи илюстрации, говори ясно. Простете за дългото изречение, но след тази книга какво друго ми остава. :-)

Почна ми трудно, не ми харесваше и дори го съобщих на всеослушание - shame on me. Постепенно влязох в схемата, да, схема, защото тук история няма, има схема, която показва времето. Да речем, че главните герои са Саша и нейният (в последствие бивш) шеф Бени Салазар. Око...more

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Oct 21, 2010 Lori (Hellian) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Quite moving. It does jump around, both chronological and different characters, so a bit hard to keep track of who to really concentrate on. But that could also be the point? Anyway, it all came together for me at the end. Made me ponder about the goon itself, Time. So many possibilities, directions, and most of all, stages of life. Even at my age! It ain't over...

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Jun 14, 2012 Angus rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nbcc-award, pulitzer-prize, reviewed-and-blogged, tournament-of-books

Original post at Book Rhapsody.

***

Time Warping and Shape Shifting

The sensation surrounding this novel forced me to buy it and the purchase was made sooner with the insistence of one of my bookish friends to read it along with him. I remember I was on budget mode that time, but a novel getting the nod of the jurors of both the Pulitzer and the Book Critics Circle? It must be worth it.

I have mixed feelings for this book. Upon closing it after reading the last sentence, I felt that it was okay. The...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Sarah rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The National Book Critics Circle Award. A Penn/Faulkner Award Finalist. The freaking Pulitzer. It has to be good, right? I thought so, to the point that it was the only book that i brought with me on the plane this weekend, but I was really disappointed.

This book, a collection of quasi-connected short stories, covers a span of time between the 1970s and 2020s and follows a variety of people, most notably a former punk rocker turned music executive and a young troubled kleptomaniac turned an adu...more

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Apr 01, 2011 rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: from-library, 2011, this-is-america

First thought: this is a book that shouldn't work, but does. Why does it work so well?

...OK, I think I'm stealing that observation from another Goodreads review that I read and must have internalized way back when I was working at the bookstore, and I apologize for that if it's your opinion I'm aping. I read a ton of reviews of this right after the store first got it, occasionally stopping in Fiction while shelving to admire the texture of the jacket, wondering, what's the big deal about this bo...more

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Feb 14, 2013 Thing Two rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Thing Two by: Book Club

Shelves: nbcc-award-winner, pulitzer-prizes-winner, los-angeles-times-book-prize, nba-winner, ala-notable-book-for-adults, pen-faulkner-award-winner, galaxy-national-book-award-winner, goodreads-choice-award-nominee, int-l-impac-dublin-nominee, book-club-goodreads-21st-century, book-club-local-orlando

This book seems to have won every award possible known to man. It's a series of vignettes - stories which could easily stand alone, but are strung together by differing characters. For a while, I amused myself trying to figure out which character would appear in the next chapter. It reminded me of a Picasso, or a Dali; there was a lot in here, a lot of stimuli

The writing is strong, almost too strong, to the point that I wondered if the author had a thesaurus beside her during the writing process...more

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topics	posts	views	last activity
Chapter 5: "You (Plural)"	40	361	Apr 05, 2013 06:26am
IRL SF Book Club ...: Goon Squad Character Map	4	7	Apr 04, 2013 07:15pm
Fun giveaways and reads	1	34	Feb 12, 2013 06:36am
Chapter 12: "Great Rock and Roll Pauses"	60	530	Feb 08, 2013 10:04am

title link	preview: A Visit from the Goon Squad
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