A Visit from the Goon Squad past Jennifer Egan

I was non going to read this volume, for much the same reason I've been avoiding Stieg Larsson. I don't fall prey to the idea that something getting popular makes it somehow unworthy—I hateful, I'm a fantasy fan, for Pete's sake. Only I notwithstanding had the same reaction; merely breezing past information technology as something I don't want to read. And so one of my very favorite professors told me he had enjoyed information technology. Feeling guilty about talking about speculative fiction non-stop, I decided to pick it up so nosotros'd have something to talk nearly. …Yeah, information technology's going to exist an bad-mannered chat.

A Visit from the Goon Team follows the lives of several people in and around the music business, linked, more or less, by Bennie Salazar, a music executive, and his kleptomaniac assistant, Sasha. Shifting from the 1960s to the 1980s to the near future, Egan examines the aging process in a digital world increasingly focused on youth culture, jumping from disaffected young punks to suburban housewives to aged rock stars.

While Jennifer Egan calls A Visit from the Goon Team a novel, it'due south functionally a brusk story collection focused on the same theme with a shared cast. In fact, iii chapters were originally published every bit curt stories in The New Yorker—the opening chapter was published in 2007 and can exist read here. I'k not quite sure what to brand of this. On 1 mitt, Egan can do what she wants; on another, I observe it a picayune disingenuous to present this equally a novel. In any instance, it's functionally a curt story collection to me; while characters ingather up once again and over again, we don't explore them equally deeply every bit nosotros could in a novel dedicated to them. (Not that I heed; several of the male person characters are downright repulsive, specially in the way they care for women.) While the fact that the characters know each other (or know of each other) makes the transitions smoother, the stories aren't specially related to each other, save in their focus on aging in the digital age and how atrocious that is.

In that focus, A Visit from the Goon Team is incredibly nighttime. Information technology's not but the fact that people dice unsatisfied with life (an incredibly horrifying concept to me), cheat on each other, steal, and otherwise act abominably—but the fact that there'due south very fiddling redeeming value near any of them. For instance, Bennie Salazar, who is, more or less, the crux of the book, is, well, repulsive. The closest we get to promise is in the novel's most interesting slice, a PowerPoint journal written by Sasha's daughter a picayune in the future. In diagrams that could have turned out gimmicky simply are surprisingly handled well, the little daughter contemplates her parents' history, her family unit's connection, and her autistic brother'due south human relationship with their father. Even as Sasha'southward daughter realizes that her "job is to make people experience uncomfortable" (204), she watches her brother and her father finally connect. This short shorty is an absolute relief, awash as the reader has been in a landscape of crushed hopes and dreams. It's one of two pieces where Egan flirts with near-time to come scientific discipline fiction, imagining the evolution of media and our dependence on electronics.

Ultimately, I came away with a lack of connection, which is, to be off-white, perchance the effect that Egan is going for. As individual short stories, I remember the chapters presented in A Visit from the Goon Squad brand for haunting, brief glimpses into the lives of terrible people; but as a novel, it'due south hard to stick with them for the good moments. I think everyone has unlike expectations for a novel and for a short story drove, and consistency belongs in the land of the novel. I still recollect of it every bit a short story collection with good stories to call up and bad ones to forget, rather than a novel with highs and lows. (Goodness, I had more to say about that than I thought!) While I'm quite glad I read information technology (if only to grab up with the rest of the literary world), I'yard a piffling bewildered by the fact it won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature; comparing this to say, Middlesex, is asking for A Visit from the Goon Squad to be utterly diddled out of the water.

Bottom line: Jennifer Egan'due south A Visit from the Goon Squad might exist called a novel, only it's functionally a brusk story collection—an incredibly night brusque story collection that presents crumbling in the digital era as an unfathomable horror. (How incredibly pleasant for those who historic period, which would be everyone.) If you're interested, requite it a shot, only I wouldn't go out of your way.

I rented this volume from my college library.

  • Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Impress.