A Visit from the Goon Squad 9781445859835 Books
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A Visit from the Goon Squad 9781445859835 Books
This book was so much different than what I expected. I certainly wasn't expecting a narrative told in separate connected stories (think: Olive Kitteridge, The Tsar of Love and Techno), that's for sure. It's a bold approach, and it works.The back cover of the book does a pretty apt job explaining it: it's about aging punk rock record executive Bennie and his younger troubled assistant, Sasha. It's indirectly about them, at least. After starting off with stories focused on Bennie and Sasha as the main characters, the other stories are about people who knew them throughout their lives. Bennie and Sasha serve as the connecting thread that binds everyone together.
This kind of narrative is gutsy because you have to make sure a) each story is interesting in its own right while b) holding the reader's attention with so many different characters and c) maintaining enough of a connection to the central characters that it doesn't feel random.
Here, Egan succeeds on all fronts. With captivating characters and intellectually stimulating prose, she kept me fully engaged and eager to read each succeeding story. She even plays around with form in an exhilarating way; one story (one of my favorites) is told as a sort of PowerPoint presentation from the perspective of a young girl.
I enjoyed this book immensely in spite of not connecting with it emotionally as much as I did intellectually.
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A Visit from the Goon Squad 9781445859835 Books Reviews
My review and rating - as for all my reports - reflects how I react to the book and should not be seen some sort of objective score. I did not love this book but it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 - so obviously the experts see it differently from me.
When I first picked out a couple of Jennifer Egan's novels to read I decided to start with Manhattan Beach because the structure of this one sounded daunting - if flashes back and forth from past to present to future focusing on different characters of a loosely bound group. Additionally the point of view switches between first, second, and third person. So, you have to be on your mental toes while reading - I wasn't.
The two main characters are Bernie - a music producer and Sasha - his one time assistant. The books starts with Sasha then jumps to other people who know her or Bernie. It is like a set of short stories rather than a novel - except the chapters all revolve around the two main characters and couldn't stand on their own. In other words - exactly like a book of short stories except they aren't.
When one of the characters - who earlier tried to commit suicide - is high he points to the central point of the book
"...and the question is, which one is really 'you', the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching?" [Loc 2718]
As we work our way through the story, that is our job which version of this person is the "real" version. But of course we change through our lives and we are the accumulation of all our history.
We read a couple of direct references to the goon squad; I'll leave it to you to read so I won't spoil it here.
This book really never grabbed me; as a result I'd put it aside for a few days and when I picked it up again the next chapter was in a different time with different characters and a different point of view. As a result I had to keep going back to remind myself who is/was who. My advice is dive in and swim through it quickly. That way it will likely hang together more may resonate better. The stories and characters themselves are interesting and the writing saves this from being a two star book - for me. The story about La Doll - Dolly's - fall, comeback, and retreat is especially good.
Not only is the writing unobtrusively perfect, but the structure of this book is a delightful mystery. Complete characters, inventive presentation...a treasure for literature lovers!
I REALLY wanted to love this story. I thought I would. Typically, any book that involves the music biz with its myriad characters that come in every shade and style of humanity completely engrosses me. I love the irreverence, the wild ride of rock & roll mixed with the roller coaster that is life in the city, life growing up, life in the push and pull of families; heartache, mental illness, etc., so this should've knocked my socks off. I wanted it to, but it didn't.
Maybe it was my state of mind, I don't know, but there was not one emotional punch that landed with me. The characters were cleverly constructed, with lots of smart dialogue and angst-ridden plot points, but I was not moved by a one. And, frankly, even after repeatedly checking the book description to remind myself of who characters were and what they were supposed to be doing, their outlines somehow kept disappearing in the meandering narrative. I couldn't keep them straight, and their vignettes and individual chapters (often with bouncing time-lines and seemingly little connection) were indistinct and, for me, ultimately forgettable.
At times I felt the writer was working too hard to be clever the Power Point display towards the top of the third act (or maybe the third of four acts?) was likely meant to convey some sort of meaning, but on an e-reader it was illegible and though a weblink was offered, even that suggestion was emblematic of the problem the device took me out of the story; it was pages and pages and pages, and had I actually left my book to go look at this on a website, I'd've LITERALLY been taken out of the story! As it was, I skipped ahead, just wanting to grab onto some thread that kept me as connected as possible to the difficult-to-follow narrative.
For me it never got there. There were some interesting, well written sections, but it wasn't cohesive enough to really impel this reader forward to find out what was going to happen. I did get to the end...and then...it was over. That was about it. It left no mark.
All art is subjective, I understand that, and clearly this is a case where my perspective is somewhat out-of-sync Egan has won enough awards for this book, including the Pulitzer Prize, to make clear that whatever has eluded me was less of a problem for others! So be it. She is a skilled writer, with a mastery of language, and this may just be one piece of her work that did not resonate. Perhaps another of her books will.
This book was so much different than what I expected. I certainly wasn't expecting a narrative told in separate connected stories (think Olive Kitteridge, The Tsar of Love and Techno), that's for sure. It's a bold approach, and it works.
The back cover of the book does a pretty apt job explaining it it's about aging punk rock record executive Bennie and his younger troubled assistant, Sasha. It's indirectly about them, at least. After starting off with stories focused on Bennie and Sasha as the main characters, the other stories are about people who knew them throughout their lives. Bennie and Sasha serve as the connecting thread that binds everyone together.
This kind of narrative is gutsy because you have to make sure a) each story is interesting in its own right while b) holding the reader's attention with so many different characters and c) maintaining enough of a connection to the central characters that it doesn't feel random.
Here, Egan succeeds on all fronts. With captivating characters and intellectually stimulating prose, she kept me fully engaged and eager to read each succeeding story. She even plays around with form in an exhilarating way; one story (one of my favorites) is told as a sort of PowerPoint presentation from the perspective of a young girl.
I enjoyed this book immensely in spite of not connecting with it emotionally as much as I did intellectually.
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