review a visit from the goon squad

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – review

T he title of Jennifer Egan's new novel may make it sound more like an episode of Scooby-Doo than an exceptional rendering of contemporary America, but don't be fooled. The book received rave reviews when it was published in the US last year, and for good reason; it has since been named a finalist for several prestigious American prizes. Egan has said that the novel was inspired by two sources: Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu , and HBO's The Sopranos . That shouldn't make sense but it does: Goon Squad is a book about memory and kinship, time and narrative, continuity and disconnection, in which relationships shift and recombine kaleidoscopically. 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.

The "goon squad" of the title is not itself a reference to The Sopranos : there are no mobsters here. It is one character's name for time: "Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?" Everyone in the book is pushed around by time, circumstance and, occasionally, the ones they love, as Egan reveals with great elegance and economy the wobbly arcs of her characters' lives, their painful pasts and future disappointments. Characters who are marginal in one chapter become the focus of the next; the narrative alternates not only between first-person and third-person accounts, but – perhaps just because she can – Egan throws in a virtuosic second-person story as well, in which a suicidal young man tells his tale to a colloquial "you". She also shifts dramatically across times and places: punk teenagers in 1970s San Francisco become disillusioned adults in the suburbs of 1990s New York; their children grow up in an imagined, slightly dystopic future in the California desert, or attend a legendary concert at "The Footprint", where the Twin Towers used to be, sometime in the 2020s.

The stories circle magnetically around a few characters who recur a bit more frequently than others, and broadly around the American music scene: Lou, a coke-snorting, teenage-girl-seducing music producer in the 1970s, becomes the mentor of an untalented young bass player, Bennie, who becomes a music producer himself, who hires a young woman, Sasha, who has a problem with kleptomania, who sleeps with a young man, Alex, who much later ends up hired by Bennie to engineer the comeback of Bennie's high-school friend Scott, who went off the rails as an adult and ended up one day in Bennie's office with a fish he'd caught in the East River, where Sasha's best friend and boyfriend in college had once gone for an early morning swim with tragic consequences. Bennie's wife works for a publicist named Dolly whose daughter, Lulu, will end up working with Alex; Bennie's wife's brother is a journalist who is arrested for the attempted rape of an actress named Kitty Jackson who has her own fall from grace and is later hired by Dolly to enable the public rehabilitation of a genocidal Latin American dictator.

Each chapter has its own distinct voice and mood, modulating from satire to farce, from melancholy to tragedy. I've never found a description of attempted rape funny before, but when Jules Jones writes (from prison) his account of his assault on Kitty Jackson during an interview, it becomes an uproarious parody of David Foster Wallace that owes more than a little to Nabokov as well, as Jules describes finding himself with "one hand covering Kitty's mouth and doing its best to anchor her rather spirited head, the other fumbling with my zipper, which I'm having some trouble depressing, possibly because of the writhing motions of my subject beneath me." Kitty sprays him with Mace, stabs him in the leg with a Swiss army knife, and runs away. "I think I'd have to call that the end of our lunch," Jules remarks.

If it comes as a surprise that an attempted rape can be hilarious, it is an even greater surprise that a PowerPoint presentation can be moving. Goon Squad becomes more fragmented, and more formally experimental, as it progresses: the penultimate chapter is written entirely as the PowerPoint slide diary of Sasha's teenage daughter Alison, whose brother is obsessed with pauses in rock songs. Those pauses, like the spaces between PowerPoint slides, become a metaphor for the gaps between what we mean and what we say, or the apparently unbridgeable distance between family members. The trick feels appropriate in a book preoccupied throughout by the effects of technology on our lives and culture, from the consequences for music of the digital revolution (as Bennie observes, digital production has transformed not only the industry of music but its sound as well) to the way in which technology is transforming our language. Egan's Orwellian final chapter imagines a future in which English has decomposed into radical text-speak: "if thr r children, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?"

Egan has said that the organising principle of A Visit from the Goon Squad is discontinuity; this may be true, but the reason the book works so well is because of the continuities she has also created: her atomised people collide, scatter and recombine in patterns that are less chaotic than they appear. Egan's characters, and the America they inhabit, are winding entropically down. It's a kind of meditation on the butterfly effect, in which recurrence becomes the measure of the chaos of our lives, the novel reimagined as a series of chain reactions. But Egan's vision of history and time is also decidedly, and perhaps reassuringly, cyclical: the impacts these characters have upon each other are engineered not by coincidence but by connectedness itself, as the people we bump against and bang into become the story of our lives.

Sarah Churchwell is a senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia

The Observer
Marcel Proust
The Sopranos
Jennifer Egan

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A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

by Jennifer Egan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2010

Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while...

“Time’s a goon,” as the action moves from the late 1970s to the early 2020s while the characters wonder what happened to their youthful selves and ideals.

Egan ( The Keep , 2006, etc.) takes the music business as a case in point for society’s monumental shift from the analog to the digital age. Record-company executive Bennie Salazar and his former bandmates from the Flaming Dildos form one locus of action; another is Bennie’s former assistant Sasha, a compulsive thief club-hopping in Manhattan when we meet her as the novel opens, a mother of two living out West in the desert as it closes a decade and a half later with an update on the man she picked up and robbed in the first chapter. It can be alienating when a narrative bounces from character to character, emphasizing interconnections rather than developing a continuous story line, but Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy that we remain engaged. By the time the novel arrives at the year “202-” in a bold section narrated by Sasha’s 12-year-old daughter Alison, readers are ready to see the poetry and pathos in the small nuggets of information Alison arranges like a PowerPoint presentation. In the closing chapter, Bennie hires young dad Alex to find 50 “parrots” (paid touts masquerading as fans) to create “authentic” word of mouth for a concert. This new kind of viral marketing is aimed at “pointers,” toddlers now able to shop for themselves thanks to “kiddie handsets”; the preference of young adults for texting over talking is another creepily plausible element of Egan’s near-future. Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us.

Pub Date: June 8, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-307-59283-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, a visit from the goon squad.

The story begins in the late ’70s California punk scene and ends in a near future where tattoos and piercings are outmoded and babies are proficient at text messaging. In the 50 or so intervening years, a set of characters drift in and out of the pages, their lives intersecting in often surprising but poignant ways. Brought together by music and concerned with personal expression, art and experience, the characters who populate Jennifer Egan's thoughtful new novel, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, are all dealing with the passage of time and the effects --- positive, negative and neutral --- it has on their lives, beliefs and relationships.

Readers first meet Sasha as she lies on her therapist’s couch discussing her compulsion to steal. From sunglasses to keys, expensive pens to scarves, she has an ever-growing collection of disparate objects taken mostly from strangers (never from stores). In her therapy session, she recalls a date, many years ago, with a man younger than herself. The one-night stand would've been forgettable but for an incident with a stolen wallet, her date's appropriation of one of her trophies and his memory of the night decades later.

We meet another central character in the next chapter. Bennie Salazar is an aging music producer who has a euphoric musical experience while listening to two sisters record a song in their basement while his son joins in on tambourine. The moment brings back for Bennie what he loves about music, but it ends in a humiliating anxiety attack and he is tended to by Sasha, who is, at this time, his assistant. Bennie's story, like those of the other figures in the novel, shifts back and forth in time. Next he is a teenage musician whose friend's inappropriate affair with music executive Lou Kline not only gets Bennie involved in the business end of music, but also introduces a whole group of other characters whose stories are entangled with Bennie, Sasha and their friends.

Some of these relationships are tenuous, others are confusing, and often the novel feels like a connection of interrelated short stories drawing from the same host of characters and themes. Yet Egan moves easily between stories and settings, and in time. We find Sasha as a young adult, in the midst of several formative relationships. Her best friend will soon be dead, and she is years away from the settled mother and wife we know she will become. We are also treated to a chapter told from the point of view of Sasha's young daughter, who explains her autistic brother's fascination with musical pauses in chart and graph form. Bennie emerges later in a second marriage confronted by the closest friend of his youth and an opportunity to make meaningful music once again.

There are so many characters here --- friends, children, business associates, the children of business associates --- that Egan always appears in danger of dropping threads. But that tension serves the story well because tension seems to be at the heart of it. We readers know what the characters don't: how it turns out and how time treats them in the end. We know who survives, who is radically changed, and who loses the battle against time. There are elements of satire here as Egan looks critically at journalism, the music industry, public relations and more. But even as she casts doubts on intentions and integrity, she is never mean-spirited. In fact, the characters she creates are sympathetic. Because we see some of them as children or young adults, we have a sense of what brought them to the point where --- for example, after witnessing their mother try to improve the image of a genocidal dictator with a fuzzy hat and a hug from a down-on-her-luck starlet --- they would attempt to manipulate public interest in the music of a reclusive janitor through guerrilla text messaging.

If it all sounds convoluted, it is and it isn't. A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD is complicated and complex, but because it addresses some of life's big questions, it is philosophically compelling and universal. The particulars of each character are unique, yet the themes remain the same. Despite the occasional fragmentation of the story, the exploration of identity, music and time make for a melodic and intelligent novel.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on January 24, 2011

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Publication Date: March 22, 2011
Genres: Fiction
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN-10: 0307477479
ISBN-13: 9780307477477

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BookBrowse Reviews A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

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A spellbinding interlocking narrative that circles the lives of an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and the troubled young woman he employs

"The days of losing touch are almost gone," proclaims one of the many characters in Jennifer Egan's meditation on the loss of youthful idealism to the ravages of time and the secrets that reverberate through the years. It is the early 1990s, and Sasha, Drew, and Rob are students at New York University, bright 20-somethings on the verge of promising lives, in a city aglow with possibility. Bill Clinton has just been elected, the Internet is beginning to bubble up from its underground status into a mainstream phenomenon, and 9/11 is still a blissful decade away. "We'll meet in that new place," says their friend Bix, the Internet prophet, "and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost." However, the realities of losing touch and getting lost animate this novel, with characters breaking away from each other far more often than coming together. Rock music provides the connecting thread between these characters as well as their only constant glimmer of salvation; almost everyone in Goon Squad either performs in a band, works for a record company, or avidly listens to music, making the novel a rock fan's dream. Rock music is notoriously difficult to write about, especially in fictional form, where literary platitudes and rhapsodic discursions often fall short of the transformative experience of actually listening to the music. Egan succeeds, though, by offering pithy observations on the sterility of digital remastering ("The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization , which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh") and the overwhelming power of listening to music over head phones ("...the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage.."). Music lovers recognize these sorts of truths as gospel, and Egan's obvious affinity with music, especially punk and post-punk, gives the book all the magic of a favorite song. My favorite songs have always been the sad ones, and in this respect, Goon Squad does not disappoint. Chapters 3, 4, and 11 contain some of the most heartbreaking depictions of adolescent turmoil that I have ever read: Chapter 3 focuses on Bennie's youth in the San Francisco punk scene and is narrated by Rhea, the perceptive and lonely girl who loves him; Chapter 4 takes us back to the early '70s, on a life-changing African safari with Lou, his girlfriend, and his daughter and son; and Chapter 11, which could stand alone as a prize-worthy short story, explores the complex relationship between young runaway Sasha and the uncle who searches for her in the underbelly of Naples, circa 1988. When Egan bluntly reveals what will eventually happen to her characters, often in a sentence or two, their often-tragic fates carry devastating impact. Even the stories that end more or less happily have a kind of melancholy, as characters exchange the brash vitality of youth for the quiet resignation of adulthood. While Goon Squad is brilliantly written, it does have a few flaws, the kind of minor irritations that music fans recognize from listening to an otherwise great album marred by the occasional bum note. Aside from the aforementioned Chapter 11, Sasha remains an oddly uninteresting character, one whose alleged allure never seems quite earned, despite such quirks as kleptomania, bright red hair, and an apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. Often the other characters surrounding her seem much more nuanced, which renders the chapters in which she appears akin to watching a movie for the supporting actors instead of the star. Likewise, the Jules and Kitty storyline comes across as a pleasant diversion that adds little to the overall plot; their chapter, written in the form of an entertainment article that might have appeared in the '90s heyday of Rolling Stone or Spin , is a dead ringer for the arch meta-narratives of writers like Nicholson Baker and David Foster Wallace, studded with ironic commentary and self-referential footnotes. Egan can write well in any form she chooses, but this section verges on overkill, as does the Power Point format that Sasha's precocious daughter uses to tell the tale of Sasha's adult life as a mother and sculptor in the California desert. Still, at its best, A Visit from the Goon Squad approaches the mournful majesty of the song lyrics from which Chapter 11's title, "Good-bye, My Love," may be taken: "Good-bye, my love/Maybe for forever/Good-bye, my love/The tide waits for me/Who knows when we shall meet again/If ever…"(" Time" by the Alan Parsons Project , 1981).

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National Post (Canada), 1/10/12

“When finally I read the first pages, I was transfixed. For the next 36 hours I found all other activities bothersome because they took me away from this marvellous book.”

Read the Review

The Independent (UK), 12/11/11

“I can’t do this 514-page novel justice in 250 words. It’s funny and serious, dry, sly and wry. The writing is as pin-sharp as the perceptions. If you didn’t read it in 2011, make it your New Year’s resolution to read it in 2012.”

Everyday E-Book , 12/4

“Put the Needle on the Record: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad Rocks”

The Short Review , 8/1

“For Egan, even tossed-off moonlight energizes and illuminates.”

Paste Magazine 5/2

“Again, Egan has taken a leap of faith, trusting her audience will follow her, past the old nonlinear stand-bys such as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, into even newer territory.”

London Evening Standard , 6/9

“A Visit From the Goon Squad is now making its own way inexorably, because almost everybody who reads it is going to recommend it to everybody they know.”

Panel Review by Lisa Brown/SF Gate , 5/15

A panel review is even better than PowerPoint!

Read the review

The Guardian , 4/2

“This is an incredibly affecting novel, sad, funny and wise, which should make Jennifer Egan’s name in the UK.”

The Telegraph , 3/26

“Jennifer Egan’s new novel, her fourth, is playful in a serious way, complex in a straightforward way, more culturally penetrating than a shelf of Don DeLillos and contains some of the fizziest prose of the year.”

London Review of Books , by Pankaj Mishra, 3/31

“Egan commemorates not only the fading of a cultural glory but also of the economic and political supremacy that underpinned it. The sense of an ending has always appeared to spur Egan’s inventiveness.”

The Irish Independent , 3/26

“A Visit from the Goon Squad is a tremendous novel: thoughtful, subtle, funny, wacky, energetic, profoundly authentic.”

BBC Saturday Review, 3/19

The group discussion of GOON SQUAD begins 13 minutes in (ie, almost at the end, after a long discussion of a Neil LaBute play)

Listen to the Podcast

The Independent (UK), 3/13/11

“The sparky disconnect between generations is sometimes rewired with brief but joyful connections.”

The Guardian (UK), 3/13/11

“This is a difficult book to summarise, but a delight to read, gradually distilling a medley out of its polyphonic, sometimes deliberately cacophonous voices.”

Slate.com , 12/8

“Goon Squad is intricately crafted, wildly imaginative, and written with verve and grace…Give it to the superannuated goth in your life.”

Village Voice , 12/8

“This Goon is all grace.”

Read the End-of-Year comment

The New Republic , 12/1

“It ends in the same place as it starts, except that everything has changed, including you, the reader.”

The New York Review of Books , 11/11

Reviewed by Cathleen Schine

“Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a moving humanistic saga, an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche.”

Austin American Statesman , 10/13

“This is art at its best — as a bulwark against the goon, as it embodies everything at once.”

The Record: Music News from NPR , 8/17

The Novelist’s Advantage: Great Books About Music

The National (Abu Dhabi), 8/5

“Egan, too, has been swiftly, silently mounting an assault on the highest reaches of American fiction, beginning with early works like The Invisible Circus and Look at Me, and her remarkable 2006 novel The Keep. The Keep was a refreshing hybrid of postmodern playfulness and classical storytelling, and Goon Squad maintains its predecessor’s experimental daring while dramatically expanding its emotional reach.”

The Post and Courrier (Charleston, SC), 8/1

“Egan’s smart, unpredictable novel doesn’t pretend to have the answers. It just charts the shifting ratio between hope and dread, as the goon stalks.”

The National Post (Canada), 7/17

“Jennifer Egan’s stunning fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a collection of linked stories that don’t follow a conventional narrative structure but works beautifully because she takes chances that succeed.”

The Globe and Mail, 7/16

“In her brash beauty of a novel, Jennifer Egan understands the power of shame, simply because it makes one present in the moment as effectively as fear or desire.”

Daily Beast/Taylor Antrim , 7/12

“A Visit From the Goon Squad should cement [Egan’s] reputation as one of America’s best, and least predictable, literary novelists.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch , 7/11

“Poignant, provocative and ultimately profound.”

New York Times Book Review (cover review), 7/11

“Remarkable…Is there anything Egan can’t do?”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , 6/27

“Ms. Egan’s concept is seductive, and her judicious marshalling of the right details of our contemporary life reveal a writer’s peripheral vision that sees the whole playing field.”

Bookotron , 6/28

“‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is first and foremost, fun and startlingly engaging to read.”

Kansas City Star , 6/27

“For all its sensory richness, social and psychological insights and brilliant layering of ideas and commentary, Egan’s time-bending tale is laced with suspense and punctuated by emotional ambushes of profound resonance.”

Minneapolis Star-Tribune , 6/27

“The effect over 13 chapters is that of a collage, choral work or puzzle, reminiscent of Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” or Robert Altman’s ensemble films.”

Time Magazine , 6/28

“It’s as if the author has taken an epic novel covering five decades and expertly filleted it, casting aside excess characters and years to come away with a narrative that is wide-ranging but remarkably focused.”

People Magazine , 6/28

“Egan introduces a dizzying array of characters…but it all makes brilliant sense in the end. A thought-provoking examination of how and why we change–and what change and constancy mean in a Facebook–era world where ‘the days of losing touch are almost gone.'”

The New York Times , 6/21

“Whether this tough, uncategorizable work of fiction is a novel, a collection of carefully arranged interlocking stories or simply a display of Ms. Egan’s extreme virtuosity, the same characters pop up in different parts of it.”

The Miami Herald , 6/20

“A Visit from the Goon Squad flares into flamboyant life. It mulls the sort of big-picture ideas good novels ought to ponder.”

The Boston Globe , 6/20

“Readers of her three previous novels and story collection have already discovered Egan’s unique sensibility and style, which defy easy classification and which some newcomers may find disorienting. Others will come away exhilarated and pleasantly breathless from the unpredictable ride.”

The Dallas Morning News , 6/20

“Egan takes a risk on an unusual structure and succeeds in moving the story forward while offering a welcome surprise.”

Bookotron , 6/12

“Jennifer Egan is back with ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ a brilliant and brilliantly enjoyable novel that manages to use the tropes of experimental fiction in a manner that make the book grippingly intense, funny, and endlessly enjoyable to read.”

Read the Review/Listen to a Podcast discussion between Rick Kleffel and Alan Cheuse

Bookpage , June 2010

“Egan’s scope remains simultaneously manic and highly controlled.”

Washington Post , 6/16

“If Jennifer Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile.”

The Observer’s Very Short List , 6/15

“How the private lives of these two characters—and plenty of others—intertwine makes for good, compelling reading, in this un-put-down-able novel.”

Read the Post

New York Newsday , 6/13

“Jennifer Egan’s bold, thrilling new novel examines the sea change from an analog world to a digital universe as it plays out in the lives of vividly imagined, richly complicated individuals.”

Read a Preview

New York Press , 6/9

“It is a great work of fiction, a profound and glorious exploration of the fullness and complexity of the human condition.”

Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered , 6/14

“Told with both affection and intensity, Goon Squad stands as a brilliant, all-absorbing novel for the beach, the woods, the air-conditioned apartment or the city stoop while wearing your iPod. Stay with this one. It’s quite an original work of fiction, one that never veers into opacity or disdain for the reader.”

Read/Listen to the Review

Entertainment Weekly, 6/9

“Egan’s expert flaying of human foibles has the compulsive allure of poking at a sore tooth: excruciating but exhilarating, too.”

The Associated Press , June 9

“A Visit From the Goon Squad” in its way resembles the kind of social novel that Charles Dickens once cranked out regularly. It features more than a dozen disparate but vivid characters, from a powerful businessman to a Latin American dictator to a group of teenage punk rockers; and the action ranges over five decades and three continents.

“But Egan has abandoned the straightforward narrative that marks most socially minded novels in favor of a series of linked stories that jump around in time and space and between a set of characters with sometimes tenuous connections. It calls to mind nothing so much as the fragmentary experience of surfing the Web.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer , June 10

“In her audacious, extraordinary fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad , Jennifer Egan uses the pop-music business as a prism to examine the heedless pace of modern life, generational impasses, and the awful gravity of age and entropy.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer , 9/8/10

“I expect this brilliant, inventive novel to become enshrined. Such rash speculation is foolish, I know — we live amid a plague of bloated praise. But “A Visit From the Goon Squad” is emboldening. It cracks the world open afresh.”

Newsweek , 6/3/10

“Her aim is not so much to explode traditional storytelling as to explore how it responds to the pressures and opportunities of the digital age.”

Chicago Tribune , 6/6/10

“Jennifer Egan’s decision to render portions of her new novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (Knopf), as a PowerPoint presentation is: Clever. Edgy. Groundbreaking.”

San Francisco Chronicle , 6/6/10

“Like a masterful album, this one demands a replay.”

Los Angeles Times , 6/6/10

“It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer.”

A DAZZLING SPIN THROUGH TIME Read The Review

Fans riding high from Jennifer Egan’s critically acclaimed The Keep have much to look forward to in her new novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which turns away from the neo-gothic and mind-bending while retaining the unexpected humor and postmodern breadth of her earlier work.

– Jillian Quint

Vanity Fair/Hot Type:

“Jennifer Egan’s slamming multi-generational San Francisco saga, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, pogoes from the romantic, Mohawked youth of the 70s to the present-day hell of selling out.”

Marie Claire Radar: Books/TV Need to Read A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD Discover your inner Joan Jett (without the requisite hangover) in a new, hell-raising novel

Warning: Those who have a hard time imagining the words *punk rocker* and *great novel* together in a sentence should stop reading now. The great novel in question is Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, an exhilarating, big-hearted, three-headed beast of a story that explores the secret lives of some seriously screwed-up people, most of whom have been in love either with punk rock or with someone who sang it…We see ourselves in all of Egan’s characters because their stories of heartbreak and redemption seem so real they could be our own, regardless of the soundtrack. Such is the stuff great novels are made of–even when the hearts in question belong to aging rock stars.

Elle Magazine May 07, 2010 Read The Review A novel that’s a globe-trotting, decade-leaping romp about music-industry people with fashionable foibles — Lisa Shea

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY (Starred Review):

Read The Review

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 and 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. (June)

BOOKLIST (Starred Review):

Egan is a writer of cunning subtlety, embedding within the risky endeavors of seductively complicated characters a curious bending of time and escalation of technology’s covert impact. Following her diabolically clever The Keep (2006), Egan tracks the members of a San Francisco punk band and their hangers-on over the decades as they wander out into the wider, bewildering world. Kleptomaniac Sasha survives the underworld of Naples, Italy. Her boss, New York music producer Bennie Salazar, is miserable in the suburbs, where his tattooed wife, Stephanie, sneaks off to play tennis with Republicans. Obese former rock-star Bosco wants Stephanie to help him with a Suicide Tour, while her all-powerful publicist boss eventually falls so low she takes a job rehabilitating the public image of a genocidal dictator. These are just a few of the faltering searchers in Egan’s hilarious, melancholy, enrapturing, unnerving, and piercingly beautiful mosaic of a novel. As episodes surge forward and back in time, from the spitting aggression of a late-1970s punk-rock club to the obedient, socially networked “herd” gathered at the Footprint, Manhattan’s 9/11 site 20 years after the attack, Egan evinces an acute sensitivity to the black holes of shame and despair and to the remote-control power of the gadgets that are reordering our world. — Donna Seaman

Kirkus (Starred Review):

“Time’s a goon,” as the action moves from the late 1970s to the early 2020s while the characters wonder what happened to their youthful selves and ideals.

Egan (The Keep, 2006, etc.) takes the music business as a case in point for society’s monumental shift from the analog to the digital age. Record-company executive Bennie Salazar and his former bandmates from the Flaming Dildos form one locus of action; another is Bennie’s former assistant Sasha, a compulsive thief club-hopping in Manhattan when we meet her as the novel opens, a mother of two living out West in the desert as it closes a decade and a half later with an update on the man she picked up and robbed in the first chapter. It can be alienating when a narrative bounces from character to character, emphasizing interconnections rather than developing a continuous story line, but Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy that we remain engaged. By the time the novel arrives at the year “202-” in a bold section narrated by Sasha’s 12-year-old daughter Alison, readers are ready to see the poetry and pathos in the small nuggets of information Alison arranges like a PowerPoint presentation. In the closing chapter, Bennie hires young dad Alex to find 50 “parrots” (paid touts masquerading as fans) to create “authentic” word of mouth for a concert. This new kind of viral marketing is aimed at “pointers,” toddlers now able to shop for themselves thanks to “kiddie handsets”; the preference of young adults for texting over talking is another creepily plausible element of Egan’s near-future. Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us. Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while affirming its historic values.

Suspend Your Disbelief

A visit from the goon squad, by jennifer egan.

In a generation of “Pointers,” the relationship between and among songs on an album—its narrative—is all but lost in favor of hit single after single. But in Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad , an array of stories mix into a cohesive novel, each chapter self-contained yet fluid as the grooves of an LP.

by Jackie Reitzes

With an economy on the rocks and limited disposable income among music buyers, there’s good reason to favor individual brilliance in quick flashes over an album’s collective crescendo. In a generation of “Pointers,” the relationship between and among songs on an album—its narrative—is all but lost in favor of hit single after single.

But in Jennifer Egan ’s latest book, A Visit from the Goon Squad , an array of stories mix into a cohesive novel, each chapter self-contained yet fluid as the grooves of an LP. Structurally, the book flashes forward in one section only to skip back in the next, shifting the protagonist’s point of view in each chapter. And yet, unlike the fragmented, seemingly unconnected world of the Shuffle, where randomization is celebrated over construction, A Visit from the Goon Squad reads as a whole, as tight as the pickup on a single-coil Fender, locked and loaded.

from Flickr

Most of the characters in these stories cross paths at one point or another with Bennie Salazar, whom we meet in the first chapter, “The Gold Cure.” Casting him as a fading music exec at first encounter, the narrative then rewinds to catch him as a young idealist through the eyes of a teenage female friend. As she views him, “Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.”

In subsequent chapters, we also inhabit the points of view of Bennie’s ex-wife, publicist, friend, mentor, assistant, employee, and the musicians themselves, whose careers interlock with his. Taken together, Bennie’s narrative personifies the rise and fall of rock’s industrial commodification, its glory days and highway to hell.

At the novel’s heart is the role of music as both an agent and subject of nostalgia. Rock acts as a bygone era and the conduit on which we may resurrect what has been lost:

He sensed Sasha listening closely and toyed with the idea that he was confessing to her his disillusionment—his hatred for the industry he’d given life to. He began weighing each musical choice, drawing out his argument through the songs themselves—Patti Smith’s ragged poetry (but why did she quit?), the jock hardcore of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks giving way to alternative, that great compromise, down down down to the singles he’d just today been petitioning radio stations to add, husks of music, lifeless and cold as the squares of office neon cutting the blue twilight.

Jennifer Egan / photo credit: Pieter M. Van Hattem/Vistalux

The struggle to recover some past ideal permeates the story lines of multiple characters, this need to recapture anything and everything; from the national consciousness before 9/11 to the name of a lover who has disappeared. Beauty, fame, fortune, family, physical health —these are the obsessions of protagonists desperately trying to retrieve something they hadn’t known they needed the first time around. A journalist replays his transgressions with a 19-year-old movie star from the confines of his prison cell. An ousted socialite scrambles for relevance at the risk of endangering her young daughter. A father takes his children and new girlfriend on a Safari in hopes of achieving previous nuclear harmony. An uncle sets out to find his missing niece and instead mines the museums of Naples for reflections of his estranged wife.

Each of these characters is poised for a reckoning, at the crossroads of something devilish. At times it is unclear whether music (and its hard-knock underworld) is at the price of or the ticket to the soul. Is music-as-a-kind-of-religion the spiritual destination, or the catalyst of decline? One middle-aged character wonders about the disintegration of wilder times into growing despondency: “Had they somehow brought it on?”

Egan raises these questions through sparkling wit and lyrical prose. As important as music becomes to the characters and the narrative, language itself (and music as language and language as music), emerges as the real main character. One particularly moving chapter, told in the voice of 12-year-old Alison Blake about her older brother Lincoln, is written entirely in power-point slides with Venn diagrams, flow charts, triangle graphs, etc.—effectively communicating how family members misinterpret each other, the cruel opacity of subtext. This type of writing through symbols might, in lesser hands, have become gimmicky, but in Egan’s case, there’s a frisson in piecing out her emotional geometries.

Lincoln is obsessed with Great Rock and Roll Pauses, or the seconds of rests within songs, little breathers, four beats, two beats, and where in the song they occur. These musical rests also mirror literary silences—white spaces, page divides, chapter breaks, section groupings— what goes unsaid. In a poignant irony, Lincoln’s cataloguing of these musical absences is actually the fullest expression of feeling he can convey. So that “Hey, Dad, there’s a partial silence at the end of ‘Fly Like an Eagle,’ with a sort of rushing sound in the background that I think is supposed to be the wind or maybe time rushing past!” actually is Lincoln’s attempt at “I love you, Dad” after seven layers of filtration.

While Alison feels compelled to chart the spouting of her brother’s pause-trivia, Rebecca–the academic wife of a freelance buzz-creator in the music biz–undertakes a project of her own, studying the words that are suppose to carry meaning, and have, like so much else in her book, lost their impact:

Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words – “friend,” and “real” and “surge” and “change,” words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some like “identity” “search” and “space” had clearly been drained of their life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Egan’s prose never suffers from casings, and that’s a testament to her acute ear and keen perception, the cadence of how to make words sing.

Time plays as “a goon” in these stories, a dark angel, the algebraic unknown; how you get from a to b , xs and os . Proust’s epigraph highlights all the suggestiveness of the physical, sensual, and associative cues, and this canonical morsel echoes throughout the novel.

T.S. Eliot once observed, “you are the music while the music lasts.” The characters in A Visit From the Goon Squad , each in his or her own way, are trying to extend the melody, to shore off the fragments of an increasingly silent and tone-deaf world.

Throughout the book there persists a tension between wanting and not wanting to know what’s real—between wanting not to care, and wanting to get back that sense of caring too much. Of wanting to be an adult when you’re a kid, and a kid when you’re an adult. Similarly, in readers and listeners alike there resonates a certain desire for telepathy, to be at one with something larger.

Like a concert, a good book can draw you in and sweep you to a different place. And after it’s over, ears ringing, lyrics rolling through your mind on the way home, remembering the way the light poured out over the stage, you can say it—you were there.

Metallica at Rock Werchter 2009 / photo credit: www.christianholmer.com

Literary Partners

Fwr partner.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

By jennifer egan.

‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is a spellbinding multi-genre book by the iconic American novelist, Jennifer Egan. The book was published to huge acclaim in 2010 and won the highly coveted Pulitzer Prize Award.

About the Book

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

From a postmodernist standpoint and written into thirteen solid chapters, with each able to stand alone as a complete, single story, Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ explores how people, society, and culture phase out in the presence of time. This gripping – yet complex – tale touches on the experiences of the different caliber of characters , all harmonized by the rock music era of the 70s.

Key Facts about A Visit from the Goon Squad

Book title: A Visit from the Goon Squad
Author: Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Release Date: June 2010
Page count: 278
Genre: Psychological Fiction. Novel. Short story collection
Climax: None clear climax or resolution
Setting: New York City, San Francisco, Italy.

Jennifer Egan and A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan’s journey to become the author of the monumental, Pulitzer Prize-winning book ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ is interesting and can’t be labeled straightforward.

The author’s literary road started out not so much as the regular spot popular authors did. To start with, Egan didn’t write from an early age. Her childhood wasn’t nearly as tranquil as most children would have because she moved around a lot with her mother (after her parents divorced when she was only two years old).

Novel writing wasn’t even in the top two dreams for Egan as she began coming of age. Her first passion was archeology and the author did take a year off after high school to explore that aspiration but it wasn’t going to be. Her next stop was modeling and the reason was probably not so tied to passion as it was hinged on the fact that she possessed a tall, model-slim frame.

After a couple of modeling trips to California and later to Japan, Egan returned to Pennsylvania and got enrolled in college, but would, after a first-year college break, take a trip to New York City and try to make something – still – from modeling. However, her booking days were less than enough to even pay for an apartment, so she left her career and concentrated on her college program.

Graduating college with a class of 85 with a degree in English Literature no doubt laid the groundwork for her later writing success – given that she had now been knowledgeable with literature theories and the art of good creative writing. Before penning her first novel ‘ The Invisible Circus ,’ first explored the terrains of mainstream journalism – publishing several award-winning articles for the New York Times Magazine.

Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ came in June 2010 as the author’s fourth book after ‘ The Invisible Circus ,’ ‘ Look at Me, ’ and ‘ The Keep.’ The book took a non-conventional approach in the genre, narrative style, characters, and technique, exploring the passage of time (how time just never stops for anyone) – in the rock music world.

The book, even though not an instant commercial smash hit, garnered several positive reviews from top publishers and critics. The following year after its official release, it won a number of awards – including the Pulitzer Prize after impressing the literary community. Even after more than a decade after the release of ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad, ’ and with the author having published other award-winning books, Goon Squad is still powering strong as Egan’s finest work to this day.

Books Related to A Visit from the Goon Squad

‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ has been called a complicated and intimidating read by its critics for its sheer defiance of the rules of regular prose-type novel writing. Initially written as a thirteen-short story series for mainstream print publication, the book was later published by Knopf as a unified novel in 2010 and designed as fiction.

Despite being widely called fiction, ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ is generally considered – even by the author herself – as a book that is (in addition to being fiction) experimental and uncategorizable. The book covers the exuberant lifestyle and struggles of punk music-loving teenagers and the overall punk rock music industry.

Every story in ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ is gripping and captivating in itself – forming an independent narrative of their own while also having at their tail ends the right story transitioning techniques to help blend the thirteen stories in a single narrative.

The book is one of the most innovative books since the 2010s given that it’s studded with several unique literary techniques – among which are the use of non-linear narrative style, and a multi-perspective storytelling technique (told in the first, second, and third person). Additionally, the book also includes a whole chapter done in PowerPoint slides – and another in the form of a magazine news article.

While there aren’t many books decorated with such abundant literary features, some books can still be regarded as being similar to Jennifer Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ masterpiece. One that is perhaps more worrisome to be included in this list is ‘ The Candy House ’ – which is a sequel to ‘ Goon Squad ‘ and follows a very similar literary prototype. Octavia E. Butler’s ‘ Kindred ’ is another similar book in this category for the fact it’s more subtle than most books and deals a great deal in a non-linear narrative, including flashbacks and flash-forwards and trips to and fro through time.

The Lasting Impact of A Visit from the Goon Squad

‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is one of the few books whose impact cuts across all readers irrespective of their age, background, and social orientation. This is because it talks about the passage of time and its offsetting effect on people, their dreams , and aspirations. This is a common struggle everyone faces and even at one point or another has been a victim of the goon squad – time.

For younger people, a very important lasting lesson is the need to remember that there won’t always be time to pursue that passion. And that the earlier one starts working on their dreams, the quicker one achieves them, and the happier one becomes when they turn grey and look back in retrospect. The book also carries some vital lessons for older people who might have been a victim of time as it teaches how to move on from a terrible past and make something out of life.

On a literary level, ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ is an enriched work of literature that examines what sway popular cultures – such as music and social media technology – have on the younger generations (with the book exploring the 70s through the 2020s). Academically, the book’s relevance shows in its inclusion as part of a course syllabus, while for the general interest reader, it is a mixture of thrills, grips, and spellbinds.

A Visit from the Goon Squad Review ⭐️

Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is innovatively written across different writing styles – effectively transitioning from newspaper article style to short stories collection style to novel writing style. The book is genuinely complicated, but is also a worthwhile read with loads of introspective lessons to be learned.

A Visit from the Goon Squad Historical Context 📖

Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ has at least three historical events that set the mood for the overall plot; the terror attack of the World Trade Center in 2001, the 1970s San Francisco punk rock era, and the advent of social media and the internet.

A Visit from the Goon Squad Best Quotes 💬

The inevitability of time is one unchanging aspect of reality that Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad hammered severely on. All her many characters – major and minor – are impacted by this phenomenon and there’s certainly more than a few admonitions for readers to pick out from the best quotes offered by the book.

A Visit from the Goon Squad Character List 📖

‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ features an array of characters from different times, but core to these characters are the troubled Sasha Blake and rock music exec Bennie Salazar.

A Visit from the Goon Squad Themes and Analysis 📖

In ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ Jennifer Egan tries to explore the theme of time and how quickly it can flash before our eyes, often leaving us reminiscing about some good memories from the past or regretting having lived less than we planned to.

A Visit from the Goon Squad Summary 📖

‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan follows a multi-style narration where some are done in the first person, some in the second, and others in the third person. The book consists of 13 chapters and each tells a complete, independent story with a different protagonist of its own.

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Book review: ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan

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A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Alfred A. Knopf: 278 pp., $25.95

Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” is a lively novel in stories about Sasha, an assistant in the music business, and her boss, Bennie Salazar. It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer.

We start with Sasha, a wry 35-year-old with sticky fingers. She’s extremely competent at her job, bored, nonplussed by the date who marvels at her old-style bathtub-in-the-kitchen New York apartment. Her only thrill comes from stealing; she doesn’t profit from it, instead keeping her take — a wallet, a child’s scarf, a seashell — as relics. She’s in therapy — she knows she’s in a bad way.

Punker-turned-executive Bennie Salazar is also in trouble. He’s been dumped by his wife, can’t seem to communicate with his son and, worst of all, has fallen out of sync with the music business. To Bennie, today’s music is “[t]oo clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh…. Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.” His failures resound in his head so loudly that he writes down a litany of humiliations, hoping to excise them.

Bennie and Sasha’s intersecting paths are illuminated by the subsequent chapters. But this is an oversimplification. What follows is no set of cause-and-effect flashbacks: Scattered across time, the narrative spins freely apart, like an uncapped centrifuge.

Each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view; Sasha and Bennie are pushed to the margins. Sometimes they’re not even present: One chapter, set in Africa, focuses on the adolescent son of Bennie’s musical mentor Lou, years before Bennie was in the picture. Another follows a disgraced publicist who used to employ Bennie’s ex-wife, while a third is narrated by a college friend of Sasha’s. Sound tangential? Sure, but the strategy succeeds, because these characters move so fully into center stage. Given voice, they become the main players.

These stories, even as they bend away from Sasha and Bennie, draw us in. Two teen girls’ lives are irrevocably changed by the charismatic Lou, with his red convertible and purple crushed velvet bedspread. A bitter celebrity journalist writes an article — with exacting footnotes — describing his ill-fated interview with a dewy starlet. A now-obese singer, once as lithe and explosive as Iggy Pop, tries to convince his publicity team that an aggressive tour — which will probably kill him — is his only choice. An adolescent girl, a decade or more hence, does her homework in Powerpoint; the tensions between her father and brother wrench, even in a chapter written entirely in slide form.

Egan has created, instead of an arc, a narrative constellation, one in which Sasha and Bennie have weak gravitational pull. Lou, Rob, Jules, Rolph, Dolly and others each take their star turns.

Scattered across time, free of chronology, the stories in the book nevertheless have a careful and deliberate structure. The novel is divided into two parts, A and B, much like the title of the singer’s new album, “A to B.” “That’s the question I want to hit straight on,” he says. “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat [jerk] no one cares about?” The answer isn’t about a sequence of events as much as the cycle of fame into whose orbit he’s swung. There are other orbits: individual tragedies and their passing, barely remembered encounters and their unexpected importance.

Yet in these cycles, the characters assert themselves. Over and over, they turn toward the sun, as if to stop time. A woman remembers when she betrayed Lou by sitting with another man on top of a pool house at sunrise. Parents, striving for balance, watch their toddler stagger along a wall of people gathered to watch the sunset. A teenaged Sasha, all but lost in a rambling Italian boarding house, counts among her meager belongings a wire she’s looped across her window; when the setting sun passes through its circle, it brings an unwanted visitor a moment of surprise and delight. “See,” she mutters to him, “it’s mine.”

Sasha’s inclination to possess things that don’t belong to her is not so unlike a novelist who, in rewriting another’s story, can give it a new tenor, push it into a new curve on the cycle. In the novel, Sasha grabs Bennie’s list of private humiliations, reading aloud, to his agony. “‘Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.’ … ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘They’re titles, right?’” Once he hears his fears recast as mundane song titles, Bennie feels a sudden peace; his darkness is made light.

Kellogg is lead blogger for Jacket Copy, The Times’ book blog.

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Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.

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Book Review

Book Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Author: Jennifer Egan

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Interconnected Short Stories

First Publication: 2010(

Language: English

Major Characters: Bennie Salazar, Lou Kline, Scotty Hausmann, Bill Duff, Jules Jones, Dolly Peale, Kitty Jackson, Ted Hollander, Sasha Blake, Andy Grady, Mark Avery, Rachel Costanza, Beth Grady, Alison Blake

Setting Place: Most of the stories take place in and around New York City, some stories are set in California, Italy, and Kenya

Theme: Identity, Authenticity, and Meaning; Connection, Disconnection, and Technology; Ruin and Redemption

Narration: A blend of first, second, third, and other non-traditional points of view

Book Summary: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction by American author Jennifer Egan. Interestingly, I tried to read it a year ago and hated it, hardly got through any of it! More proof for me that I’m better off not forcing myself to read something I’m not enjoying: there are too many other books to read and I may, as I did this time, come back to it later and discover that the time is now right for me to appreciate and enjoy the same work that I hated before!

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-destruction and redemption.

“I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away – I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”

Egan switches points of view frequently but I had little difficulty following the changes in perspective. I enjoyed seeing how characters that were minor ones in one section became the focus in another. I also loved the end section with its totally different format and different view of a major character.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan follows the lives of Sasha and Bennie (whose assistant she is). While reading the events of their lives, we enter into the lives of many other characters whose lives they touched, sometimes tangentially. I really enjoyed seeing a minor character suddenly become the star of another chapter-it seemed to me to be like life, where we are all the stars of our own lives, supporting players in the lives of those we are close to, and walk-ons in the lives of those whose lives we touch briefly or lightly. The shifting perspective made the texture of the book rich and more interesting than if the spotlight had remained solely on the two major characters.

“Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.”

Egan also wrote Look at Me which focused on a supermodel whose identity is completely changed. In this reading, A Visit from the Goon Squad more than lived up to all its hype (maybe because I had not enjoyed my previous attempt, my expectations were lower).

I found A Visit from the Goon Squad satisfying on many levels. It resonated on many levels. However, I think I mostly enjoyed this book because it was interesting in its approach to the characters and so well written. The characters were vivid and it was easy for me to recognize them, despite the many shifts of focus.

I strongly advise everyone who loves fiction to try this book: if you don’t like it at first reading, maybe (like me) you’ll discover its treasures later on!

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Jennifer Egan and the Goon Squad

The novelist talks about her pulitzer-winning book, which includes one chapter written as a powerpoint presentation, and stephen fry discusses greek mythology..

Hosted by Sam Tanenhaus and Pamela Paul

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For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2010 and 2020, respectively.

Jennifer Egan’s latest novel, “The Candy House,” is a follow-up to her Pulitzer-winning novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which came out in 2010. That year she appeared on the podcast and told the host Sam Tanenhaus how she had gone about organizing the book’s centrifugal structure: “What I was really interested in was trying to move through time and work with the difference between private and public. We see people and they seem to be easily categorizable — sometimes they seem like types. And I loved then taking that person that we had seen peripherally and showing us that person’s inner life in a really immediate way,” she says. “It happened very organically. … I just followed the trail of my own curiosity.”

Also this week, we revisit the actor and writer Stephen Fry’s 2020 conversation with the host Pamela Paul, in which he discussed topics including Oscar Wilde, Fry’s own love of language and his book “Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined.” “It’s a miraculous thing about Greek mythology that there is a timeline and a chronology,” Fry says. “It’s probably reverse-engineered by Hesiod and Homer and the later poets, obviously. But nonetheless, it has a shape, a beginning and an end, which other mythic structures don’t seem to have. And they’re so deep in the — I hesitate to use such a cliché, but I can’t avoid it — in the DNA of our own culture and art that it’s part of who we are.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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Judge rules in favor of receivership for Benjamin nursing home

A Suffolk County Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday to put the Edgar Benjamin Healthcare Center into receivership after community members took matters into their own hands in an attempt to stop the center’s pending closure.

In a lawsuit filed March 28, two family members of residents at the historically Black nursing home officially pushed for receivership of the Mission Hill facility, after petitions for the attorney general’s office and the Department of Public Health — the two state entities designated to seek a receiver — did not initially lead to official action.

However, days before the case’s April 2 hearing, the attorney general’s office and DPH voiced their support for the action, following months of declining to petition the court for receivership. Receivership would lead to a state takeover and the ouster of the Edgar Benjamin’s controversial management team but not necessarily ensure the center’s survival.

The receivership case was heard in the Suffolk County Superior Court. The day after the civil hearing, Judge Katie Rayburn ruled that an emergency exists at the Edgar Benjamin — the standard in state law required to appoint a receiver — and approved the petition that will put attorney Joseph Feaster in charge of the facility.

When residents and staff at the center learned a receiver had been appointed, there was clapping and hugging throughout the building. The staff was ecstatic and some people were brought to tears, said Leslie Henderson, the center’s director of admissions.

“It’s like a dark cloud over you, and you’re in the midst of this storm and you don’t see your way out and then it’s like an awakening,” Henderson said.

She looked to the center’s almost 100-year history and said she’s hopeful the appointment of a receiver will offer a chance for that legacy to go on.

Oren Sellstrom, the attorney who represented the two guardians of Edgar Benjamin residents, said he is very pleased with the ruling.

“We are gratified that the judge recognized the emergency nature of the situation and acted quickly to appoint a receiver to stabilize the organization and ensure the safety and wellbeing of the patients and residents,” he said.

The suit for receivership comes after the Edgar Benjamin’s administration announced in February its intent to close the facility, which currently serves about 70 residents, most of whom are people of color.

Ahead of the hearing, former state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson said she was “delighted” the case is being heard in court. Supporters hope that the receivership will offer a chance for new leadership to try to get the facility back on track.

“The answer can’t be to throw the whole baby out,” Wilkerson said. “You’ve got to run some new bathwater.”

In a letter to families Feb. 13, Tony Francis, executive director of the center, said the closure was due to “insurmountable financial difficulties.”

Since Francis took over as director in 2014, his salary rose by more than four times to nearly $628,000 in 2021, according to financial records filed with the IRS.

In its history, the Edgar Benjamin has twice before been put under receivership, and both times, the change in leadership allowed the center to bounce back and continue operations.

“It’s critical that the person at the helm be someone who can manage finances properly and steer the institution in the right direction,” said Sellstrom, who serves as litigation director at Lawyers for Civil Rights.

In the filing, attorneys from Lawyers for Civil Rights pointed to inadequate supplies, staff shortages and center mismanagement in their lawsuit filed to ask the Massachusetts Superior Court to grant receivership.

Francis and the facility declined to comment.

According to the suit, residents at the Benjamin have faced declining care. As of 2020, the center had a doctor on site. Now the doctor comes in only on Saturdays and doesn’t meet with residents. The facility’s dietician doesn’t come in regularly and is allowed to work remotely. Risk assessment meetings with the doctor, dietitian and nursing staff, which are supposed to happen weekly, haven’t occurred since January, even as patients have experienced significant weight loss.

Affidavits from staff at the facility paint a picture of limited supplies and equipment. As of February, the center’s supply of colostomy bags ran out and staff had to wrap a resident in a towel before they could borrow some from another facility. About 10 call lights — used to signal when a resident is having an emergency or needs help — were nonfunctional.

In response to the allegations, during the hearing, the attorney representing the Edgar Benjamin pointed to an affidavit from Stephen Davis, director of the state’s Department of Facility Licensure and Certification, describing a visit to the center at which time, he found no shortages of supplies.

During the same visit, staff said that was not always the case. For instance, the cook said that budget issues sometimes lead to insufficient food supplies.

According to the affidavits, vendors who used to work with the facility have cut ties due to non-payment. This has left residents with broken wheelchairs and equipment, like the lifts used to help get heavier residents out of bed. Residents can’t be weighed correctly because the scales used are inaccurate and uncalibrated, and computers at the facility are left vulnerable to cyberattacks and hacking without updates.

The center’s van, used to transport residents to medical appointments, hasn’t been used in months because the insurance hasn’t been paid on it, said Henderson in her affidavit .

Utilities, too, have gone unpaid, resulting in a past-due water bill of $175,000 and an electric bill of $339,000 as of February.

The facility failed to pay staff paychecks in November 2023 and again in December — with Francis citing financial issues both times. In December, staff also started receiving paper checks after the payroll provider stopped processing paychecks because of nonpayment. When several employees attempted to deposit their checks, the checks bounced.

Francis allegedly said he would pay for banking fees and late fees resulting from the bounced checks, said Kathy Blicker, who works in accounts receivable at the Edgar Benjamin, in her affidavit . To her knowledge, that hasn’t happened.

During periods when staff went unpaid, the center saw decreased staffing numbers as nurses called out of work. According to an affidavit from Marise Colsoul, the Edgar Benjamin’s director of nursing, understaffing often left each of the three units with one nurse only, and nurses sometimes had to work double shifts.

Blicker said that when the facility was especially understaffed, she and other office staff would go in on weekends to perform tasks that would normally be done by a certified nursing assistant.

Following the filing of the lawsuit, staff again went unpaid as checks bounced Friday. In response, two nurses called out from the Saturday night shift, leaving the facility understaffed.

During the hearing, an attorney for the state said the most recent round of bounced checks is what pushed both the DPH and the attorney general’s office to sign onto the petition for receivership.

If appointed, they said, the receiver could ensure payment of staff and care of residents while also determining if the closure plan should continue or if the facility could be kept open.

The lawsuit brings into question the financial hardship the nursing home is allegedly facing.

According to Blicker, the facility continues to receive significant income and revenue.

Monthly, it receives about $720,000 from sources like private and public insurance, as well as an additional $75,000 in rental income from Roxbury Prep’s Mission Hill Campus, which rents the building’s third floor. In 2021, the facility received over $1.6 million in Paycheck Protection Program support from the federal government, according to the federal Pandemic Oversight program .

Royal Bolling Jr., who previously served on the board of directors at the Edgar Benjamin until he was removed after questioning financial decisions at the facility, said that during his tenure at the organization, the center frequently faced financial challenges, but they were never insurmountable.

Sellstrom said there’s a series of red flags that indicate the need for a change in leadership, including a rapidly shrinking board that went from about 12 individuals prior to Francis’s tenure to three, as of March 21.

“For a nonprofit organization like the Benjamin, the board of directors are key to maintaining accountability and transparency,” Sellstrom said.

Staff at the Edgar Benjamin alleged that any board members who raised issues about management of the facility were removed, and that no board member, save for Francis, who serves as president, has set foot in the building.

Sellstrom also pointed to a “highly unorthodox” interchange of Francis’s personal money to pay for things like payroll with a 12% interest rate.

A series of request forms for checks cut by the facility in 2023 to reimburse Francis for personal money used to pay the Edgar Benjamin’s payroll and other expenses show a total of at least $660,000 given back to Francis, including interest.

Separately, bank statements obtained by the Banner show payments of large bills on an American Express card for Francis. In March 2023, the bill was $100,000. In July, it was $85,000.

Francis’ alleged financial mismanagement came under fire at a public hearing on March 26, held by the Department of Public Health.

“If we’re in such financial distress, and if we’re still able to pay a salary in excess of $625,000, maybe you are the financial distress,” said Henderson, the admissions director.

At that hearing on the closure process, which took place at the Thelma D. Burns Building in Roxbury, a crowd of residents, staff, guardians and community members voiced strong support for Francis to step down or be removed from his role, and for a receiver, if appointed, to figure out how to keep the facility running.

That public hearing is part of a process to inform the department’s response to the Edgar Benjamin’s closure plan. It has until April 9 to approve or provide comments on the plan.

Sellstrom said the community’s goal is to keep the facility open but that, once appointed, a receiver would be able to assess all options and determine if that is feasible.

“The community is strongly behind keeping the Benjamin as the premier institution that it is in the community,” Sellstrom said. “We believe that with the appointment of a receiver that will be the first order of business, to examine how to make that a reality.”

Specifics around what happens next and when remain to be seen. As of Wednesday, when the ruling immediately went into effect, the appointed receiver Feaster has the authority to manage and operate the facility. Sellstrom said he expects the top priority to be to ensure safety and stability for residents and staff. After that, it will be up to the receiver to determine if the closure goes on.

Ahead of the ruling, Feaster said he didn’t know much about what the circumstances are at the Edgar Benjamin, but said he believes he can bring a sense of order to the process, given his career as an attorney, his longstanding community connections, and a previous five-year stint as a receiver at the Roxbury Comprehensive Community Health Center.

In 2013, Feaster was tapped by then-Attorney General Martha Coakley to take over the Roxbury health center and guide it through a tumultuous closure, helping to transition patients to other facilities and assess the financial situation that had led to that health center’s collapse.

Bolling said that if a receiver were appointed, that person would be one part of the puzzle but would have to turn to someone with nursing home administration expertise to keep the facility open long-term.

Feaster said he would want to be able to provide another set of eyes on the situation.

“You want to look at whether you can stabilize the organization such that it can continue,” he said “That’s the threshold determination, in my view.”

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan - review. T he title of Jennifer Egan's new novel may make it sound more like an episode of Scooby-Doo than an exceptional rendering of contemporary ...
Book Review
Check. 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. Certainly the targets ...
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction ...
A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. 6. Pub Date: March 6, 2000. ISBN: -375-70376-4.
A Visit from the Goon Squad Review: Rhythms of Connection
A Visit from the Goon Squad Review . Written by Jennifer Egan, 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' is a Pulitzer-winning book that captures the harsh reality of how time flashes so quickly before our eyes - forcing us to watch our dreams and aspirations fizzle out. The book is gripping and engaging and leaves helpful tips for all readers in ...
Reviews of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers. Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the ...
A Visit from the Goon Squad
A Visit from the Goon Squad. The story begins in the late '70s California punk scene and ends in a near future where tattoos and piercings are outmoded and babies are proficient at text messaging. In the 50 or so intervening years, a set of characters drift in and out of the pages, their lives intersecting in often surprising but poignant ways.
Review of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
More by this author. From one of the most celebrated writers of our time, a literary figure with cult status, a "sibling novel" to her Pulitzer Prize- and NBCC Award-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad - an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private.
Reviews « Jennifer Egan
"A Visit From the Goon Squad is now making its own way inexorably, because almost everybody who reads it is going to recommend it to everybody they know." ... BBC Saturday Review, 3/19. The group discussion of GOON SQUAD begins 13 minutes in (ie, almost at the end, after a long discussion of a Neil LaBute play) Listen to the Podcast. The ...
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
In a generation of "Pointers," the relationship between and among songs on an album—its narrative—is all but lost in favor of hit single after single. But in Jennifer Egan's new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, an array of stories mix into a cohesive novel, each chapter self-contained yet fluid as the grooves of an LP. by Jackie ...
Jennifer Egan's 'Visit From the Goon Squad'
A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. By Jennifer Egan. Illustrated. 274 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the ...
A Visit from the Goon Squad
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a 2011 Pulitzer Prize -winning work of fiction by American author Jennifer Egan. The book is a set of thirteen interrelated stories with a large set of characters all connected to Bennie Salazar, a record company executive, and his assistant, Sasha. The book centers on the mostly self-destructive characters of ...
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Egan's ' A Visit from the Goon Squad ' came in June 2010 as the author's fourth book after ' The Invisible Circus ,' ' Look at Me, ' and ' The Keep.'. The book took a non-conventional approach in the genre, narrative style, characters, and technique, exploring the passage of time (how time just never stops for anyone) - in ...
A Visit from the Goon Squad
The Boston Globe. As thought-provoking and entertaining as Egan's speculative projections are, A Visit From the Goon Squad is, in the end, far more than a demonstration of the author's skill in bending time, form, and genre. It's a distinctive and often moving portrayal of how — even when their inhabitants don't realize it — lives ...
Book review: 'A Visit From the Goon Squad' by Jennifer Egan
Alfred A. Knopf: 278 pp., $25.95. Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad" is a lively novel in stories about Sasha, an assistant in the music business, and her boss, Bennie Salazar. It ...
A Visit from the Goon Squad: Pulitzer Prize Winner
Jennifer Eganis the author of four novels: A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus; and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: A Visit from the Goon Squad
"Goon Squad" is certainly a worthy novel rife with literary innovation, which is, of course, very good for the genre of the novel. Hence, I must highly recommend this literary novel with a 4.52 Star Rating. "Novel Criticism" Critical Performance Indicators (CPIs) Review of: "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan 1. Stylistic Invention ...
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: A Visit from the Goon Squad
Though it is concerned with being relevant and modern, A Visit from the Goon Squad fails to have anything truly new to say, and is therefore completely forgettable.Rating: 2 starsMediocre writing, lack of characterization, no discernible meaning, self-conscious, labored, forgettable. Read more.
Book Review: A Visit From The Goon Squad
Opinions differ. Awards are questionable. This book just didn't work for me. The writing was good, sometimes great, but the structure was ridiculously convoluted, the characters were largely unsympathetic, and many of the literary devices felt forced. Coming off of last week'sfantastic read, this book was a chore.
Book Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction ...
Jennifer Egan and the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan's latest novel, "The Candy House," is a follow-up to her Pulitzer-winning novel "A Visit From the Goon Squad," which came out in 2010. That year she appeared on the podcast ...
A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread
12 ratings5 reviews. Jennifer Egan described her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad as a combination of Proust and The Sopranos. In rereading the book, Ivan Kreilkamp takes Egan up on her comparison, showing how it blends a concern with the status of the novel in the twenty-first century with an elegiac meditation on how ...
Community members sue for receivership of Benjamin nursing home
The suit for receivership comes after the Edgar Benjamin's administration announced in February its intent to close the almost-100-year-old facility, which currently serves about 70 residents, most of whom are people of color. Ahead of the hearing, former state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson said she was "delighted" the case is being heard in court.

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Judge rules in favor of receivership for Benjamin nursing home

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