A Visit from the Goon Squad in Reading with Style

Jul 02, 2011 Juniper rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-books

Sigh.
Double sigh.
Egan did some brilliant things with this book but my brain did not like it. At all.

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Apr 18, 2011 Bucket rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: experimental, 1001-read-all-editions, psychology, reviewed, literary, music, time, pulitzer-winners, many-perspectives

Update (1/18/23):
I got a lot more out of this on a second read. The first time around I was in my mid-20s, and the impact of "time is a goon" and how aging and evolving change the meaning of the passage of time just weren't on my radar yet.

Now, this theme hit me hard. I was struck by the idea of pauses (in music, in the environment - the desert, in the jumps from one story to another) as not only time passing, but as impactful in their own right. Most directly, a pause in a rock song changes the Update (1/18/23):
I got a lot more out of this on a second read. The first time around I was in my mid-20s, and the impact of "time is a goon" and how aging and evolving change the meaning of the passage of time just weren't on my radar yet.

Now, this theme hit me hard. I was struck by the idea of pauses (in music, in the environment - the desert, in the jumps from one story to another) as not only time passing, but as impactful in their own right. Most directly, a pause in a rock song changes the song. The passage of time impacts life too. It's not just the events we experience or the people we meet that change us. The very fact of time's passage changes us too. The pauses are not silent (the music has the crackle of old recordings, the desert buzzes/drones with sound) and time's passage isn't either. It's gritty, it rubs on us.

Egan very inspiredly follows all this with a futuristic vision of youth as frictionless. Their music is clear and smooth, no recording remnants. They don't get tattoos or piercings. They don't swear. They live through their 'handsets.' They minimize their friction (with time and the world) to minimize their aging and, ultimately, to hold on to their powerful. Because to be young in our society is to be powerful even now, and in Egan's future no less so.

I also noted the accuracy/prescience of Egan's ideas about moral turpitude around truth and how much it matters. Back in 2010, there were inklings, but I don't think most of us had realized yet how flexible and flimsy 'truth' would become, politically and socially. Egan's portrayal of it is fairly innocuous (people pretend to like things or care about things for appearances and to increase their reach on social media). In our current reality, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Original review (6/11/11):
Egan won a Pulitzer in 2011 for this novel in stories. Each chapter is a self-contained short story from a different character's perspective. There is no obvious central character, though Bennie and Sasha seem to come up the most and all the other characters are connected to one or the other of them. The order of the stories is not chronological.

It's interesting to me that the most recent two Pulitzer winners are novels in stories. While I enjoyed 'Olive Kitteridge' more, 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' is certainly the more risky and modern book. I loved each story here in and of itself - each chapter is self-contained and beautifully written. The characters are gritty and flawed, and Egan does a great job showing what makes them tick without coming right out and saying it. The chapter done in powerpoint is stunning. I was worried it would be a gimmick but it works so well that I can't imagine it working any other way. Ditto the chapter done in the 2nd person - Egan created an excellent example of how the perspective can be done well.

Despite all that praise, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I do many others. I couldn't get a sense of the reasoning behind the order of the chapters until the very end and I still didn't feel all that engaged in the characters. It was interesting reading, and I loved analyzing the way Egan writes, but I wasn't swept up in most of the stories (exception: the powerpoint) and there are so many characters that none of them are central enough to make me really care. I think my taste in novels leans away from the postmodern.

Themes: music, technology, future, youth, relationships, characterization, experimental ...more

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