A Visit from the Goon Squad Pulitzer Prize Winner by Jennifer Egan
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Web ID: 15626728Incredible
From GoodReads, “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 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.” It’s a crazy quilt of a book. Each of the 13 chapters has a different time period and POV. Each is its own square, seemingly unrelated until you see the pattern. Then you bask in the fascinating connections. (Though I did break down and make an org chart - second picture.) It’s beautiful, gritty, compelling, and odd. We jump forward in some stories, back in others. We change POVs. One section is set in the dystopian future. And it all works! Even as an audiobook, Egan gives reference points to help readers orient themselves in the story. I heard about chapters with nothing but PowerPoint slides and wondered how that would play out in an audiobook. It worked! Between each slide, you hear a “Ka-chunk” sound like a slide projector carousel. I went to Egan’s website to see the slide show after finishing the book. I loved this Pulitzer Prize-Winning GEM of a book so much that I immediately picked up the “companion” collection, A CANDY HOUSE, published this year. (Review coming tomorrow). If you want to read A CANDY HOUSE, I strongly recommend reading this first. Trigger Warnings include drug use, addiction, suicide, and a particularly disturbing attempted sexual assault from the perspective of a bipolar attacker. I listened to this as an audiobook loan from my local library via the Libby App.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Propulsive writing and little else
If well Goon Squad is a bit experimental structure-wise, there’s nothing experimental in the easy to read writing that revolves around the music scene from the late 1970s until the first decade of this century. The book is formatted like a vinyl music record, with side A having six stories— the “fait a accompli”—, and side B displaying seven—how the characters got from A to B. Most of the characters have some connection, albeit tangential, either to music producer Bennie Salazar—his ex-wife, Stephanie; his former brother-in-law, Jules; his mentor, Lou; three of the members of Bennie’s music band in 1979–Rhea, Jocelyn, and Scotty; a starlet named Kitty Jackson, loosely connected to Jules and La Doll (Stephanie’s boss)— , or to Sasha (she worked for Bennie for twelve years before he fired her for having “sticky fingers”). The only salient features of this novel are, again, its page turning writing— propulsive especially towards the first half— and its unusual structure. I failed to connect with the characters and didn’t care much about them, except for finding out what linked them to the cornerstone characters. What’s more, I failed to see what all the hype was about. I’ll be reading its sister novel, but after reading this one I don’t know what to expect.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Clever and addictive!
Technically clever but very readable. You really care about some of these characters and despise others. Don't skip the PowerPoint section, it's brilliant!
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Recommended This Book To Friends
Formulaically, I love short stories and vignette styles. I love that so much meaning and interpretation can be found in so little space. Like a composer, the writer was able to create a masterpiece akin to famous arpeggios. These characters, like chords on a scale, are interspersed but belonging to the same cohesive universe.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com