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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
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A Visit from the Goon Squad (original 2010; edition 2011)

by Jennifer Egan

Series: Goon Squad (1)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
8,589511971 (3.68)673
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.… (more)
Member:sanddancer
Title:A Visit from the Goon Squad
Authors:Jennifer Egan
Info:Anchor (2011), Edition: 1, Paperback, 352 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:****
Tags:fiction, aging

Work Information

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)

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(see all 21 recommendations)

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» See also 673 mentions

English (490)  Dutch (7)  Finnish (2)  Swedish (2)  Spanish (1)  Italian (1)  Portuguese (Portugal) (1)  Norwegian (1)  Turkish (1)  French (1)  Danish (1)  German (1)  All languages (509)
Showing 1-5 of 490 (next | show all)
Well written but for my tastes it depends on its theme too heavily to do the work of providing cohesion for all the different set pieces; that time passes is too obvious and well-covered in literature to be very remarkable without more assistance. ( )
  lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
Hard to follow, but very good descriptions of modern musician life ( )
  ChrisGreenDog | Feb 11, 2024 |
Wow. This is a creative, emotionally resonant novel. I loved it and was thinking five stars(!) until the last chapter, which left me cold. So I knocked a star off for an unsatisfying finish, but otherwise I can't recommend this enough. In some ways, it reminded me of [b:Let the Great World Spin|5941033|Let the Great World Spin|Colum McCann|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320561164s/5941033.jpg|6113503] because it has a large cast of characters who are loosely connected, and it works around a grand theme but sticks mainly to the details and feelings of everyday life. Colum McCann's theme, I think, was the multitude of individual people who make up the world and how unknowable all of us are (or something like that). Egan's theme, I think, is how we reconcile past selves with current selves, both our own and other people's.

What I found so powerful about this book was not just Jennifer Egan's great writing, great characters, etc., but the originality of the storytelling. Of course, we know this is the book with a chapter told in PowerPoint. That's one thing. But she also writes a chapter in the second person, jumps all around chronologically, and (my favorite) writes one chapter as a satirical celebrity profile. I felt like I was reading a truly uncommon novel (or connected short stories--whatever), which was exhilarating.

Instead of trying to reconstruct the plot, let's see if I can remember all the characters... There isn't a main character in the traditional sense, but the character with the most page time is probably Sasha, a red-headed girl who, when we first meet her, is a kleptomaniac on an unremarkable first date. She works as Bennie's assistant (some may argue that Bennie is in fact the main character). Bennie is a successful record label executive who is, like Sasha, troubled but functioning. We also meet Bennie's wife Stephanie and Stephanie's brother Jules Jones (the author of the hysterical celebrity profile). We meet Sasha's college friends, her Uncle Ted, and her children. Who else is there? There are Bennie's high school friends and Bennie's mentor Lou. We go on a safari to Africa with Lou, his children, and his girlfriend Mindy. We follow Stephanie's former boss, Dolly, as she meets a warlord and tries to repair his image by connecting him to a starlet (the same one profiled by Stephanie's brother). And finally, we end up with Dolly's daughter Lulu, Bennie, and the man who was seen in the first chapter as Sasha's unremarkable date. Whew.

This is a brilliant book, but I need to vent my dissatisfaction with the final chapter. In it, Egan describes a near future that is terribly bleak and not nearly as amusing or affecting as the rest of the book. Here is Egan's future:

1. Everyone is attached to "handsets" and texts each other with terrible spelling. (Duh.)

2. People are paid to promote products in secret. You never know if someone is really voicing their opinion, or just parroting for cash. (Depressing.)

3. Everyone is having tons of kids because "if there are children, there must be a future, right?" (Sad.)

4. What the babies like becomes the center of music culture. Babies are basically the main target demographic because they're the only ones buying music. (Ridiculous.)


To sum up: It's hard to end a great book well. No one wants it to end. So I think about the other 95% and say yes, I think Pulitzer Prize deserved. ( )
  LibrarianDest | Jan 3, 2024 |
A sprawling and ambitious story of multiple characters over a long period of time, but that all have connections to a single timeline. The different writing styles from each character's perspectives all had good reasons for being distinct, but it does give a challenging bent to the reader that's trying to knit this together into a single plotline. As for the topical content, if you have interest in the recording industry, this could be intriguing, although Egan was certainly showing some of the darker sides of musicians and record label executives. ( )
  jonerthon | Dec 31, 2023 |
Started off reminding me heavily of London Fields for the first chapter, and then much more of Cloud Atlas as I got into the rhythm of it.

It's an impressive and original book but it doesn't seem to amount to very much. Each of the chapters is told from the point of view of a different person, mostly mentioned in passing in an earlier chapter [normally in the preceding chapter, although I noted one time that wasn't the case which felt a bit jarring. Anyone else?]. We normally see the person at some pivotal point in their lives, but not often the defining moment. Those normally happen off-screen [what's the literary equivalent of "off-screen"?], which is kinda refreshing, but just might be a bit lazy too. Oh, and the chapters are arranged in non-chronological order - I quite liked that. I suspect the book would be less interesting arranged chronologically.

In the end, there are lots of things that are alluded to which you have no idea how they turn out, which means they end up feeling like mere archetypes - the kind of things that might happen, so the details of them are unimportant. I found this unsatisfying.

Still, it was nicely written, and it kept me engrossed while reading it. It's probably better realised than Cloud Atlas, but I feel this book lacks its ambition.

If we end up picking sides, I'm with Cloud Atlas.






( )
  thisisstephenbetts | Nov 25, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 490 (next | show all)
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.
added by sduff222 | editPublishers Weekly (Jan 31, 2011)
 
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.
added by zhejw | editNew York Times, Will Blythe (Jul 8, 2010)
 
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.
added by zhejw | editWashington Post, Ron Charles (Jun 16, 2010)
 

» Add other authors (13 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Egan, Jenniferprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
de Wilde, BarbaraCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Heuvelmans, TonTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Karjalainen, HeikkiTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Ortega, RoxanaNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Velina, MihaelaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Zeltmann, HeideÜbersetzersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
'Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.'

'The unknown element of the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.'

       - Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Dedication
For Peter M.,
with gratitude
First words
It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.
Quotations
"Time's a goon, right? Isn't that the expression?"
“I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.”
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Wikipedia in English (1)

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.

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Book description
D'une écriture acérée , Jennifer Egan dépeint les compromissions , les faiblesses et le courage d'une galerie de personnages inoubliables .
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