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Loading... A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)by Jennifer Egan
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No current Talk conversations about this book.  kell1732 | Jan 25, 2015 |  Loved this - pushed it on friends with a slightly manic air, which may have put them off, but if they'd read it they'd feel the same - I reckon. (  ) LizzieHG | Jan 13, 2015 | Overall I feel like this book was really good, really entertaining and sometimes vaguely haunting. The last chapter, however, I'm pretty sure is satire of the dystopian the-next-generation-is-bad stuff mixed with Egan's descriptiveness. (  ) tpollack | Jan 11, 2015 | (2) I had read an earlier novel by Egan and disliked it (The Keep) and swore her off as an author, but when I saw this had won critical acclaim - the Pulitzer, I believe, I decided to give it a try. Definitely, has that postmodern feel which usually grates on me, but I indeed enjoyed it. hard to do a plot synopsis - our two main characters are a record producer named Benny and his secretary Sasha. We learn about their lives as well as the lives of many people they have known from times before the opening of the novel and the future as well. The story is told by a series of passages,?chapters from lots of these different characters. Life's disappointments, surprises, self -destructive things people do. The book is VERY funny at times. I had all I could do to control myself while sitting next to a stranger on a plane while reading the "faux" piece of celebrity journalism. That passage was the best of the book. I could have done without the Power Point though, though it was surprising effective, it just felt gimmicky. Very good, overall. I read it almost in one sitting on a long plane ride and it was engaging and entertaining. Pulitzer-worthy? I don't know about that. For me, it was not powerful enough. I do think I will likely forget it in time and I haven't thought about it all that much since I finished it. But, still a worthy and funny read. ( ) jhowell | Jan 9, 2015 |  Nataliec7 | Jan 5, 2015 |
 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 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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.
 Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0307477479, Paperback)Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.National Bestseller (retrieved from Amazon Mon, 30 Sep 2013 14:04:49 -0400) Working side-by-side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970s San Francisco to the post-war future.… (more) |
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5
My favorite part of the novel was Alison’s section where images, graphs, and diagrams were used to tell the story. I thought it was very well thought out and surprisingly easy to understand. It was whole new way of telling a story, which is always a risk, but Egan did it artfully, creating something new and exciting for her readers.
The only issue I had with this book, and the only reason I’m going to give it a 4/5 was the ending. I didn’t feel like it tied things together very well, and it seemed really random by the end. I even felt like it could have been taken out or else rewritten as something completely different. I’m not sure what but that ending just did not work. However, the rest of the book was totally worth it, despite a rather disappointing ending. (