A Visit from the Goon Squad [Paperback]

Jennifer Egan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 22, 2011

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.

National Bestseller
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Best Book

One of the Best Books of the Year: Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Newsday, NPR's On Point, O, the Oprah Magazine, People, Publishers Weekly, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Slate, Time, The Washington Post, and Village Voice

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In reading this novel of interconnected lives at the fringes of the music industry, Roxana Ortega freights her breathy voice with the moral confusion and sadness of Egan's disaffected, dismayed characters. A surprisingly supple instrument, Ortega's voice can drop to a gruff near-growl, and she craftily uses her range to convey the feeling of the bottom dropping out of the characters' lives. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 22).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics loved Egan's newest novel, describing it as "audacious" and "extraordinary" (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the hands of a less-gifted writer, Egans's time-hopping narrative, unorthodox format, and motley cast of characters might have failed spectacularly. But it works here, primarily because each person shines within his or her individual chapter that offers a distinct voice and a fascinating backstory. A few reviewers mentioned the uneven nature of the chapters and the different stylistic experiments within them. Yet, hailed as "a frequently dazzling piece of layer-cake metafiction" (Entertainment Weekly), A Visit from the Goon Squad is a gutsy novel that succeeds on all levels. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; 1 edition (March 22, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307477479
• ISBN-13: 978-0307477477
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (603 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #18 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > Single Author
  • #56 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Psychological Thrillers

More About the Author

Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago, where her paternal grandfather was a police commander and bodyguard for President Truman during his visits to that city. She was raised in San Francisco and studied at the University of Pennsylvania and St. John's College, Cambridge, in England. In those student years she did a lot of traveling, often with a backpack: China, the former USSR, Japan, much of Europe, and those travels became the basis for her first novel, The Invisible Circus, and her story collection, Emerald City. She came to New York in 1987 and worked an array of wacky jobs while learning to write: catering at the World Trade Center; joining the word processing pool at a midtown law firm; serving as the private secretary for the Countess of Romanones, an OSS spy-turned-Spanish countess (by marriage), who wrote a series of bestsellers about her spying experiences and famous friends.
Egan has published short stories in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta and McSweeney's. Her first novel, The Invisible Circus, came out in 1995 and was released as a movie starring Cameron Diaz in 2001. Her second novel, Look at Me, was a National Book Award Finalist in 2001, and her third, The Keep, was a national bestseller. Also a journalist, Egan has written many cover stories for the New York Times Magazine on topics ranging from young fashion models to the secret online lives of closeted gay teens. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.

Photo credit Pieter M. Van Hattem

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1,029 of 1,121 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Kindle readers beware October 25, 2010

By diane roy

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Although the book, itself, was thought provoking and cleverly structured, I would warn anyone who elects to read the book digitally that the "powerpoint" chapters are extremely difficult to read on the Kindle. The print is so small and the back grounds so dark that even a magnifying glass was little help. The font size selection feature on the Kindle did not work on the "slides" for those chapters.

511 of 559 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What happens between A and B? May 5, 2010

By Susan Tunis TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

After reading a few chapters of Jennifer Egan's latest novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, I'd determined it was really a collection of linked stories more than a novel. Reading further, however, I saw the larger themes and the cohesiveness of the whole. It is, indeed, a novel, and an excellent one at that!

The book opens sometime in the recent past, and kleptomaniac Sasha is recounting a story to her therapist. Her former boss, record producer Benny Salazar, is mentioned in passing. The next chapter takes place several years earlier. Here Sasha is still Benny's assistant, and now it is he that is the first person narrator. Benny's just trying to get through a visit with his pre-teen son while mentally stifling a lifetime's worth of shame. He reflects, in passing, on his old high school gang, and in the next chapter we're back in San Francisco, circa 1980, with them. Benny wants Alice, but Alice wants Scotty. Scotty wants Jocelyn, but teenage Jocelyn is seeing Lou, a record producer more than twice her age. Don't worry, he'll get his chapter.

They all get a chapter or two or three. The story skips back and forth in time and place. The voice moves from first person to third person and even to second. Asides or characters that seemed tangential become central. And eventually several themes become apparent. The main one is not even subtle, as the traversing between points A and B is referenced several times in various ways. Scotty at one point asks, "I want to know what happened between A and B." An aging rock star's comeback album is entitled A to B. Even the two sections of this book, which might have been labeled "Part I" and "Part II" in another book, are here "A" and "B."

Another theme is the passage of time. The novel, as I mentioned earlier, moves back and forth freely along the timeline of characters' lives. Ranging from around 1980 to some point in the 2020's, we see the (often ravaging) effects of time.

One character states, "Time's a goon, right? Isn't that the expression?"
Another responds, "I've never heard that. 'Time's a goon?'"
"Would you disagree?"
"No."

The episodes that Egan spotlights are all, in some way, transformative for her characters. And let's talk about those characters. Reviewers like me will often extol "richly-drawn characters." It isn't until I read a novel like this--with insight so deep that you feel you know everything it's possible to know about these people based on brief snippets of their lives--that it really hits home what characterization is all about. Egan is THAT good.

Plus, there's the language. Her prose is truly a pleasure to read, no matter how absurd or at times unpleasant the subject matter. Egan's pointillistic novel roams from the New York music scene to an African safari; from the affluent suburbs to life on the edge in Naples, Italy; from a dictator's palace to our collective future. And in careening from place to place, time to time, and character to character in these linked lives, Jennifer Egan takes us from point A to point B.

167 of 185 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "You grew up...just like the rest of us." July 7, 2010

By Jill I. Shtulman TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

In Jennifer's Egan's lively and inventive novel - A Visit From The Goon Squad - each character feels his or her mortality. Each is in a tenuous danse-a-deux with time and aging, otherwise known as "the goon."

Every chapter is told from a different character's point of view and it is no accident that the novel starts with Sasha - the assistant of music producer Bennie Salazar, one of the key focal points. Sasha has sticky fingers and is constantly pirating away meaningless objects to compose "the warped core of her life." These objects serve as talismans, placing her at arm's length from the love she wants.

And Bennie? A one-time band member and arrogant indie genius, he is now one step removed from the action, adding flakes of gold to his coffee to enhance his libido and bemoaning the state of digital technology. Like Sasha, he's at arm's length from a direct connection with love and life in general.

Bennie and Sasha will never know much about each other - even though they've worked together for decades - but the reader comes to know them through various stories. We get to know Lou, Bennie's charismatic, misbehaving, skirt-chasing mentor during a harrowing African safari; Dolly, the PR mogul who places her own daughter in harm's way; Jules, the ex-con journalist whose lunch with a Hollywood grade B actress goes terribly wrong; Ted Hollander, Sasha's art-loving uncle, who travels to Naples to find her. Each will add a little something to our understanding.

Yet none of their stories is told in chronological order, or even through flashbacks. Rather, time is revealed like the grooves of a record album, jumping from track to track in what appears to be no particular order. As each character takes his or her own moment in the spotlight, he or she is desperate for a second chance and to hold off the approaching goon. At one point, Dolly reflects, "Her deeper error had preceded all that: she's overlooked a seismic shift...Now and then (she) finds herself wondering what sort of event or convergence would define the new world in which she found herself, as Capote's party had, or Woodstock, or Malcolm Forbes's seventieth birthday, or the party for Talk Magazine. She had no idea."

The rich, lush, adventurous life that these characters once lived is being replaced by PowerPoints (one young character reveals her story through a 40-page PowerPoint presentation), paid "parrots" who create social media buzz, truncated emails, and digital technology. As Egan's characters "strut and fret" their last hours on the broader stage, the world of technology is making them increasingly irrelevant. When Alex - Sasha's would be beau whom we meet in the first chapter - tells Bennie, "I don't know what happened to me," Bennie's answer is, "You grew up, Alex...just like the rest of us."