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A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan (Goodreads Author)

3.64 · Rating Details · 134,326 Ratings · 14,640 Reviews

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-destruct ...more

Hardcover, 288 pages

Published June 8th 2010 by Knopf

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Nov 21, 2011 Jeanette "Astute Crabbist" rated it did not like it

Recommends it for: Crackheads

Shelves: started-it-hated-it, pyoo-litzers

Um, this is just BAAAAAAD. Bold-face, capital-letters BAD. Absolutely awful!
What.....were.....they.....thinking????? Oh, I forgot, they weren't!
When did the Pulitzer become the Puke-litzer? I'll never again trust that prize designation except with books from a long time ago.

Don't be fooled by the first chapter, which is not too bad. Sort of an interesting start, about a kleptomaniac aging punk rock chick. After that, FORGET IT! Dumpster filler.

A lot of people make a big mention of the PowerPo ...more

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Tifany I loved this book
Award or no award it was masterful
Clearly there is no accounting for tastes
Jan 01, 2017 07:19AM

Lo I haven't read this book, and after looking at the reviews I don't plan to... I just dropped by to mention that this phrase "unlikeable characters who I haven't read this book, and after looking at the reviews I don't plan to... I just dropped by to mention that this phrase "unlikeable characters who seem to substitute therapy for actually getting on with their lives" comes across as pretty insulting to the mentally ill. I'm assuming good faith and that it wasn't meant in this way, but it could certainly come across as such.

The reason it jumps out at me is that I spent many years being told I needed to just "get over it" and that I overreacted too much. I believed this, and spent years desperately training myself to ignore even the most upsetting feelings, and as a result got suckered into a variety of abusive relationships with the people who said this type of thing to me (and by "abusive," I don't mean, "they told me to get over my shit," I mean they stole money and items from me, were physically abusive, and/or treated me in ways that broke the law. It may seem blindingly obvious that I should stand up for myself, etc, etc, but remember that I truly believed, after decades of brainwashing, that any time I was upset, it was an overreaction and I needed to get over it and move on.

Ultimately, I finally found my answer. I have PTSD. Trying to "get over it" makes the problem significantly worse. Only confronting the problems (usually in therapy, for most of us with PTSD) and recognizing that we are UNDERreacting to what happened is the only way to, as you put it, actually get on with our lives.

I completely understand that this is likely not how the characters in this book were portrayed, and I'm sure your frustration with them is well-justified (again, I'm not going to read it). I only bring this up because your presumably-justified frustration with the book may have inadvertently spilled over to condemning therapy in general (or just look that way), and being exposed to messages like this does real, measurable harm to people like me. Many, many people who just come across as annoying or assholes are, in fact, deeply traumatized, and society is often the thing that's keeping them from getting better.

Thanks to anyone who read this, and have a great day! ...more
Jan 20, 2017 01:15PM

Aug 23, 2010 Patrick Brown rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Patrick by: Edan Lepucki, everyone on the internet,

Shelves: best-of-2010, favorites

Spoiler alert: You will get old. You will die. Things will never be like they are right now. And yet, how things are right now will determine how they are in the future. This is so.

The "goon" in the title of this book is time. It opens with a quote from Proust, the poet laureate of memory, about how we cannot recapture the people we were in past the places where we were those people, but rather that those people exist within us, always. And that, it seems to me, is more or less the book, in a nu Spoiler alert: You will get old. You will die. Things will never be like they are right now. And yet, how things are right now will determine how they are in the future. This is so.

The "goon" in the title of this book is time. It opens with a quote from Proust, the poet laureate of memory, about how we cannot recapture the people we were in past the places where we were those people, but rather that those people exist within us, always. And that, it seems to me, is more or less the book, in a nutshell. But, oh, how it gets there. How the story unfolds -- stories, really -- is breathtaking. This the best book I've read this year.

A collection of narratives -- they aren't really stories -- centered around various record industry denizens -- an aging producer, his assistant, her college best friend, the producer's mentor, his wife's brother, a publicist, etc. -- Goon Squad is a novel about lives. It opens with Sasha, the beautiful, troubled assistant to record producer Bennie Salazar -- and continues on through a host of characters who knew them. And knew is the word here, for the lesson of the book seems to be that we are not the same people we were before. Those people are dead, and yet the people we all became -- the sagging, sad, tired, knowing people we are now -- those people are inextricably tied to the people we were. We are simultaneously incapable of recovering what was lost and yet bound to know what it is that we're missing.

Does this sound like the book is horribly, horribly sad? It isn't. It's beautiful and clever and very smart, and, okay, a little bit heartbreaking. One of my favorite aspects of the book is how it deals with technology. Facebook, in the novel, is a kind of memory, excavating lost lives from the ether, reconnecting people with the people they were before...or at least the people they knew before. And in the end, it's a burst of horrible, relentless technology that seems to save the music business. And one of the most powerful chapters of the book is told in powerpoint (To wrench soul from the teeth of a Microsoft product is truly a feat unto itself). In fact, this book may be one of the most subtly speculative works of fiction I've read. It presents a future near enough to include all of us, close enough to be recognizable, and still strangely different from where we are today.

I realize this review dances around the book. It tells you what the book is about without really telling much of what the story is. And that's because the story of the book wouldn't sound like much on its own: Some people grow up. They work in the music business. Their friends die, and then so does their business. But those people keep going. They have lives and love affairs and children. They make new friends and rediscover people they assumed were dead. Their lives cross with one another in myriad ways. And then they cross again. I keep returning, again and again to the section on Jocelyn, a girl who ran away from home to be with a record producer, a man who spit her out almost before he was done chewing her up. The passage is on page 65, and it's one of several haunting paragraphs in Jocelyn's section:

"We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?"

This book, it ambushed me. ...more

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Aug 17, 2011 K.D. Absolutely rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: Pulitzer 2010

Shelves: pulitzer

I attended a novel-writing workshop last week and one of the things that I took home with me was: write to express and not to impress. I have a feeling, and I could be wrong on this since I am just a paying reader, that Jennifer Egan wrote this novel A Visit from the Good Squad mainly to impress. Well, it won the nod of the Pulitzer jurors so the trick worked!

Each of the 13 chapters is told in different points of view mostly by people who the two main protagonists, Bennie, the gold-eating reco ...more

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Jan 13, 2011 karen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

hell's bells. believe this hype.

this book is the saddest, truest, wisest book i have ever read in a single day. which is not to belittle it - my tear-assing through it is because i did not want to stop reading it and resented any interruption that tried to get in my way. i am someone who plans things. i have timetables in my head - i have to, in order to get everything done. nothing important, just "at 8:00 i will untangle my necklaces while i watch my netflix. at 10:00, i will fold my laundry a ...more

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Sep 16, 2010 Greg rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, girls-girls-girls

This is the best book ever that has a whole chapter done in power point.

I hate power point. I think it was invented by the devil and given to humanity to make us even dumber than we are now. I think teachers who use power point should be hog-tied by their intestines and then sodomized by Mary Lou Retton (and probably people in the corporate world too, but I don't know about that first hand, but I'm sure they deserve even worse). I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate power poi This is the best book ever that has a whole chapter done in power point.

I hate power point. I think it was invented by the devil and given to humanity to make us even dumber than we are now. I think teachers who use power point should be hog-tied by their intestines and then sodomized by Mary Lou Retton (and probably people in the corporate world too, but I don't know about that first hand, but I'm sure they deserve even worse). I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate power point, but Jennifer Egan can do a whole book in power point and I'd it would probably be more effective than most normal novelists are with whole pages filled with words at their disposal.

Back in November 2009 I proclaimed the ARC of Jonathan Dee's The Privileges the best novel of 2010. There are a few books that have come out that I haven't read yet, but which may be better (Citrus County is one that I think might) but I now know that this book is just as good, if not better, than Dee's.

This book has a) a lame cover, b) a lame jacket description, c) a chapter kind of poking fun (jesting?) at DFW's writing style, and d) a chapter written in power point; but still with all of these apparent negatives the book is awesome.

I'm not going to try to sell you on the book. Coming from a punk background I know that too many people liking something inherently diminishes the enjoyment one can get out of something. Since Jennifer Egan is already a fairly popular author, and me already being late to the game with liking her (for years I thought she was Janet Fitch, I knew they were different people, but I thought they were synonymous with each other) I can't risk you or anyone else that hasn't already read her finding out how great she is and stealing some of my precious enjoyment from me (for example it's a scientific fact that people who listened to Green Day when they were on Lookout! in 1993 enjoyed 97% more than they enjoyed them 12 months later in 1994 when everyone liked them. The enjoyment ratio flew way down and the music essentially didn't change. There is only so much enjoyment in the world to split up, fortunately there is an infinite amount of pain and sorrow so we can all partake in that).

Anyway, now that I've gotten that pesky talking about the book out of the way. Let us turn to one of the points in the power point chapter. For those of you who haven't read the book, and will not read the book and steal my enjoyment from me; the chapter deals with a family. The daughter of the family is the narrator, or constructor of a power-point journal. Her younger brother is semi-autistic. He has a thing for silence in music. Pauses. He makes loops of the different silences, he graphs them for duration and effect. And there is a fairly interesting description of different pauses in the history of rock music, but with two of my favorite examples left out, and with one artist who made too much use of them, but who used them effectively also left out.

One. The best use of the pause in music (well in punk music) is in the Sex Pistols song "Bodies". That NOFX is mentioned in the chapter and "Bodies" isn't, is well a travesty. While it's not as surprising a false-ending as "Please Play This Song on the Radio" or as quirky / funny / jokey, it is more effective for punk pathos. I read once in a book (I think it was England's Dreaming) that the sound of the Sex Pistol's imploding was captured at the end of "Belsen was a Gas" during their last show (in my reality they never re-formed, so we are talking 1978 here), when there was just silence for a second. That silence was preceded by the one in "Bodies" though where all of the fury was released in a string of almost nonsensical uses of the word fuck.

Two. Sunny Day Real Estate, "Seven". Here the use of short almost micro pauses and one slightly longer pause work to create a expectation, excitement and anxiety. One could argue that there are not pauses in this song, but that argument is wrong. Maybe it wouldn't fit in the dynamic of the chapter because it would be very difficult to capture the pauses to sample them. More mention should be made of the first Sunny Day Real Estate album.

Three. Matthew Sweet. The man made an art out of the false-ending. He deserved to be mentioned in a chapter dealing strongly with pauses and silence in rock songs. I'm not a huge fan, but he should be given a mention.

Hopefully this aside has convinced you to not read this book and allow me to enjoy it more than if you stole some of my pleasure. ...more

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Jan 13, 2011 j rated it it was amazing

Shelves: library-books, 2010, 52-in-2010, minus-half-a-star, stories-no-wait-a-novel-no-wait, vote-getters

I was going to post a really cool review of this, post-dated from the year 202X, but I couldn't get Goodreads to display my PowerPoint presentation correctly*.

*This is a lie. I did not write a PowerPoint book review because I:
am lazy/am not that clever/don't have PowerPoint. Or is it all three*?

*It is all three.

I loved this book, which is funny because it's basically short stories, and I usually don't have the patience for short stories. But these did me the favor of interlocking nicely in a way I was going to post a really cool review of this, post-dated from the year 202X, but I couldn't get Goodreads to display my PowerPoint presentation correctly*.

*This is a lie. I did not write a PowerPoint book review because I:
am lazy/am not that clever/don't have PowerPoint. Or is it all three*?

*It is all three.

I loved this book, which is funny because it's basically short stories, and I usually don't have the patience for short stories. But these did me the favor of interlocking nicely in a way that made me feel like I was reading a novel, and also of being published with a very pretty cover with foil stamping, printed on that textured, slightly rough paper that assures you that you are reading a classy, classy book that will probably be nominated for something.

"Time is a goon," we're told, and the older I get (and I'm not even old), the more I realize that this is really true, as years fly faster and faster and things that once sounded like a long way off are suddenly in the rear view mirror (like: it is 2010; in one year, 9/11 will have been 10 years ago). I used to think 70 seemed old. With my parents newly retired and pushing the seven-decade mark, though, anyone who dies before 80 seems like they died young. I take heart in the fact that, barring a car crash, cancer, or freak tripping-over-the-cat-related catastrophe, I'm still less than halfway done with my brief time on this planet. Is this morbid? Are you supposed to start pondering your mortality a year from 30, or is this some kind of commentary on The Times in Which We Live? Or am I just shifting my fears that I won't end up doing any of the neat things I want to do into the future, the fear that time is only going to keep getting faster, and pretty soon we'll be talking about where we were on that day 20 years ago when Everything Changed, or seemed like it would.

This isn't really about the book, but it is. Egan follows a bunch of characters who work in the music industry, ping-ponging from life to life, from the present, to the past, to the future. It makes total sense: time's a goon; it will creep up on you as quickly as turning a page. Nostalgia is a trap too: I don't miss the good old days for what they were, but for what lay ahead of me, the time I've already spent in-between then and now. This book encompasses all of that, allowing us to see it all: the way past regrets and mistakes shape our future choices, the way our lives will unfold and blossom or wither in ways we can't possibly expect, or maybe can exactly predict.

Oh, and it's also fabulously written in about a dozen different styles, from first- to second- to third-person and in newspaper articles and even in, yes, PowerPoint graphics. And it's about the music industry which is very cool but also big business and that's an interesting dichotomy, how do you commercialize and corporatize the spirit of punk rock, the primal scream of youth looking around and seeing nothing but waste, looking forward and seeing nothing but uncertainty? ...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Sarah rated it did not like it · review of another edition

The National Book Critics Circle Award. A Penn/Faulkner Award Finalist. The freaking Pulitzer. It has to be good, right? I thought so, to the point that it was the only book that i brought with me on the plane this weekend, but I was really disappointed.

This book, a collection of quasi-connected short stories, covers a span of time between the 1970s and 2020s and follows a variety of people, most notably a former punk rocker turned music executive and a young troubled kleptomaniac turned an adu ...more

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Apr 27, 2013 Nataliya rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, excellent-reads, pulitzer, 2013-reads, recommended-by-my-colleagues

Time is a strange old fella, isn't it? It creeps up on you and changes you bit by bit until you the new you and the old you are barely more than strangers to one another.

You can see time as a continuum, a line stretching from the past into the future, a long straight road to travel along with occasional proverbial 'road not taken' splitting off to the side - where barely perceptible changes accumulate one by one.

Or else you can look at it as a series of snapshots, a deck of cards randomly and c
Time is a strange old fella, isn't it? It creeps up on you and changes you bit by bit until you the new you and the old you are barely more than strangers to one another.

You can see time as a continuum, a line stretching from the past into the future, a long straight road to travel along with occasional proverbial 'road not taken' splitting off to the side - where barely perceptible changes accumulate one by one.

Or else you can look at it as a series of snapshots, a deck of cards randomly and carelessly shuffled, each one showing a face different from the rest - life in snapshots.

And these snapshots are so different from one another, separated by the years of smart choices and poor choices, pain and happiness, gains and losses, laughter and tears, having formed an invisible network of scars that forever preclude us from following that once-long-ago good-natured yet impossible advice of 'Please don't change; just stay the way you are!' - the promise we can wholeheartedly make but no matter how hard we try we cannot keep.

"Alex imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there— his young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet. The fantasy imbued him with careening hope."

I still can easily remember being sixteen, not knowing anything besides the blissful strong-willed ignorance of youth, where everything was just beginning, everything was still about to start, nothing was decided yet, and the world was one giant untapped possibility with no way of telling where time will eventually take you.

But time goes on, and now I can almost see thirty from this point in life and occasional gray hairs are creeping onto my temples (yes, I know - thirty is the new twenty and all that bullshit we tell ourselves to feel younger and preserve that feeling of endless, overwhelming potentiality and possibility that we so took for granted half a life ago), and there's not that much connecting me to that girl in the Land of Ago (to borrow Stephen King's phrase).

Time passes, and with it we change, slowly and subtly but unavoidably, until one day, just like a character in A Visit from the Goon Squad notices, we stop being ourselves 'without recognizing it'.

And then maybe we learn to appreciate the pauses in songs, like a young autistic kid the glimpses of whom we see through a powerpoint presentation made in the future by a 12-year-old girl (oh dear, how much do I loathe the inescapable omnipresent powerpoints that have reduced public speaking to mindless reading of slides!) - because they make us think the song is over, and then it restarts and we get a temporary reprieve from the end, the real end, and it's that giddy feeling of almost having cheated the inevitable, of having gotten away with something at least for a while longer.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.”
Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. “You grew up, Alex,” he said, “just like the rest of us.”

This is a book about losses and regrets as people change with time - as well as glimpses of personal redemption, especially in the threads of the story connected to Sasha (who I really started to love after the NYU chapter - because how can you not?). It's a book full of little often unseen connections between the characters who have touched each other's lives in the ways they may never understand.

"Redemption, transformation — God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?"

This book is about people connected by time, connected by music, with moments in life captured just like the pauses in songs, full of realized hopes and shattered dreams, with constant reminders of beautiful fragility of life. The road from A to B - be it in time or on two sides of a musical record - is not always in a straight line; it curves around, zigzags madly, loops back, runs into life itself - and is a path connecting the kaleidoscope snapshots of our beings that somehow will eventually fall into the beautiful but ever-changing patterns, which before you know it will fall apart into another snapshot, something different and unrecognizable - because time is a goon, after all.

“I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B.”

And in the meantime, while the unrelentless goon is mercilessly dragging us along, we can look around at the fragile beauty of life around and try to remember the world for what it is now - because it will never be the same again. Because time is a goon. But for now, it's not yet over. “Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.”

And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he’d felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire. Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light.
“See,” Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. “It’s mine.”

...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Lee rated it it was ok

A must-read for "creative writing" types interested in POV/style variation. Otherwise, for the second consecutive year, the Pulitzer committee awards nearly empty formalism (see "Tinkers"). Both "Tinkers" and this one are formally "unconventional" and concerned with time, yet otherwise seem to have very little to say, as they used to say.

I liked the PR/General chapter. I liked a description of old tattoos on saggy flesh. I liked the big fish caught in the East River. I really liked the sudden ju ...more

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Aug 25, 2016 Kemper rated it liked it

Shelves: plain-old-fiction, modern-lit, 2011

Reading this book is like going into the future and eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends who haven’t seen each other in years:

“Remember Bennie Salazar?”

“Sure. He was that record producer who used to put the gold flakes in his coffee. Didn’t he used to be in a band?”

“Yeah, he was a wannabe punk rocker in the ‘80s. He was friends with Scotty back then.”

“Was Scotty normal then? Because I heard he’s completely shithouse-rat-crazy these days.”

“Oh, he’s totally insane. Hey, what was Reading this book is like going into the future and eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends who haven’t seen each other in years:

“Remember Bennie Salazar?”

“Sure. He was that record producer who used to put the gold flakes in his coffee. Didn’t he used to be in a band?”

“Yeah, he was a wannabe punk rocker in the ‘80s. He was friends with Scotty back then.”

“Was Scotty normal then? Because I heard he’s completely shithouse-rat-crazy these days.”

“Oh, he’s totally insane. Hey, what was Bennie’s assistant’s name?”

“Sasha?”

“That’s it. Whatever happened to her?”

“I’m not sure. I heard she was a total kleptomaniac.”

“Really? I heard some wild stories about her running around Europe back in the day.”

“Someone told me that a friend of hers drowned and really messed her up.”

“Huh. It had to be something. Oh, did you know Bennie’s ex-wife used to work for that PR woman Dolly?”

“The one who is trying to resurrect her business by helping that dictator rehab his image?”

“That’s her. Like she’ll ever get steady work again after that disaster she put together.”

“Wasn’t it Bennie’s ex-wife’s brother who attacked that actress that’s been hanging around that dictator, too?”

“That’s right! Small freaking world.”

See what I mean? You don’t really know these people, but after a while, you get to know their stories and get a feeling for the connections between them. That’s what Jennifer Egan has done in this creative little novel. By telling a series of stories loosely based around Bennie and Sasha’s past, present and future, she builds a web of relationships that becomes large but always feels intimate.

One of her cuter tricks is an entire section told via a PowerPoint presentation written by a child in the future. It sounds like a gimmick that might be good for a few laughs, but Egan actually uses it to give us a pretty detailed portrait of the future family of one of the characters we’ve read about earlier in the book.

It’s a well-written and clever book, but the tone’s a bit sad and depressing because it deals a lot with the loss and regrets that all adults have over what gets left behind as you move through life. I might have liked it more if I hadn’t just read Super Sad True Love Story, which also dealt a lot with the down side of aging. The two books also share a similarity in depicting a future state where smart phones and constant communication have changed society. (This one is mostly set in the past and present with only a couple of sections in the futue.) So while I liked this, I got a bit of a been-there/done that flavor when reading it, and I think I hit depression overload somewhere in the middle of this. ...more

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Oct 05, 2010 Aldrin rated it it was amazing

Originally posted here.

There are two paragraphs in Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad , that heavily hint on its fundamental theme but were not at all written by the author. One is the book’s epigraph, taken from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “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 disappointmen ...more

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Jul 15, 2011 Rachel rated it did not like it

Shelves: depressing, kill-it, make-it-stop, seriously, unlikable-protagonists

Normally I don't start reviewing books before I've finished them, but saying how much I hate this book at the halfway point is cathartic.

I hate this book. I HATE IT SO MUCH.

Is it well-written? Probably. Complex characters? Yeah, I'll give them that.

That being said, even reading one chapter of this leaves me so freaking depressed that I want to put it in the sink and light it on fire. Also, the characters may be complex, but I don't care what happens to any of them. I really don't. There's this ...more

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Sep 22, 2016 Ilse rated it it was ok

Shelves: american-literature, symforosa-rc, 2016, reviewed

Christmas Eve, 2011. The foreboding sheen of a room filled with excited anticipation and beautiful glimmering presents piled up under the Christmas tree. This traditional family habit blending festive elation with infantile sibling jealousy and rivalry ever fuels surreptitious reflections on the guileful art of giving. Every year, I ingenuously and silently wish for a book. (Oh frustration! Do you recognize this experience? Having to live with an avid or obsessive reader, people might think they should actually help the reader, try to re-educate this pathetic creature, curing his book-addiction by rebuffing him his drug, so stop hoping ever getting a book by your family, get real and grow up, Ilse). Then my father selects a cute package looking like a book from the pile and offers it to….my little sister. While she is unwrapping Visit from the goon squad, the dimmed light fortunately conceals my jealous pea-green complexion. A novel about the merciless effects of Time, even labelled as a present-day riposte to Proust, about rock and punk music, experimental, humorous and elegantly written, showered with euphoric reviews in every paper and magazine I read. Sigh. How could my family torture me like this? This just to explain why expectations were damned high and why I was very thrilled when this was scheduled as the next read by my “real life” reading group.

Don’t let me be misunderstood. This novel is barely about music - it is partly an unsentimental defiling of popular music culture, exposing the corruption and perverting of the music business world - how capitalism effects and degenerates every level of life, even infecting and hedging in counterculture and rebellious youth just for profit. It’s the economy, stupid.

The start is promising. The structure surely looks clever – the welding together of the different viewpoints taken in the non-chronological 13 chapters – short stories in their own right - entangling the stories by a playful use of characters more or less subtly turning up in each other’s stories; in the beginning it almost reminded me of the narrative techniques used in the wonderful film Short Cuts. In an interview Egan frantically emphasized this is not merely a collection of short stories, defending its coherence and connectedness, although in the embryo stage there were just a couple of short stories. She compares her novel to a concept album. And there is where the novel misses a mark. Observing a skeleton, few laud the beauty of the bone structure. The novel bears a resemblance to an edifice of which someone forgot to remove the scaffolding. The structure is so obtrusively visible that it obscures the substance (in that respect, Egan’s distracting accent on structure reminded me of another much-admired novel which also left me underwhelmed and which, like Egan’s, also references to Proust, Bonsaï by Zambra).

deadkennedies

Attempting to pinpoint why I lost my interest in the characters and where a sense of disenchantment slipped in, I discern 2 entirely personal flaws triggering this. First, punk and rock music are Radio Nostalgia to me, and as the flavor of the wild years is still with me, Egan’s prose suffers from a phoniness that cannot be saved by just namedropping one my favorite bands, the Dead Kennedys, or describing slam dancing. Where is the raw power, the energy in sex, drugs and rock-and-roll? Except for the occasional half smile it provoked, her prose is too slick and polished for me to call it sardonic (ever read Flaubert’s letters?). I am aware probably it is just me. I must have turned into some grumpy curmudgeon overnight without noticing, which could clarify another cause why the book eventually did not resonate with me. Reading about the various (mainly trivial) vicissitudes of the aging, over-the-hill rockers and their state of decay, I soon found myself humming snippets of a old Rolling Stones song, thinking about the successive generations at work alternately hitting the dance floor at the new year party when “their” music is played and staring at each other the rest of the time:

You're obsolete my baby
My poor old-fashioned baby
I said baby, baby, baby you're out of time.

However entertaining by flashes, it definitely wasn’t a wise idea – and perhaps not fair to Egan - to pick this immediately after reading a masterpiece of world literature, I'm Not Stiller, by Max Frisch. As to aesthetical and artistic taste, I clearly seem to have become a fogey.

Time as a bunch of ruthless thugs ever willing and able to beat you up and crush you is a lucky strike as a leitmotiv, but couldn’t prop up the whole novel. Neither could a flake of gold in your coffee. Panta Rei, as Heraclitus said. Memento Mori. Yeah, the Grim Reaper will come and get you sooner or later and everything is ending, but not yet. I think we all know. The British band Crass declared punk dead in 1978 in just a few lines which said it all:

Yes that's right, punk is dead,
It's just another cheap product for the consumers head.
Bubblegum rock on plastic transistors,
Schoolboy sedition backed by big time promoters.
CBS promote the Clash,
But it ain't for revolution, it's just for cash.
Punk became a fashion just like hippy used to be
And it ain't got a thing to do with you or me.

Talking about music and the spirit of the age, a pitch-perfect rock song could outdo Egan’s exposé. I still believe in the power of music. There is more authentic despair in this single song of Eels than in the whole idea of Time as a goon squad knocking at your door:

Rags To Rags
There's a spider crawling on the bathroom mirror
Right on top of my right eye
And I can't stop staring back
How did I get this way?
Take a big look at a living lie

Rags to rags and rust to rust
How do you stand when you've been crushed?
So rags to riches was a bust

Sometimes I dream about it
What it's like back home
The railroad tracks and the pussy willow
But I had to leave it
Now I go back
Whenever my tired head hits the pillow

Rags to rags and rust to rust
How do you stand when you've been crushed?
So rags to riches was a bust

Busted once again
Well I'll show them one day
That I can buy and sell the world

And one day I'll come through my american dream
But it won't mean a fucking thing

Rags to rags and rust to rust
How do you stand when you've been crushed?
So rags to rags and rust to rust
Don't let me go.

Should ask my sister if she read it anyway, meanwhile. Parenthetically, the kitchenware I got from my parents as a change that year (instead of “another” book), was fine for me, thank you. I love cooking and organizing parties.
...more

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Sep 07, 2013 Kinga rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: special-place-in-my-heart

The older I get the harder it is for any book to get on my special-place-in-my-heart shelf. The last time I found myself raving about a book as if it was the Second Coming of Christ was when I read Evening is the Whole Day in December 2009. Either I have been reading lots of so-so books lately or I have become jaded.

Luckily, here comes this book to prove to me I am not as indifferent as I would like to believe myself to be.

Another thing this book proves is that you can have a best selling colle The older I get the harder it is for any book to get on my special-place-in-my-heart shelf. The last time I found myself raving about a book as if it was the Second Coming of Christ was when I read Evening is the Whole Day in December 2009. Either I have been reading lots of so-so books lately or I have become jaded.

Luckily, here comes this book to prove to me I am not as indifferent as I would like to believe myself to be.

Another thing this book proves is that you can have a best selling collection of short stories, as long as you pretend they are a novel. Short stories seem to be perfectly suited to our current busy lifestyles and short attention spans. It's baffling they are pushed off the literary mainstream, and judging by this book's success, it seems to be some unexplainable prejudice. After all, this book is just a collection of loosely connected episodes that could (and have been) easily published as stand alone stories.

The appeal of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" lies in its treatment of passing time and growing old, of how people go from being the protagonists to barely mentioned secondary characters. These are all things we know about but we don't like to think about. The delicate way in which Egan presents the inevitability of all of them makes it a very sad, melancholic, and bitter-sweet read. This book is also about rock'n'roll because music is one of those things that were always better when we were young.

No matter how accomplished and powerful the character, he or she will eventually get pushed aside and left to reminisce. This is the most powerful and important message that this book delivers. However, it doesn't leave you completely hopeless. It uses a beautiful metaphor of pauses in rock'n'roll songs. Just when you think it's all over, the song comes back on after a couple seconds for its one last hurrah.

I have read a few negative reviews (most notably Sarah Aswell's one) and while I see where they are coming from, I must say this book did it for me. It was so true that all I could do was sigh for two reasons. One, because we're all gonna die, two, because there is no way I could ever write anything this powerful.

Time is a goon and life is a bitch, eh? ...more

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Jan 29, 2017 Fabian rated it really liked it

Taking home the Pulitzer, it's clear what types of novels are favored, the novels deemed fresh and classic simultaneously. Like "Olive Kitteridge" or "The Interpreter of Maladies", this is a novel made up of short stories, all of them vivid anecdotes of people surrounding the music industry (as in musicians, roadies, fans, relatives... etc.) in precise clear-cut slivers of everyday life. Jennifer Egan's prose is exciting, her method of bleeding one story onto the next, of building up these, what ...more

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Jan 13, 2011 Krok Zero rated it liked it

Shelves: summer-2010

Probably not Egan's fault that I didn't love this one -- I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get behind any novel with this kind of pointillist structure. Maybe I'm more aesthetically conservative than I thought I was, because this year I've read two ecstatically praised novels that use this piecemeal approach (the other being David Mitchell's Ghostwritten) and found it difficult to give a fuck about either of 'em. The idea, I guess, is that the individual fragments add up to a great Probably not Egan's fault that I didn't love this one -- I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get behind any novel with this kind of pointillist structure. Maybe I'm more aesthetically conservative than I thought I was, because this year I've read two ecstatically praised novels that use this piecemeal approach (the other being David Mitchell's Ghostwritten) and found it difficult to give a fuck about either of 'em. The idea, I guess, is that the individual fragments add up to a greater thematic or narrative gestalt that can be observed by standing further away. But this distance seems to me antithetical to the purpose of the novel, which is supposed to be all about close engagement with a set of imagined lives and/or events. Not that I want to be prescriptive about this sort of thing, or even use phrases like "the purpose of the novel," because what do I know? But it just feels too often like a case of literary ADD. Mike Reynolds says Goon Squad is "definitely a novel," but doth he protest too much? The fact that Mike even feels compelled to make this assertion tells you that it is not "definitely" anything. (Gives me an idea for the paperback: instead of the customary "A Novel" ID underneath the title, Knopf should go with "Definitely A Novel.") This is really a story collection, I think, and I'm vaguely perturbed by the trend of slapping the "novel" label on interrelated story cycles; if they were first published today, would In Our Time or Winesburg, Ohio be pushed as novels? I'm all for the malleability of forms, but I'm also for truth in advertising. So I dunno.

And so, like any story collection, some of the stuff in Goon Squad is better than some of the other stuff -- though Egan's crisp, satisfying prose can be found throughout. Like everyone else, I loved the powerpoint chapter, excerpts from a 12-year-old girl's "slide journal," as moving as it is formally innovative. Also wonderful is the first-person account by a David Foster Wallace-esque journalist of a celebrity interview gone horribly awry. But another piece, co-starring the same celebrity, struck me as so wildly implausible that I kept waiting for it to be revealed as a fiction-within-the-fiction (no such luck); and an Almost Famous-ish section about rockin' '70s teenagers was hideously over-voiced, a fault that also occasionally tripped up Egan's otherwise deeply entertaining The Keep. It's like, I know you want to create a convincing teen-girl voice, but replacing the verb "to say" with the verb "to go" in every single instance of that verb just comes off as a distracting authorial contrivance. And some of the units, like one involving an African safari (which Mike cites as one of his favorites) might have really worked for me in the context of a proper story collection, but in the context of a novel -- with all its attendant expectations, even in non-linear fragment form -- it felt inessential. So labels do matter, I think, and this book has the wrong label. But of course there is plenty of wonderful writing here, many juicy sentences of wit and insight and elegance that jolted me out of my macro-disappointment; I'm still on Team Egan, and I appreciate her continuing efforts to engage meaningfully with the more disconcertingly salient aspects of contemporary culture. Sometimes the strings show a little too much -- the final chapter (which I basically like) strays perilously close to essayism, and doesn't seem to understand how text messaging works -- but I'm down with any writer these days who tries to chronicle The Way We Live Now without being a dick about it.

Update: I'm officially the only person who does not love this book, so I am floating to assert my independence. Shine on, you crazy me. ...more

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Jun 10, 2015 Jeffrey Keeten rated it really liked it

I have never read Jennifer Egan before. I had no expectations for this book except that it carried the caveat of Pulitzer Prize Winner. The book as it turns out is really a series of interlocking stories. A minor character in one chapter may be the main character in the next chapter. I thought Egan locked these stories together seamlessly making for an enjoyable quick read.

I found myself reflecting on my own life, the trials and tribulations of these characters certainly struck a nerve with me ...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it really liked it

Shelves: reviews, read-2012, reviews-4-stars, egan

One At a Time

The thirteen chapters of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" are like lily pads on a pond.

They encapsulate the lives of a group of people, a community, a human ecosystem, over a period of 50 years (only it doesn’t seem like that long).

We start on the pad nearest to us (which is not necessarily the present or the most recent story), then we look around and jump onto the other pads, one at a time, each choice made for us by Jennifer Egan, but not necessarily dictated by any apparent partic ...more

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May 16, 2011 Nicky rated it it was ok

Shelves: nyc, borrowed, hipsteria, novels, contrary-wise, 2011, short-stuff, moody-blues

This book felt so transparent to me. I could feel her writing and thinking and smirking and patting herself on the back. Normally, I have no problem with that. I love arrogant people when the arrogance is earned. But these stories didn’t ring true for me. They felt staged and cute and show-offy. “Oh, look what I can do. I can write a chapter in the second person for no reason and another one in PowerPoint and another one in cyber-gibberish. And I can connect a bunch of simplistic but oh-so-quirk ...more

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Feb 22, 2016 Nandakishore Varma rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Time, you old Gypsy Man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

- Ralph Hodgson

“Time’s a goon, right?”

- Bosco, a character from A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan is a unique book which defies analysis, probably because it breaks all conventions of storytelling. In fact, it does not tell a story at all. It tells many stories, not by traditional narration but by cameo glimpses into the intertwined life of a handful of characters connected with ...more

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Nov 19, 2014 Laurel rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

While I enjoy writing from time to time, I'm not an author. I wasn't an English major. I've never taken a creative writing course, nor read any books on how to write. Perhaps that's why I often struggle when I give a poor rating to a book that has received high critical acclaim. I mean, what do I know?

However, I rate books not so much on their literary merit, but on how much I enjoyed the book as a reader. I rate according to how engaged I was; how much I enjoyed the story, the characters, the t ...more

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Dec 26, 2016 le_fino rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, post-modern, american-21st-c, pulitzer-fiction, novels

It took a chapter or two for me to hit a groove with Goon Squad and from there I was hooked. It was definitely an interesting ride through time with evolving and changing narrators - a literary puzzle which sort of comes together at the end. I did feel like I would like to have been at the concert and to have met and spoke with Sasha and Lulu and Bernie. There is a striking realism to Egan's writing that is highly compressed but also evocative. I can see now why they gave her a Pulitzer for this ...more

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Aug 22, 2011 Megha rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews, its-not-you-its-me

Time is a goon? Not necessarily, I think.

( First of all, I think I may be too un-American to really get this book. The dreams, hopes, expectations, definition of a happy and content life for most Indians are entirely different from all of Egan's characters. These stories won't fit in an Indian context. This may be a reason why this book didn't speak to me the same way as it did to many other readers. )

I can't help feeling that at least some of Egan's characters were responsible for wrecking thei Time is a goon? Not necessarily, I think.

( First of all, I think I may be too un-American to really get this book. The dreams, hopes, expectations, definition of a happy and content life for most Indians are entirely different from all of Egan's characters. These stories won't fit in an Indian context. This may be a reason why this book didn't speak to me the same way as it did to many other readers. )

I can't help feeling that at least some of Egan's characters were responsible for wrecking their own lives. They just didn't make an honest attempt to build livable lives for themselves. Yeah sure, circumstances don't always work in one's favor. But how our lives shape up also depends on the numerous big and small choices we make for ourselves. It also depends on people around us because our lives are cross-wired with many others. It is not right to blame time and luck for everything that goes wrong. True, unfortunate circumstances can at times push one in a dark corner, for none of their own fault. Some people do have worse luck than most others. But one cannot keep using that as an excuse for every wrong step they take. At some point they have to stop grieving, pull their lives together and do the best they can with whatever cards they have been dealt. Whatever happened to time is the best healer?
Times do change. But the change is not necessarily bad. Not for everyone, at least. Some people get rude shocks, some others hit upon unexpectedly good fortune. It works both ways. We gain something new, we leave something behind. We learn to live with the flow of the time. It is one thing to have hopes and ambitions, and plan things out for future. But it is too much to expect for time to follow our rhythms and pauses and ensure that our plans are executed perfectly. No matter what Paulo Coelho says, the universe may not actually be conspiring to make every single person's wishes come true.

Another of Egan's concerns is regarding rapidly changing lifestyle, ways of communication and our dependence on technology. Yes, that is happening alright. Don't we all know it! And we also know that similar things have been happening for generations. My parents grew up without TV or (any kind of) phone. Surely they didn't expect to see a day when smart-phones and laptops will begin to be just as essential possessions as a toothbrush. Likewise, we can't know what exactly the world around us will be like when we are a generation older. Some changes will make things easier, others will give rise to anxieties. And again, we will learn to live with the times. People always have.

One more reason why Egan's thoughts didn't come across very well is that her theme had to constantly vie for attention with her stylized structure. I did really like her use of non-linear time-line and kaleidoscopic manner of presenting certain pieces of the character's lives. But the novel's form also felt like she had just come out of week-long writing workshop and was eager to show off every single style she had learnt.

However, I must say, this book is not merely popular, it also has a literary gene in it. ...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Stephen M rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mentions-mitchell

I don't think I've ever been this torn on a book. I mean three stars? four? five? I give away so many five stars anyway.... Ah, goodreads star-rating system, you can never fully capture my experience with a book.
So, what did I think of this book? Absolutely beautiful at times. Was it consistent? No. Was it sad? Yes. Was it rewarding? Yes. Did the post-modern gimmick work in this book? I'm not sure.

And that is where most of my grippes come with this one. Because I couldn't help but feel that Egan ...more

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Sep 03, 2012 René rated it did not like it · review of another edition

What a bunch of crap.

A thing I find unbearable is the forced pathos of one-dimensional characters.

Take Benny, for instance. Benny can't get an erection. So he puts gold flakes in his coffee and stares at his assistant's tits with various degrees of discretion. We get it. Why then are we led through the ritual over and over? Benny starts his day with a coffee, stares at assistant's tits, self-scans and finds no erection. Later, in the car with the assistant, he stares at her tits. No reaction. Bu ...more

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May 30, 2016 Lyn rated it really liked it

Dubliners for the Digital Age.

Whereas Joyce used naturalistic prose to depict a specific time and place, Dublin, Ireland in the early twentieth century, author Jennifer Egan uses the same style and perspective to describe life in the late twentieth century, early twenty first century. Also like Joyce, Egan has structured her work into a series of loosely connected short stories, though Egan’s novel, or collection of short work, is more narratively connected than the earlier work. Likewise, Egan’ ...more

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Apr 26, 2011 JSou rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, favo-u-rites

Sorry Greggers, I have to read this now. It sounds like it would even be better than getting to meet Mary Lou Retton.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

I love to people-watch. Even as a little girl, I remember seeing people in stores, walking down the street, or even in passing cars and be fascinated with the thought that they had actual lives they were living, just like me. I would imagine what kind of house they lived in, how they got a Sorry Greggers, I have to read this now. It sounds like it would even be better than getting to meet Mary Lou Retton.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

I love to people-watch. Even as a little girl, I remember seeing people in stores, walking down the street, or even in passing cars and be fascinated with the thought that they had actual lives they were living, just like me. I would imagine what kind of house they lived in, how they got along with their family, what they liked to eat, and wonder if I would ever come across those same people later in my life. Does this have anything to do with the fact I love, love, love connecting short stories? Stories that in the slightest of ways join people together? I'm not sure, but I do know they get to me every time, and more than likely end up on my favorites shelf.

Throughout the book, each story connects characters in some small way, but honestly, this didn't jump to a 5 star rating for me until the very last chapter. Seriously, that last part in itself was Pulitzer-worthy. Showing a glimpse of our probable-not-so-distant-future, Egan totally blew me away. I was enthralled and a little sick at the same time.

Not being too technology savvy, I only recently bought a Droid phone. Before that, I had the type of phone most parents buy for their first-graders. My kids also have a pretty basic phone, but constantly tell me they need a new touch-screen phone or an iPad. Oh, how I laugh. Sorry, not gonna happen. I don't care how many of your friends have them. It has amazed me that every single time I set my new phone down, I'm now bombarded with all of them circling me like vultures, "Can I see your phone, can I see your phone, can I see your phone?" Um, no. Go do your homework, grab a book, or go clean something (yes, my kids are mad at me a lot of the time).

Egan gives a depressing and almost frightening look at what our society is gradually becoming. Just today, while reading NPR's "What We're Reading this Week" post on facebook, a lady commented that she wasn't reading anything at the moment because she was waiting for her new iPad to be delivered since her iPhone was too small. Really, lady?!? Ever hear of a book??? Hell, I'll even send you one (not this one though, it's a keeper).

I realize all these changes are inevitable, but really, e-readers, text speak, our growing inability to actually talk to another person, it all makes me sad. At least it inspires me to continue my already out-of-control book buying (you know, just to make sure I'll always have enough), and truly appreciate this site and fellow goodreaders. I love you, booknerds. ...more

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May 09, 2011 RandomAnthony rated it liked it

I wish the hype surrounding Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad never reached me.

A Visit From The Goon Squad functions like an invisible literary daisy chain (the flower kind, not the sex kind, perv) through which characters connect in subtle ways that are most likely imperceptible from the players’ vantages. The reader views the interactions from above and traces the relationships like they were troops moving on a map. Egan transcends gimmickry and uses the device to rewind and fast-fo I wish the hype surrounding Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad never reached me.

A Visit From The Goon Squad functions like an invisible literary daisy chain (the flower kind, not the sex kind, perv) through which characters connect in subtle ways that are most likely imperceptible from the players’ vantages. The reader views the interactions from above and traces the relationships like they were troops moving on a map. Egan transcends gimmickry and uses the device to rewind and fast-forward and, in turn, highlight personal evolutions that otherwise might appear glacial. These evolutions occupy, more often than not, a curious and very human space between growth and decay, or, more accurately, including both growth and decay. As the characters change they carry their wounds and power. Time (The Goon Squad, I think) is a character on its own. A Visit From The Goon Squad is bold and brave and full of psychological insight across a myriad of settings and personalities; the book seems sprawling without epic length.

That said, I can't place this novel among my all-time favorites. The powerpoint chapter brought a wave of relief as I wanted the book to end by then and that quick-reading stretch teleported me toward the finish line. Some sections were of the “read with your fingers laced in front of your eyes” variety because the characters did such awful, stupid things to themselves and each other. And every now and then I got the feeling the rapid-fire scenario shuffle allowed Egan to skim details in the name of character numeration. So...pros and cons. The cohesive and elegant interconnections sacrifice the depth of deeply exploring the nuances of one or two individuals. I can live with that, as most novels go that route, and Egan's strong sense of inner dialogue, her portrayal of people becoming sentient in vital and dangerous ways is horrible, scarring, and freeing. And the final chapter, set in the near future, was brilliant.

A Visit From the Goon Squad and the surrounding publicity reminded me of the same situation with Franzen’s Freedom. The former is the better book. Both Franzen and Egan seem to want to say something important about American hope and perception, but Egan's text is more sublime and intricate than her talented counterpart's. I don't think book people can avoid A Visit From The Goon Squad’s hype machine. Book clubs and culture are already eating it up. They could do worse. Egan's book is excellent, worthy of praise and awards, and shouldn't be penalized for its critical gilding. Shut your ears, tune out the buzz, and form your own opinion. Three and a half stars.
...more

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May 23, 2011 Kim rated it really liked it

Shelves: contemporary, gr-friend-recommendations, it-was-density, mmxi, hype

You know what. I don’t really have much to say about this. Except the whole hype thing and that for the first time EVER I was reading this at the same time like 4 of my friends were reading it and hell, I’ve been in book clubs where that doesn’t happen. Score another one for hype.

This book made me sad. Not because I was really invested in the characters, no... it was a purely self-centered sadness. I’m not alone in thinking that we (born 1960-1975) are a disillusioned generation right? That we ...more

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Jun 01, 2015 Saffron rated it it was amazing

Perfect.
Beautiful.
Infuriating.
Stunning.
Emotional.
Smart.

I don't know why I took so long to read this!

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About Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and St John's College, Cambridge.

She is the author of three novels, The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the bestselling The Keep, and a short story collection, Emerald City. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and ...more

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