From the Bookshelf of Tackling the Pulitzer Prize Winners!…

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Start date: May 1, 2011

Finish date: May 31, 2011

Discussion: The Tackled Pulitzers

Why we're reading this: This book was the 2010 Winner. See our discussion group on it for more about our responses.
[close] This book was the 2010 Winner. See our discussion group on it for more about our responses.

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What Members Thought

Jun 28, 2013 Kristel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1001-books, 1001-challenge, new-york, pulitzer-prize

Published: 2010
Pages: 274
Genre: fiction, Punk Rock Music, Psychological Fiction
My copy: Library book

A series of interconnected stories of a wide cast of characters who all have some kind of connection to each other, covering five decades with the backdrop of the music industry and covering locales such as New York, San Francisco, Africa and Naples. I loved this book because it is about time. I like stories about time. The title, A Visit From the Goon Squad, is a reference to time. Time is a goon
Published: 2010
Pages: 274
Genre: fiction, Punk Rock Music, Psychological Fiction
My copy: Library book

A series of interconnected stories of a wide cast of characters who all have some kind of connection to each other, covering five decades with the backdrop of the music industry and covering locales such as New York, San Francisco, Africa and Naples. I loved this book because it is about time. I like stories about time. The title, A Visit From the Goon Squad, is a reference to time. Time is a goon and it beats you up. This is a work of originality. Not that interconnected stories have never been done but all the elements of this story; the interconnects, time as a theme, shifts in communications, use of texting and slide shows all come together to make this a unique work deserving of a Pulitzer Prize. There are many characters but they are all connected on some level, they don't even know how connected they are or how much they have impacted each other. I liked many of them and the way Egan developed them was very different and fun. The language was fresh and changed over time and with various characters and finally progressing to texting and to power point. There was a lot of emotional impact for me. The passing of time is emotional, the hurts, the tragedies and the victories.
I liked these quotes; Ms Egan uses a passage from Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time to introduce the book "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 as in success. It is in ourselvs that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years." and "The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish."
Pg 174, "...she'd felt the passage of time." The slide show of Pauses (wonderful), pg 269, "times a goon", and page 259 gives a most wonderful (probabably exaggerated for effect) description of today's relativism. ...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Jan rated it really liked it

Shelves: my-pulitzer-project

Another book in my attempt to read all of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this book reads more like a collection of short stories than a novel, except that the characters keep popping up at different life stages in stories told from different points of view. I loved the "Power Point" chapter, which told a complete story in a very different way. I probably would have given this book 5 stars, but the last chapter fell flat (in my opinion). I have noticed that even if a PP winner isn ...more

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Dec 20, 2012 Kristi rated it really liked it

Shelves: reading-challenge-2012, 1001-books

A captivating read. Egan's novel is a set of interwoven narratives; each successive chapter develops a character introduced in a previous installment, filling in gaps in the overall narrative and illustrating the development of specific individuals over time. The title, "A Visit from the Goon Squad," is a reference to time; time visits each of the characters in her book, leading to destruction for some and redemption for others. The book has a rather large cast of characters, but the "main" ones A captivating read. Egan's novel is a set of interwoven narratives; each successive chapter develops a character introduced in a previous installment, filling in gaps in the overall narrative and illustrating the development of specific individuals over time. The title, "A Visit from the Goon Squad," is a reference to time; time visits each of the characters in her book, leading to destruction for some and redemption for others. The book has a rather large cast of characters, but the "main" ones are Bennie, a record exec, and Sasha, a troubled young woman who works as his assistant at one point. Egan returns to their narratives multiple times over the course of her book. Music and rock culture feature prominently in many of the chapters, as well as life in New York City. Self-destruction, neuroses, love, sexuality, aging, identity, and family feature as major themes.

I thought this book was very interesting and well written. Egan had me hooked from the very first chapters on Sasha and Bennie. I thought that all of her characters had a very distinctive voice, which helped to maintain my interest over the course of the narrative. She also did an excellent job balancing the variety of the individual narratives with the coherence of the "overall" story. I thought it came together quite nicely. The one thing I didn't particularly like was the introduction of the idea of "pointers" (babies and young children who purchase music by merely pointing at their tablets) and the general development of social communication in the final chapter. I suppose Egan was trying to incorporate some commentary on the future in this closing section (since most of her chapters seem to take present in the ambiguous present or past), but it seemed like a rather heavy-handed and not terribly insightful way to make that move--I didn't really think it added to the core story and found it to be distracting.

I would recommend this book to pretty much anyone. If you're interested in music and rock culture, it will probably appeal to you a bit more than the average person. Since so much of the novel revolves around the theme of time and aging, I suspect that older readers will get more out of this than younger ones. ...more

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May 23, 2015 Shatterlings rated it liked it

Shelves: prize-winners

Pulitzer Prize winners, it seems you either love them or you just don't get them. This one is clever, I can see it's clever, the playing with time and different view points, so yes it's clever. But do I love it...no, it all left me kind of cold. It's so hard to keep track of all the characters and the timing of events without a story. It might not be big or clever of me but I like a story I can follow without having to draw some sort of chart, this needed a chart. ...more

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Feb 09, 2012 Leslye rated it really liked it · review of another edition

If 3 1/2 were an option, that would be my vote. I didn't really love it in the beginning, but it grew on me. ...more

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May 28, 2012 Chris Ryan rated it really liked it

I liked it a lot. Innovative story presentation, interesting characters, great shifting perspectives. Yes, it has a chapter presented as a PowerPoint, no I am not jealous that I didn't think of that. Because I am not jealous of this book's success and nor was I affected by its hype, I was able to just sit back and enjoy it. And I did. ...more

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Jun 08, 2012 S rated it liked it

Shelves: pulitzer, 2012

I loved the disconnected feel of the connections. I would've liked the book more though, if it hadn't been so full of sex and the f-word. I understand being realistic, but I felt like it was more for sensationalism than realism. ...more

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