On our trip to London I finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I had read several rave reviews and knew it won the National Book Critics Circle Award last year so I decided to give it a shot.
It’s hard to summarize this story about the music industry because it is told by several narrators whose stories are intertwined and shift from the past to the future, from NY to Naples and everywhere in between. It’s basically the perfect postmodern rollercoaster ride starring a cool cast of characters such as an aging record producer, a lovelorn kleptomaniac, a terminal singer who isn’t capable of dying and a genocidal general just to name e few.
Each chapter features a character with a wonderful story to tell that easily flows into the next one like a babbling brook. Egan doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the music industry from the Seventies onwards but it is a captivating and clever one enforced by her prose which is a pleasure to read, no matter how absurd or at times unpleasant the subject matter.
Jennifer Egan effortlessly takes us from place to place, time to time, and character to as she creates a pitch-perfect fictional mosaic. Her style is rich and adventurous (she for example includes a power point presentation as a chapter) and complements this tale about the passing of time perfectly.
As each character takes his or her own moment in the spotlight, he or she is desperate for a second chance and wants to hold off the approaching goon aka death, making music the perfect metaphor for this novel seeing as time is like the grooves on a record album, jumping from track to track in no particular order.
I savored every minute of A Visit from the Goon Squad but if you’re still not convinced of its splendor, take it up with the Pulitzer committee seeing as they just awarded her the prize.
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