A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
My rating: 5/5 cats
hell’s bells. believe this hype.
this book is the saddest, truest, wisest book i have ever read in a single day. which is not to belittle it – my tear-assing through it is because i did not want to stop reading it and resented any interruption that tried to get in my way. i am someone who plans things. i have timetables in my head – i have to, in order to get everything done. nothing important, just “at 8:00 i will untangle my necklaces while i watch my netflix. at 10:00, i will fold my laundry and then pay bills, etc etc.” this book ruined all of my good intentions. i read straight through one mental time-allotment after another, leaving dishes unwashed and e-mails unanswered. and i did not care one bit.
as i read, i kept thinking, “this is exactly right – this woman gets it, this is just what i was talking about the other day.” because karen has been doing a little bit of dwelling lately, and this book really captured so many universals of youth, adulthood …and the rest. she knows just how to twist the knife.
everyone has been praising this book since it came out, but all i knew going into it was that there was a powerpoint chapter and a dfw chapter (which i had already read, at greg’s command, months ago). i didn’t even know they were stories that combined to show facets of people’s lives in different times and places and stages and manifestations. i didn’t know who would attain closure and who would fade away, i just thought it was another book by the lady who wrote invisible circus.
i had read invisible circus years ago and had been unimpressed, and then i start hearing all this talk about look at me and how it is this incredible book, but i looked at the cover and i thought – “no, thank you.”i am pretty sure i bought the keep, but it got sucked into one of the stacks here, never to resurface. but then this comes out and greg and tom fuller are praising it to the heavens, and then tom gives me his copy to have forever, so i pretty much have to read it. i do not disobey my work-dad.
and as always, father knows best…
i have never seen crash because “they” tell me it is retarded, but i did see 21 grams and babel and amores perros and 11:14 and all of those others – disjointed narratives where one thing affects another thing and it’s all connected, man… (amores perros is the only one you need to see from the above list), but how often does it really work, and how often is it just flashy storytelling to compensate for lack of a true plot??
it’s the same in the litworld. i thought michael cunningham’s the hours did it really well, and this – well, this makes it work perfectly. because it is less about the impact an action has upon others than having the opportunity to understand a character’s motivations from witnessing snapshot-chapters from different periods and the -oh god not again – it is like a sneeze – zeitgeist of the pop cultural (punk rock-ical) and historical climates of these poor broken characters.
but elizabeth – it is not a downer!! it is not one of my “downer books.” it is more… gently nostalgic. and bewildered. definitely bewildered.
She was thinking of the old days, as she and Bennie now called them – not just pre-Crandale but premarriage, preparenthood, pre-money, pre-hard drug renunciation, preresponsibility of any kind, when they were still kicking around the lower east side with Bosco, going to bed after sunrise, turning up at strangers’ apartments, having sex in quasi-public, engaging in daring acts that had more than once included (for her) shooting heroin, because none of it was serious. They were young and lucky and strong – what did they have to worry about?? If they didn’t like the result, they could go back and start again.
i mean – gutpunch. this kind of blithe optimism is exactly what touched me when i was reading shiver shake. remember being indestructible?? i sure do.
this is also one of the few works where 9/11 is used tastefully and more or less subtly, and the absence of the buildings is worked very well into the pervasive loss that holds this book together.
the NYU chapter is greg’s favorite, and it is both heartbreaking on its own and bittersweet for me because it could have very easily been me. i remember sunwarmed fire escapes between classes and bobst and for me it was mamoun’s falafel, but regardless. it was both familiar and far away. i liked the naples chapter best, because for me it is storytelling 101 – a perfect story and the last line kills me because “muttered” is the best possible word there, and it complicates what could have been a very easy and pat ending.
jennifer egan i luvs you.
