So I need to start by pointing out that this must have been an extremely challenging and fun book to write. Jennifer Egan is clearly an excellent writer given the quality of narrative, voice, and style. It is a unique story that won’t be for everyone, but if you can get on board you’re in for a wild ride.
“It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?”
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a multi-perspective interlocking narrative that focuses on the grungy and glamorous lives of those in the entertainment industry, from a kleptomaniac record executive’s assistant to a shamed public relations agent representing a notorious dictator – there seems to be a little something for everyone. The drama is unending and comedy uproarious. Very few authors can accomplish such intellectual wit with stupid jokes that make the reader feel they’ve been on a disorienting punk-rock trip.
There were moments in this novel that I absolutely loved and were so original and bizarre that I can’t imagine experiencing anything like them again. It was a unique mind that imagined this goon squad and I won’t forget it.
“The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.”
However, the parts greatly outmatched the sum in this one. Each individual section of this novel seemed great, but it wasn’t until the end that one realizes each part drops sharply off a cliff to nowhere in particular. Perhaps that’s what Egan was going for, but I couldn’t help feeling a lack of completion and catharsis as I read the last pages of the novel.
Now I am not typically one to be fussy over endings, but I do feel like books should have them. This book does not so much end, as just stops. It felt as though Egan simply just stopped writing and sent the manuscript off to the publisher.
That might sound harsh but I honestly loved this book. It was so startlingly entrenched in a topsy-turvy punk rock culture that pulls you in and just doesn’t let go. I completely understand why this novel won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and I also understand everyone who didn’t end up liking it.
“th blu nyt
th stRs u can’t c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy”
Reading the back cover I never would have picked this book up. It was upon insistent recommendation that I finally sat down to read it, and I am so happy I did. Intellectual humor is – in my personal opinion – one of the most difficult feats for an author. To make people laugh without cheap tricks and tropes is downright Shakespearian.
There, I said it and I meant it.
Read this book. If nothing else it is unlike any other.
VAN BIBLIO 