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Loading... A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)by Jennifer Egan
  
Books Read in 2014 (88) » 27 more Top Five Books of 2013 (534) Books Read in 2018 (267) Amusing Book Titles (54) Top Five Books of 2015 (384) Overdue Podcast (213) BBC Radio 4 Bookclub (240) Books on my Kindle (73) Allie's Wishlist (102) A Novel Cure (448) Favourite Books (1,455) No current Talk conversations about this book.  Melissalovesreading | Sep 30, 2018 |  2.5 stars This rating is purely about personal taste. I enjoyed the characters, but wish it was more cohesive. (  ) lhofer | Sep 26, 2018 | I really wanted to like this book and a lot of the later chapters worked for me, but I ended up going "eh" a lot. I think it is probably good just not my taste. (  ) jeninmotion | Sep 24, 2018 | A disjointed disappointing read. The chapters do not follow any patterns and host a confusingly large cast of characters. I felt like there were inconsistencies in the timing of events with the presented ages of the characters. (  ) niquetteb | Aug 28, 2018 | The horror...the horror. (  ) FleurdeMLIS | Aug 14, 2018 |
 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 Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:25:15 -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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Wikipedia in English (1)
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I just don't see what the whole point was. Was it to show the passage of time, and how life changes people? Okay sure, but there could have been better ways to do that. And I was left with a lot of unanswered questions about the different characters, particularly Sasha and Kitty Jackson. Kitty Jackson seemed so randomly placed, but I found myself slightly intrigued by her.
I think that was part of my distaste for this novel, just the fact that there were so many different characters, and they didn't have any sort of sense of direction. It seemed like they are all just wandering around aimlessly through their lives.
They're also oddly all connected in some way or another. A nice play on the role of technology and how people can stay connected, but still strange. One element that really bothered me was the change in a part of the dialogue toward the end, to text speak. This irritates me to no end. When I text people, I spell out most things, rarely abbreviating them. To see text speak in the middle of a novel just made me cringe.
One element I did find interesting and enjoyed was the Power Point. It went on for about 75 pages and it was a nice break from all the different vignettes, (so to speak.) It was a simpler way to tell the characters story, and given that this character was a twelve year old girl, this seems appropriate.
But this one point certainly isn't enough to make me think that the whole novel is simply so amazing as everyone's been raving it is. (