A Visit from the Goon Squad

A novel about the music industry might seem a strange choice for me. Though I love music, I've never played an instrument (except air guitar), and I find stories of rock stars' misbehavior tedious at best. But a friend urged me to read this book, and I'm glad I listened.

Yes, it's about the music industry, with a varied cast of characters (artists, producers, and more). But it's also about issues I connected with instantly: pursuing one's dreams, finding one's voice, making one's way in life, work, and love.

Creative language use matters to me, and Egan's prose knocked me… show more.

Jennifer Egan’s 2011 novel (and its 2022 sibling novel, The Candy House) take readers back and forth through the recent past and near future as we drop in on the lives of characters at different turning points in their lives. Each chapter takes readers in a new direction that deepens, complicates, or thoroughly upends our sense of characters. It makes for breathtaking reading.

Egan's point-of-view and temporal experiments worked very well. Even the Powerpoint presentation-as-story/chapter. I loved getting different perspectives on the same characters at various times in their lives, and thus became emotionally attached and curious about what happened to them. 

Some consider this a novel, but I enjoyed each “chapter” as a self-contained short story. Several pieces focused on aging punker Bennie Salazar and/or his employee, Sasha. In the non-Bennie chapters I wondered about Bennie, and Sasha. Despite the time leaping, the plot had a nice circular arc in the end that was quite satisfying, tying the whole thing together.

The… show more.