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Loading... A Visit from the Goon Squad (original 2010; edition 2011)by Jennifer Egan
Work detailsA Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
Jennifer Egan uses a unique narrative style to trace the story of Bennie and Lou, two record producers, and the people that come into contact with them over several decades. The other interesting aspect of this book is the way in which technology impacts both the industry and the characters, although this is brought out very subtlely from the disappearance or records and recordings to the power point diary of a young daughter. The Goon Squad is aging and this book shows that wisdom does not always follow age. (  ) CarterPJ | Apr 28, 2013 |  Wow. This surprised me. I thought I would love this book and I might have loved it if the story had continued from the first chapter. It's more like intertwined short stories, some of which just were not for me. I listened to the audio book so maybe something was lost in that translation, but most of the time I thought, WTF? I did like some of the characters like Sasha and Benny but others just left me feeling meh. The back of the audio book case made it sound like this book was all about Sasha and Benny, but it strayed into the lives of their friends and acquaintances. I wanted more Sasha and Benny. BUT! Take my review with a grain of salt. I expected greatness but didn't get greatness. You may love it, but I didn't. Cather00 | Apr 27, 2013 | What a load of self-indulgent rubbish. I got fifty pages in before I just had to give up - the people were absolutely insufferable, the style was terribly knowing and contrived, and in general this was a complete exercise in trying to win an award rather than write a book. Also, I'm fed up with reading books that include weird, excessive, references to male genitalia. I'm not a prude but between this and the swaddled penis incident, I'm starting to worry a little bit for the sake of my sanity. (  ) heterocephalusglaber | Apr 26, 2013 | A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan is a very highly acclaimed winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. I would say that the style is unique, but having recently finished reading Cloud Atlas, I see similarities. As in Cloud Atlas, A Visit from the Goon Squad features a highly non-linear narrative form, with a series of vignettes beginning in the present day, proceeding backward in time, with characters in the preceding story playing a leading role in those that follow. After four such stories, we follow the characters through a series of stories back to the present day and into the future, though not necessarily in chronological order and skipping from one character to another. Unlike Cloud Atlas, the characters in the stories in A Visit from the Goon Squad are consistent and closely related, the stories therefore being more easily followed and the transitions smoother. The stories are intriguing and captivating. This is a far better reading experience than Cloud Atlas. Nevertheless, leaving and returning to a variety of characters, at points in the past and in the future, in no particular order, has the potential for confusion and periods of reacclimation. Such was the case here, at times, though not to the extent of seriously affecting the reading experience. Having said that, I read the entire book in only three or four days. Stretching the book out over a period of weeks could result in the potential for becoming lost or losing track of the characters. Despite being listed as having 342 pages, roughly 50 are consumed with a rather silly stretch of “powerpoint slides”. The book can be easily consumed in 4-5 hours. ( ) santhony | Apr 25, 2013 | Jennifer Egan is a very, very talented, visionary, ambitious writer. I loved this novel --just as i loved her earlier book "Look at Me." She has the unique ability to combine darkly satirical social commentary with arresting personal portraits of individuals, creating and unexpected reading experience. Usually, it seems, you have to choose between those two things--a book can be really funny and dark, but its characters may not move you, and you don't expect to be drawn in to an elaborate, beautifully written narrative of personal experience at the same time. Jennifer Egan seamlessly combines these styles in "A Visit from the Goon Squad." We should be talking about her instead of Jonathan Franzen! Argh. (  ) KristySP | Apr 21, 2013 |
 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 0307592839, Hardcover)Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers. (retrieved from Amazon Wed, 12 Jan 2011 10:23:07 -0500) (summary from another edition) |
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