Enjoy A Visit From The Goon Squad!
A Visit From The Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the day I finished the first third of the book. Naturally, I started paying more attention. I realized that the chapters I'd already read, which had seemed like discrete short stories, were related in a mysterious way, and my too casual reading style wasn't helping.
By the time I'd read eighty percent of the book, I knew I needed to go back and do some re-reading. The earlier chapters were often later in the story. It was like the film, Memento, only the story didn't flow straight backwards in time— it jumped around like the chapters were being thrown out of hiccupping time machine.
There was San Francisco seen through the lens of members of a high school punk band in the late 1970s, then other college students in New York City in the early 1990s, then a wandering young traveler in Naples in the late 1980s. Finally a few of these characters are thrown together, this time in the New York City of the not-too-distant future. A unifying subject is the popular music scene, but you have to put the story together for yourself. The author brings all of the different times, places, characters, and milieus alive, so you feel like you've read a very dense book.
I read the Kindle edition and it colored my experience more than usual. One chapter, from the point of view of the twelve year old daughter of one of the important characters, consists of power point slides. Even with the Kindle's ability to enlarge font size and change page orientation, I still found some of the fonts too small and too pale to read. I could read enough to gets the general sense, but some telling details may have been lost to me. On the other hand, using the search feature to find earlier references to 'Alex' for example was really helpful. More than once I used the dictionary lookup feature.
In the 1970s lit majors were talking about Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet pushing the boundaries of the novel by telling a story from four different view points. Books I've read recently (The Imperfectionists, Lady Matador's Hotel) seem to be short story chapters linked together—with different characters point-of-view. A Visit From The Goon Squad takes this trend even further, telling a story about time and music with even more complexity. There are plenty of interesting and disquieting points to think about as you piece together the plot and peer into the future. Like seeing Memento a few times, I may have to reread this book, to make sure I've completely got it. But, A Visit From The Goon Squad will be worth it!
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
