A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

Paperback, 2011

Status

Available

Publication

Anchor (2011), Edition: 1, 352 pages

Description

Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs confront their pasts in this powerful story about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn, and how art and music have the power to redeem.

Media reviews

It is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, but something in between: a series of chapters featuring interlocking characters at different points in their lives, whose individual voices combine to a create a symphonic work that uses its interconnected form to explore ideas about human
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interconnectedness. This is a difficult book to summarise, but a delight to read, gradually distilling a medley out of its polyphonic, sometimes deliberately cacophonous voices.
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7 more
Publishers Weekly
Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive in well in this graceful yet wild novel. We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac
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Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie's one-time bandmate who all but dropped out of society, and Alex, who goes on a date with Sasha and later witnesses the future of the music industry. Egan's overarching concerns are about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, and lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn. Or as one character asks, How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Egan answers the question elegantly, though not straight on, as this powerful novel chronicles how and why we change, even as the song stays the same.
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Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a moving humanistic saga, an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche. It has thirteen chapters, each an accomplished short story in its own right; characters who meander in and out of these chapters, brushing up
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against one another’s lives in unexpected ways; a time frame that runs from 1979 to the near, but still sci-fi, future; jolting shifts in time and points of view—first person, second person, third person, Powerpoint person; and a social background of careless and brutal sex, careless and brutal drugs, and carefully brutal punk rock. All of this might be expected to depict the broken, alienated angst of modern life as viewed through the postmodern lens of broken, alienated irony. Instead, Egan gives us a great, gasping, sighing, breathing whole.
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Although shredded with loss, “A Visit From the Goon Squad” is often darkly, rippingly funny. Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.
If Jennifer Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile. Her new novel, "A Visit From the Goon Squad," is a medley of voices -- in first, second and third person -- scrambled through time and across the globe
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with a 70-page PowerPoint presentation reproduced toward the end. I know that sounds like the headache-inducing, aren't-I-brilliant tedium that sends readers running to nonfiction, but Egan uses all these stylistic and formal shenanigans to produce a deeply humane story about growing up and growing old in a culture corroded by technology and marketing. And what's best, every movement of this symphony of boomer life plays out through the modern music scene, a white-knuckle trajectory of cool, from punk to junk to whatever might lie beyond. My only complaint is that "A Visit From the Goon Squad" doesn't come with a CD.
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'A Visit from the Goon Squad' seems put together eerily like a record album--even nostalgically, one might say, except that Bennie Salazar, the music producer whom the novel bears with through several decadent decades, insists that "Nostalgia was the end--everyone knew that." Chapter for chapter
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the novel has the initial feel of a series of short stories--or songs on a CD--only gradually and implicitly interlocking to express a particular sensibility and outlook.
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Booklist
Egan tracks the members of a San Francisco punk band and their hangers-on over the decades is they wander out into the wider, bewildering world. In this hilarious, melancholy, enrapturing, annerving, and piercingly beautiful mosaic of a novel....Egan evinces an acute sensitivity to the black holes
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of shame and despair and to the remote-control power of the gadgets that are reorderng our world.
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Kirkus Reviews
“Poetry and pathos . . . Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy. . . . Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why
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their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us. . . . Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while affirming its historic values.”
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User reviews

LibraryThing member brenzi
I seem to have read a fairly large number of books recently that are comprised of inter-locking stories. There was “Olive Kitteridge,” and “Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” and also the quirkily original “The Imperfectionists.” Enter Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” a
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very clever book that turns those other books on their heads. She not only creates a series of interconnected stories, weaving them back and forth in time, but includes, I believe for the first time, a chapter presented in PowerPoint mode. She’s good enough that none of it seems contrived or gimmicky. It all works beautifully.

The stories are centered on the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record producer and his one-time assistant Sasha and span the years 1979 through about 20 years into the future. This is much too complicated a plot to try to summarize and it is a book that I will try to reread in the next six months because I think that is how the stories will gel for me. A very interesting yet very challenging read, there were times when I couldn’t pin down the time frame and then Egan would throw out the words that would immediately solidify when the story was taking place without giving the actual date. She draws connections and parallels between her characters and the dying music industry because this is, above all, a book about rock and roll. Patterned after albums which have an A and B side she is able to draw comparisons to her struggling characters lives: an overweight, down on his luck rocker; a young girl with a stealing propensity; a has been publicist who tries to resurrect her career on the back of a Central American dictator and a washed-up actress; a young journalist who loses control of his story and himself as he tries to rape the young actress he’s interviewing; and along the way the story seamlessly turns in on itself and makes for a fascinating mosaic.

The closing chapter, which takes place in the future, reveals how society may have evolved about twenty years from now and the author chooses her words carefully:

“Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words---“friend” and “real” and “story” and “change”---words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity,” “search,” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?” (Page262)

Smooth, polished writing carries you along and Egan’s ability to draw deep, complex characters and to connect to the reader with great storytelling makes each story compelling and able to stand on its own. But it is as you start to make the connections that you find yourself smiling at the ingenuity of the narrative. Highly recommended for the reader willing to be patient for the big reward.
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LibraryThing member Smiler69
Somehow, I don't think saying that this book is about the music industry is doing it any justice, because is seems to be about so much more than that. But then, it's as much about music as anything else that is about time and voice and melody is, I guess.

We meet Sasha in the first chapter when she
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steps into the women's restroom at a hotel and is taken by the urge to steal the wallet from the handbag of an occupant of one of the stalls. We learn this incident took place on a date with a young man she met via the internet as she is retelling the incident to her therapist, who is trying to help her come to grips with her compulsion to steal things. We also learn that she used to be the assistant of one Bennie Salazar, a big player in the music industry. In the next chapter, we meet Bennie who is working through a series of shameful memories. He's sitting in a meeting, when his assistant Sasha appears and hands him a cup of coffee into which he mixes some gold flakes, an Aztec concoction to ensure sexual potency. "So this is going to be a story about this Sasha and this Bennie characters working through their issues", I think. Then by chapter three, we move to a first person narrative. This part of the story takes place in 1979. Our narrator is a teenager called Rhea, and she and a bunch of friends are part of a punk rock band trying to make it on the music scene; other than her there's also Scottie, Jocelyn, Alice, and a young Bennie Salazar, who Rhea happens to have a crush on. Her best friend Jocelyn is having an affair with a fortysomething year-old called Lou, which all makes for plenty of sex, drugs and rock'n roll. "We've got multiple points of view and we keep going back in time", I now think. By chapter 12, which is told by one Alison Blake via powerpoint slides sometime in the future, I think: "multiple perspectives through time with characters related by causality. An interesting exploration into storytelling approaches." Then, with the thirteenth and last chapter I think—not for the first time—that this novel is just too gimmicky for me and that those Pulitzer prize people really are off on a very high literary cloud that most regular folk can never hope to come close to, including me. But then, something happens because I haven't quite gotten to the end yet, and I catch myself wishing I wasn't so overbooked again this month, because I really wouldn't mind reading this one all over again, maybe a couple of times even, to figure out just what it is that Egan has done to somehow get this strange brew to actually work the way it does. So she must have done something right, right?
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LibraryThing member dmsteyn
A curious book, both well-written and moving, but also sometimes perplexing. I liked the fact that the book challenges some time-honoured novelistic conventions, but these challenges to literary customs sometimes led to a disjointed feel. The book is certainly interesting and unusual in its
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structure, but does not let these postmodern tricks get in the way of an engaging and delightful story.

The book deals with a large cast of characters, each connected to the others through a six-degrees-of-separation kind of synchronicity. Each chapter of the book is a bit like a short story, in that they seem to stand on their own, but there is a definite progression through the book that lends it a coherence that might seem to be missing initially. With each new chapter, one feels a little disoriented, as the characters at first seem to have nothing to do with the previous chapter’s cast. But, gradually, one realises that there are tangential connections between the characters in each chapter. Often, Egan makes a character who was very marginal or only briefly mentioned in a previous chapter, the focus point of the new chapter. As I mentioned, this lends a disjointed feel to the novel – not necessarily a bad thing. Egan manages to deftly interweave the different strands of her story, even if the ending of the book seemed far-fetched to me. A personal quibble.

I found most of the experimental writing interesting. Egan has a whole chapter presented in the form of various charts, which is supposedly the way in which future generations will post things on the Internet. Hmm, possibly, but unlikely. In any case, this kind of speculation adds to the interest of the novel. And, although I am a bit more of a traditionalist (with a dislike for pictures in novels – I’m looking at you, Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close), this seemed to work better than most attempts at introducing other media into novels. I also found the references to the music industry fairly enlightening and absorbing.

Did it deserve the Pulitzer? Dunno. I liked it. It has definite humour, but also gravitas and an emotional core. Even if you do not like postmodern smoke and mirrors, this book has enough else going for it to be worth at least a dip.
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LibraryThing member baswood
A Visit from the Goon Squad is smart, witty, sassy but ultimately as empty as the lives depicted in Egan’s novel. It won the Pulitzer prize for literature, whose criteria for selection seems to be a closely guarded secret all that we know is that the selected book should be concerned with
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American Life, but this is American life almost reduced to the level of sound bites. Chapter 12 “Great Rock and Roll Pauses is set out like a power point presentation, but only succeeds in being pointless. A great way to fill out space perhaps as it takes up 74 pages: that’s getting on for a quarter of the novel.

The thirteen chapters of this novel play out like a series of short stories centred around the circle of friends, relations and business associates of Bennie a record company owner and then record producer after selling his company. The stories are connected by the characters in them and references back to Bennie, they go forwards and backwards in time and some are told in the first person. They are all well written in a glib superficial prose style that can appear more conscious of leading up to a wisecrack than in developing plot or character. We suspect that the sort of people that hang around record company and advertising executives are a shallow bunch and Egan does nothing to dissuade us here.

It is a fast paced entertaining read and the short story idea works well as one of the main themes of the novel is connections and while connections are not immediately obvious when we start a new section, Egan soon skilfully makes them for us. It is also a critique of American society and points towards an uncertain future, but we have all heard this before and the smart ass writing keeps getting in the way. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed it, but it felt more like a well scripted American movie than a prize winning piece of literature. 3.5 stars.
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LibraryThing member rmckeown
If someone set out to write a book that would frustrate all believers in the “Rule of 50,” this book would win the prize. A friend recommended this book, and she has a good track record with me, so I decided to read it. I struggled past the first fifty pages with characters I did not like, and
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a story line I had difficulty following because of all the bungie jumps through time. Only occasionally did a clue appear hinting at a time shift.

Another annoying habit of Egan’s involved her suddenly telling the reader what would happen to a character in the next 20 or 30 years. She often dropped these as an afterthought at the end of a chapter.

Egan wrote one chapter entirely in second person. A cheap trick and a tired gimmick, if you ask me. Chapter 12 took the form of a power point with flow charts and pie graphs. Like the form in its usual incarnations in business meetings, this chapter had “No power and no point.” I could not even begin to tell you what ideas this chapter tried to convey. All I got out of it was a well-scratched head.

The characters who populate this story had not one ounce of charisma – except for a few women characters drooled over by some of the men. Second-hand charisma is phony.

A Pulitzer Prize? Give me a break. A Visit from the Goon Squad doesn’t even come close to any book awarded the Booker Prize.

This novel is gimmicky and not worth the read. 1 star

--Jim, 7/4/11
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LibraryThing member megantron
TL;DR version: don't buy into the hype.

this book is irritating on so many levels. whatever jennifer egan says, this is mostly a glorified short story collection rather than an actual novel. (as a novel, it doesn't work. period. as a short story collection, it's average.)

the characters are
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unlikable (this book is like THE definition of #WHITEPEOPLEPROBLEMS) and the format is gimmicky. for example, one chapter is (infamously) presented as a powerpoint presentation. Now, I was once six years old, and while I didn't have MS Powerpoint as a kid, I did have WordArt and a Microsoft Publisher-esque program called Greetings Workshop. I spent many long hours using these programs to type out stories in rainbow fonts, make news articles, and design book covers so it's not like I think the concept of a 12-year-old girl using powerpoint rather than a traditional diary to chronicle her feelings is that strange. (as you might expect, I was not a very popular child lol). HOWEVER, if Jennifer Egan expects me to believe that this story NEEDED to be told in ppt format rather than in a traditional format, then homegirl is sorely mistaken. There is an emotional beat in the story (and to be fair, Egan is really great at emotional beats) that MIGHT have only worked using the ppt format, but at the same time, I'm not really sure if that payoff was worth the gimmicky format. oh and e-book users beware --this chapter is not fun to read on your kindle.

It's not just one chapter either --another chapter is written as a magazine interview with (groan) FOOTNOTES. this novel has been called post-post-modern, whatever that means. egan herself disagrees with the label. there's actually nothing truly experimental about this novel (if using .ppt format is revolutionary, then I weep for the state of American literature); it's pretty much standard New Yorker-fare. plus, all the references to modern life --AIMspeak (nothing says second-hand embarrassment like authors trying to imitate youth slang), 9/11, millenials, Gawker-- just had me RME and SMDH.

As for the good things: when Egan stops fishing in her bag for cheap literary tricks, she actually writes pretty well. There are some sentences that I want to underline again and again, and like I said, she really knows how to write those emotional beats. She is marvelous at ending stories --some of them are so exquisite, they almost make up for the other 5000 words you were forced to read.
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LibraryThing member mrstreme
A Visit from the Goon Squad has been nominated for almost every major award, including winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. What makes this book by Jennifer Egan so great? While I am no literary critic, I do believe the allure of Goon Squad lies in its characters. For me, the characters tie
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the entire story together.Each characters' experiences may have been different, but their lives were somehow intertwined. It made for a rich story that kept me turning the pages.

There are many characters in this story, but the focal point of the book are two: Bennie and Sasha. Bennie is a music producer whose early years were spent in the San Francisco punk scene. Sasha was Bennie's assistant - a kleptomaniac who struggled with intense personal losses. Around them orbited secondary characters, including: Scotty, Bennie's friend from high school who played the slide guitar; Teddy, Sasha's uncle who travels to Naples to find Sasha but gets distracted by Naples' art; Rob, Sasha's college friend who drowned in the East River; and Rhea, another high school friend of Bennie's who manages to escape the punk scene relatively unscathed. With each secondary character, you learn more about Bennie or Sasha, until the end when you meet Alex, the one character with ties to both. This circular fashion of storytelling reveals so much about the characters - adding layers of complexity to each one.

Admittedly, one of my favorite chapters is the "PowerPoint chapter" - crafted by Sasha's daughter, Alison. I enjoyed how Egan presented Alison's story through the slide deck. It was effective and creative, and stretches the imagination of the reader. I never knew that a great story could be told through PowerPoint, but in Egan's competant hands, Alison's story was full of emotion and love. PowerPoint has never been warmer.

Once you've settled in to Egan's writing style, A Visit from the Goon Squad takes off like a roller coaster, bouncing you through twists and turns that you don't see coming. This book won't be for everybody, but I think readers who enjoy character-driven fiction will find The Goon Squad to be an enjoyable and insightful read.
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LibraryThing member CarolynSchroeder
I was not as enamored with this book as it seems most readers were. I thought it was creative/unique in spots, mostly in structure, and the author did a good job of intertwining all the people's stories (basically a new one with each chapter) over various timeframes and locations. But overall,
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these people just did not have much to say, nor anything new or interesting about the whole music scene/industry (e.g., creepy 40-something loser producer guy does cocaine whilst receiving blowjob backstage by smitten teenage groupie, yawn). In addition, I did not find one of these characters likeable. They were quirky, lost, sometimes a bit humorous, but that was about it. The thing that made me keep reading is quite simply, Egan is a really good writer. She engages you and no question she has talent, I just wish she used her skills for characters a reader could care about. Part of what I gather the suspense was, was finding out what happened to certain people over the generations. Sadly, I did not really care and when I found out, I'd just go "oh well." The last few chapters (absent the PowerPoint one, that was kind of funny), were a chore. I really cannot recommend this one and I really do not understand all the hoopla.
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LibraryThing member msf59
"Time's a goon, right?” asks one of the characters, in this remarkable collection of stories. Interesting question. Time passage and it’s daunting inevitability, is one of the themes in these inter-locking tales, that all seem to circle around an aging punk rocker, named Bennie Salazar, now a
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fading music producer. Music and human connections play a big part in these characters lives, as they grapple with an unsteady future. Actually the last story focuses on the year 2020 and people find themselves unable to communicate verbally, being much more comfortable texting each other! Highly ambitious and very well-written. I will be reading more of Egan’s work.
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LibraryThing member phredfrancis
This relatively breezy read took more effort to get through than I ever would have expected. I can't fault it for structural cleverness (interconnected stories with a temporal sweep of approximately 50 years), literary craft (Egan seems to go out of her way to display multiple points of view and
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storytelling styles), or theme (we were all once young and gave almost no thought to those older than us, and we all become old and are bewildered by those younger than us). The literary world got very excited by the book and bestowed upon it the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In circumstances like this, I am always confused by why the magic failed to work on me, and thus my review of the book tends to feel more like a series of excuses than a proper critique.

Still, no reader is here to agree with the majority opinion, and I am not rejecting the book outright and claiming it lacks many of the qualities others might marshal in defense of its greatness. Perhaps I expected too much, as I never really considered reading the book until after it had done gathering in its accolades, so I was primed for a Really Great Read. What I got was, in my opinion, a Sometimes-Good Read that had untapped potential to be more the kind of book I might wholeheartedly endorse.

Perhaps the key to my dissatisfaction comes in the way the book has been presented. It is no secret that this is a book of short stories, not a novel. As such, it has no chance of immersing readers in the transcendental manner of a novel. No sooner is a character introduced and lightly explored than he or she is shuttled aside and we start again. True, the connections are all there, and one can play the spot-the-linkage game throughout the book, but that comes to feel more like a pastime once it becomes clear that we will never once circle back for greater continuity on any of these stories. Here is Sasha when she's relatively young, and there she is in a supporting role of Benny's story, and here she is in college, and there she goes in her precollege days that we heard a bit about, and then she's spotted in the oft-referenced story told in Powerpoint, and finally she's hovering as a figment of recollection in the final tale. Yet for all that, she becomes only slightly more of a fully realized character than she was in the one story in which she is the main character. Some of her traits and tendencies are explained, and we're given some clue about her future, but all I know about this character after all that is she has some sadness in her and is hard to know.

It does not surprise me to discover that HBO is developing the book as a series, because the elements of television are all there. The stories have a variety of interesting settings and numerous characters that will probably benefit more from being embodied than they were in being described. There are anecdotes and flashbacks set within the plot structure of the stories too, so the screenwriters and directors can have fun with that. But more to the point, what I found is that there is a superficiality to the characters and their plights that have more in common with TV than with books. The sentimentality of many of the stories might resonate with viewing audiences. The lingering images that stand in for understanding or revelation will convince those that see them that something important and moving has been communicated.

Most of my criticisms apply to the collection as a whole or to a select few stories that felt overperformed (the Powerpoint story is animated by nothing more than rock critic obsession and Hallmarkian family sweetness). Some of them worked well on their own terms, and I would have welcomed additional stories that stuck with these characters and drew me into their world more fully. I have considered and reconsidered the reductive rating I'd give this book, but finally arrived at one that is lower than I expected it to be. It's a rating informed by my experience of the book, not by a more objective reckoning. If this book were being graded for its themes and experimentation, it would definitely earn higher marks. But quite honestly, this book irritated me as much as--perhaps more than--it entertained and informed me, and therefore I can't say that I liked it. I will remember it, and I might even reconsider it at a future date, but right now I'm just glad it's over.
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LibraryThing member benjamin.lima
The rock and roll lifestyle is primally appealing but very destructive. True happiness is found in commitment to one's family and one's work. Hard drugs will make you die young. The lifetime pursuit of hedonistic sex will make you die alone and pathetic. Youthful relationships are intoxicating but
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unstable.

I'm so pleased that an impeccably correct product of the elite liberal cultural-literary establishment is devoted to revealing such plainly socially conservative truths as these.


From a formalist point of view, I actually wished this book had been much longer. Her genius at characterization is frustratingly under-fulfilled as she drops each point of view after a single chapter. She really could have extended each of these characters much further.


The PowerPoint thing was a disappointment unfortunately -- she is no David Byrne.
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LibraryThing member detailmuse
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel in linked stories about a punk-rock record producer, his assistant, and their families, friends and colleagues as they grow (and decline) from who they were to who they are and who they’ll be. Think of it as a montage -- a soundtrack album, each of its
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stories (songs) memorializing key aspects of a larger saga.

And then Egan puts those key bits in a blender and they come out zigzagging between the 1980s and a dystopian 2020s; between San Francisco, New York City, Africa, and Italy; through various characters, tenses, points of view and narrative forms (including a magazine article with footnotes evocative of David Foster Wallace, and a 12-year-old’s slide presentation that’s nearly graphic-novel format). The structure borders on showy and distracting, but it’s also very fun and the stories are good -- the most extensively (and effectively) linked collection I’ve read yet.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)
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LibraryThing member stonelaura
It's really more like I admired it rather than liked it, as the three stars suggests. Egan is very talented and does a good job of linking the various characters in this(yet another)novel-as-short-story-collection, although you still may need a spreadsheet to keep it all together. She creates great
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characters, great dialog and captures a time and place, but don’t be expecting a neat chronological novel. The chapters jump all over time and place, often without clear indication of who we’re supposed to focus on until well into the chapter. Each chapter, including the long Power Point presentation, is interesting, but I often wanted to know more and read more about a character only to find the chapter ending. Like other great novels-as-linked-stories such as “Olive Kitteridge,” “Let the Great World Spin,” and David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas,” you’ve got to admire the work, but I still came away feeling a bit cheated.
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LibraryThing member mausergem
This Pulitzer Prize winner book of 2010 comprises of stories with characters recurring in different stories. We can see it as a coming of age stories of people in New York.

We have here a hard working musical executive, his kleptomaniac assistant, her confused and rapist journalist brother, a film
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actress whom he molested, a bi sexual guy, a publicist and her clever daughter. The myriad of characters gives you a glimpse of the life in the Big Apple and how it will change in the coming few years.

There are chapters in word excel and writings in mobile texts. All in all it makes for a entertaining read.
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LibraryThing member suetu
What happens between A and B?

After reading a few chapters of Jennifer Egan’s latest novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, I’d determined it was really a collection of linked stories more than a novel. Reading further, however, I saw the larger themes and the cohesiveness of the whole. It is,
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indeed, a novel, and an excellent one at that!

The book opens sometime in the past—the late 90s, I’m thinking—and kleptomaniac Sasha is recounting a story to her therapist. Her former boss, record producer Benny Salazar, is mentioned in passing. The next chapter takes place several years earlier. Here Sasha is still Benny’s assistant, and now it is he that is the first person narrator. Benny’s just trying to get through a visit with his pre-teen son while mentally stifling a lifetime’s worth of shame. He reflects, in passing, on his old high school gang, and in the next chapter we’re back in San Francisco, circa 1980, with them. Benny wants Alice, but Alice wants Scotty. Scotty wants Jocelyn, but teenage Jocelyn is seeing Lou, a record producer more than twice her age. Don’t worry, he’ll get his chapter.

They all get a chapter or two or three. The story skips back and forth in time and place. The voice moves from first person to third person and even to second. Asides or characters that seemed tangential become central. And eventually several themes become apparent. The main one is not even subtle, as the traversing between points A and B is referenced several times in various ways. Scotty at one point asks, “I want to know what happened between A and B.” An aging rock star’s comeback album is entitled A to B. Even the two sections of this book, which might have been labeled “Part I” and “Part II” in another book, are here “A” and “B.”

Another theme is the passage of time. The novel, as I mentioned earlier, moves back and forth freely along the timeline of characters’ lives. Ranging from around 1980 to some point in the 2020’s, we see the (often ravaging) effects of time.

One character states, “Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”
Another responds, “I’ve never heard that. ‘Time’s a goon?’”
“Would you disagree?”
“No.”

The episodes that Egan spotlights are all, in some way, transformative for her characters. And let’s talk about those characters. Reviewers like me will often extol “richly-drawn characters.” It isn’t until I read a novel like this—with insight so deep that you feel you know everything it’s possible to know about these people based on brief snippets of their lives—that it really hits home what characterization is all about. Egan is THAT good.

Plus, there’s the language. Her prose is truly a pleasure to read, no matter how absurd or at times unpleasant the subject matter. Egan’s pointillistic novel roams from the New York music scene to an African safari; from the affluent suburbs to life on the edge in Naples, Italy; from a dictator’s palace to our collective future. And in careening from place to place, time to time, and character to character in these linked lives, Jennifer Egan takes us from point A to point B.
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LibraryThing member Micalhut
I have to admit I was a tad hesitant to read this even though the author is coming to our Literary Sojourn AND it won the Pulitzer. I kept hearing weird things like . . . powerpoint presentations and futuristic and disjointed. And punk rockers. Really?

To make myself read it, I suggested it to
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bookclub and it got voted in. And boy am I glad it did. LOVED, LOVED, LOVED! And the powerpoint chapter ended up being one of my favorite chapters to read. Poignant: and what he's really saying to Dad is "I love you." (sorry gotta read it).

And how did she come up with all these fantastic mini-stories, turn her characters (not really likable either) inside out for us to see their motivations without boring us, and turn it all into one? Genius, that's how.

Time is a goon! If we allow it to thieve us of who we are. Cheers, Jennifer Egan. You took my breath away.
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LibraryThing member chorn369
I honestly did not think I was going to like this book. Wealthy punk rock stars and music producers and their progeny circa 1980s buffeted by the vicissitudes of life? Pleeez! But Egan somehow makes them seem pretty normal, that is, fighting the same problems and neurosis as the rest of us.

The
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author pulls some very interesting tricks with time in the prose; one minute you're reading about a spoiled rock star on a safari in Africa attacked by a lion and the next you're viewing what has transpired in someone's life fast-forwarded 20 years. Like you might zip through one of your relative's This is Your Life compilation video tape (DVD?), skipping through the boring details and cutting to the chase. Egan shows restraint with this technique; she does it just enough times to make it compelling rather than trot it out with every single character.

Speaking of video tape, digital technology also figures as a character in the very last pages. This is my favorite part of the book. Egan's characters navigate the present-future with a meld of digital hand-held devices and social networking sites only slightly more powerful and sophisticated than the iPhone and FaceBook as the central mode of interaction. Parents worry about their children's dependency and craving for these devices; they worry about their own reliance on them too. But they're resigned and helpless to stop. Just as they're resigned to the low-level post-9/11 paranoia and security apparatus that looms everywhere.

It seems that only an outsider to technology can create art that is truly great, and one of the washed-up former punk rockers, now greatly aged and beaten up, does just that. His performance at the end feels like an authentic howl in the wilderness; a wilderness not marked by wild beasts and flora but a cold, artificial one created by 1s and 0s.
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LibraryThing member laweiman
I started reading this book three times and until this last week in January, I wasn't able to complete it. Each time I started from the beginning and each time I thought, "hey, this is great writing." But, what inevitably happened as I plodded my way through this book was I lost interest in the
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characters. I didn't find them people I cared about. I didn't connect with them or understand their issues. I felt they were whiny and self-centered. In finally forcing myself to finish the book, I can say that I think Ms. Egan is a very good writer. She can craft beautiful sentences and make a scene come alive. And, I commend her for playing around with structure and time and new forms of reaching out to audiences. Unfortunately, for me, I just didn't care for the story, and had the book not won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, I probably would not have forced myself to finish it to see what all the fuss was about. (Four stars for writing and creativity, and two stars for the basic storyline, IMHO)
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LibraryThing member jasonlf
This novel or short story cycle or whatever you call it deserves its place on the year-end best of lists. It is a sprawling set of interlocking stories that circle around an aging rock-and-roll producer, his assistant, and an increasingly far flung cast of characters on multiple continents, in
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multiple decades, and most notably in multiple styles ranging from first person to second person to third person to PowerPoint. Yes, PowerPoint has finally made it into a major novel, apparently in a portion of it set slightly in the future.

Aging (the "goon" of the title) plays a role in many of the stories, usually in a not-so-happy way, often in a few compressed paragraphs at the end of a chapter that often contain a coda that looks into the future.
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LibraryThing member TheAmpersand
I was a teenager about fifteen years after news of a Black Flag show could put the LAPD's riot squad on standby, but eighties-era hardcore -- that ruthlessly minimalist, explosively aggressive variant of punk rock -- rotted my brain straight through. Imagine my surprise, then, when I figured out
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that that scene -- or rather some its San Francisco-based precursors -- had become the subject of a Real Book that had gone off and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The genre's come a long way since "Ack Ack Ack."

It also sort of surprised me that "A Visit from the Goon Squad" was, at least in part, about selling out. As a teenage music obsessive, the question of who was and who wasn't going to sign with a major took up altogether too much of my time. I eventually grew up, as all teenage music obsessives do, and I moved on from the issue. The world itself seemed to have moved on, too -- the guy from Of Montreal even changed one of his song's lyrics at Outback Steakhouse's request and claimed that the entire concept of "selling out" had lost its meaning. But it takes on new life here. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" isn't to be confused with an argument for punk or indie purity -- which may always have been an unattainable goal anyway. Still, many of Egan's characters find themselves no longer young or in real-deal middle age and have forgotten, or been made to forget, who they once were. While its tone is never regretful or brooding, much of Egan's concerns the manner of compromises we're forced to make as time goes by and how those past selves might be, if not exactly recovered, at least honored in some way. This is, in other words, a great book for anyone who ever wore out a copy of Fugazi's "13 Songs" album or woken up wondering how the heck they turned into the person they are.

Egan also devotes some time to her characters' search for that rarest of all things -- the real. This is, after all, a novel that touches on punk rock, which is a genre that fetishized authenticity, or at least its own conception of it. By the book's last chapter, punk rock is as distant a cultural memory for its younger characters as ragtime is for today's kids, and while the environment has, unsurprisingly, kept degrading at speed, the author also shows that the youngest generation has something to feel hopeful about. It was a pleasant surprise to come across this non-dystopian future, but it is very much of a piece with the novel's fluid, productive approach to narrative. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" could be called, I suppose, episodic, but then Egan's hardly the first writer to tell a non-linear story. We see a couple of punk girls eat a fancy restaurant, a record producer go on a safari in Africa, a disoriented young woman make her way through Europe. We meet these same characters in other contexts, when they are living other lives. The author sometimes pauses the narrative entirely to tell us exactly how a character we meet in passing ends up faring in life. In the manner of an old friend we haven't seen in ages, she tells us how things turned out for everyone. But the book's episodes don't always connect in a strictly narrative sense, and there are few events here that lock any character into any particular fate. While not everybody ends up finding what they're looking for, this lends "A Visit from the Goon Squad" a loose-limbed, generative aspect that I found profoundly satisfying. What Egan shows us feels meaningful, but real life happens, as it so often does, somewhere in the background, while we're not really watching. From a literary perspective, it's one thing to say that the world is a big and surprising place, but by relating these loosely connected, open-ended bits of narrative, Egan actually succeeds in showing that it is. This isn't a minor achievement. This airy, extended structure also has the unexpected side benefit of allowing its protagonists the time and space they need to genuinely work on themselves. In some particularly heartening cases, we see time and effort turn chaos into stability and anger into purpose. To paraphrase Freud, these characters' journeys are proof that work and love can still work wonders. Not everybody needs to listen to Flipper -- who also, shockingly enough, get mentioned here -- but maybe this is the sort of story that everybody needs to hear, in some form or another. Recommended whether you ever gave yourself a Germs burn or not.
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LibraryThing member GCPLreader
There is some excellent writing here in this very ambitious book. I usually do enjoy books with alternating narratives, but I tend to become irritated when too many new characters are introduced. Early in this book, I was annoyed when I realized that the early characters that I found so fascinating
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weren’t narrating the following chapters. But most of the chapters work and I was really caught up in unraveling the story. Be warned- there are a lot of characters here to keep track of in this novel of interconnected stories. I would advise any reader to take notes on who’s who. Also, pay close attention to shifts in time-- the ending even takes us brilliantly into a sort of dystopian future. My favorite part, hands down, is the chapter told in PowerPoint slides! So original and refreshing--don’t miss this one.
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LibraryThing member alanna1122
I really enjoyed this book. I love when novels use interwoven changing narrator voice from chapter to chapter. I love that sort of sideways character and plot development revealed through the eyes of multiple character. It was complex without losing its easy and accessible tone.

I even liked the
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chapter that was written in Power Point Slides, I saw it coming and really was cringing in advance because generally I loathe gimmicky things like that - but it turned out to be just fine.

I will say that the final chapter was the only chapter that let me down. I found it a bit forced and that it lacked the flow of the previous chapters. I felt that all the futuristic trappings were silly and distracting.

Otherwise a very good novel - one of the best I have read this year.
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LibraryThing member amybrojo
This was hard to start. The chapters each focus on different time periods and characters that are loosely related. It wasn't as music industry insider as I thought it would be. Her idea of the near future is interesting. All in all- OK.
LibraryThing member JWarren42
Absolute genius, each story connecting in startling ways to the others, building an effect, like poetry. The prose isn't always stellar, but is quite good more often than not. A grand, multi-generational tale told with postmodern sensibilities so it avoids the typical Oprah-bait cliches. GET THIS
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BOOK.
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LibraryThing member taletreader
You will either really like the way Egan has presented her chapters or really dislike it, depending on how well your memory serves you. Not particularly hating it, I liked how each character seems to find his or her way into the life of another, but trying to differentiate between one character and
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another got me so frustrated that my brain-fog eventually took over and I forgot what was important about each individual character. Like I said, frustrating.

Egan's writing, on the other hand, is far from frustrating. In fact, it's almost dizzying, giving you vertigo from some of the fruitful words she comes up with, and smirking at how cleverly she has managed to connect character A to character B (if you have a good memory, that is).

The only other complaint I really have about this book is the infamous powerpoint chapter. I hated it. I liked the idea of it, so I have to give Egan props for that, but in all essence, I cannot stress enough how much I hated it. For me, it took away from the book, and at the end, I couldn't even remember anything about the character who made the slideshow or why they were important. I wish it had been half as powerful as some of her quotes are, in "handset" style-- "if thr r childrn, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?"

I will say you will enjoy the characters. You will enjoy them because some of them you will become swept up with. Some of them you will feel an eager pull to remove yourself from them, remove their habits, their flaws. But in the end, you will like the characters because they are human. And humans are, after all, what the title has said all along...goons.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2010

Physical description

352 p.; 5.2 inches

ISBN

0307477479 / 9780307477477

Local notes

Fiction
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