A Visit from the Goon Squad

Loved it. Such unique storytelling in many ways, really captivating and just generally fun and interesting to read.

Any book with a chapter discussing pauses in popular songs (with The Four Tops' “Bernadette” being a particularly great one) is doing something right. Egan is a very skilled writer, who says more in a paragraph than other writers say in a chapter. Though her characters were really well drawn, I didn't particularly like any of them. So while I savored every page, it felt like something was missing.

I really thought I was going to love this book early on.

The first chapter is told from the perspective of a kleptomaniac, who lies to her boyfriend about the actions of a woman whom she stole something from. Her boyfriend goes on a rant about the (false) actions of the woman, and the narrator becomes “irked by his obliviousness even as she strove to preserve it”. That line to me was just a brilliant representation of a weird internal conflict that I was hoping would continue.

Unfortunately, while the first few chapters delve into these sort of human weaknesses, as I got further into the book I found it dipping farther into more of human depravity that I did not find enjoyable. And by the end, the “future” premises are entirely ridiculous (even if that is supposed to be the point), where society has become so commercial that babies just a few months old have their own advanced cell phones and are directly marketed to, I was just completely checked out.

I think there are some neat things here and there. Each chapter jumps around in time and to different characters that were usually tangential characters in a previous chapter, which is something I haven't really seen before and is often effective, but almost as often is very unsubtle (“Hey, remember that time that thing happened 30 pages ago?”).

I listened to this via audiobook from the library on the Libby app. The narrator Roxana Ortega was good. It felt like she chose a single main tick of each character to base her voices of them around (in control, frantic energy, sultry, etc), which can be a bit on the nose, but does a good job of differentiating a big cast and allowing you to understand the character quickly.

Music ruins lives
why be a better person
focus on the flaws.

A different kind of novel. Short stories, perhaps, but still a novel. Poignant. I was totally immersed, inside the characters. It's unusual for an experimental work to be so accessible.

Time is a stealth goon so read this one slowly appreciating every chapter's poignant portrait.

Please dog, don't let me become this one day.

I just realized I never wrote a review for this, but I can't even remember when I read it. I definitely liked it, and recall being pleasantly surprised–Egan's characters aren't always sympathetic, and I wondered how she was going to write an ending that actually satisfied. Then she did.

Thought I'd enjoy this book much more than I did. Not sure why I didn't enjoy it. Felt more like a series of connected short stories than a cohesive novel. 

Time As A Bully

This novel is more reminiscent of short stories that are interconnected. Some of the stories are interesting and fast moving, others seem like fillers. What I am still mulling over is how does the title connect to the stories. Is time the goon? The one consistent theme is that time has not been good to any of the characters.

Nowhere near as interesting as I expected it to be, considering it won the Pulitzer. But a few good scenes.

This book is ambitious and hard to wrangle at first. So many interwoven perspectives, some in the same chapter, some of them (Jules, Alex) difficult reads for different reasons. It's a mixed bag because of this, but the high points (Dolly, Old Lou, the PowerPoint chapter) really deliver.

The only thing I liked about this book is the style of writing. Other than that, it was pretty darn boring. I couldn't even understand the point of it.

it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteay man on a slide guitar.

The last chapter/story makes this book work.

I get why people are loving this. The structure is very impressive, and Egan writes very well about dashed dreams and the like. And yet, it didn't always hang together for me. Despite the connections between all the characters, sometimes this just read like a bunch of short stories.

It's appropriate that I read [b:Cloud Atlas 49628 Cloud Atlas David Mitchell http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170360941s/49628.jpg 1871423] not long ago.  That novel and A Visit from the Goon Squad share some similarities in structure: both are essentially a set of short stories, each in a different style, that are all connected in some way.  Ultimately, I have to say that I enjoyed Cloud Atlas more than Goon Squad.The main difference between the two is the purpose that the structure and style serves.  In Cloud Atlas, the structure made me curious as to how the stories would end up connecting to each other.  The changes in style worked because they suited the different settings of each story.In Goon Squad, conversely, the structure and style work against the story.  The point-of-view change in each chapter makes it difficult to connect to any one character.  By the time you get to know a character, their story is pretty much over and we're on to the next one.  It didn't help that most of the characters were expressing the same dissatisfaction and sadness over getting old.  I know that aging and the passage of time are the themes of the book, but it got a little monotonous because everyone in the story is filled with angst and regret.I respect Egan's writing style for the most part; she definitely expresses ideas very creatively.  However, I think she overdoes it in a couple of chapters.  The chapter about Rob is narrated in the second person.  I don't think there's any reason for it, other than to do something different.  It's almost like she wrote it in first person and then simply replaced every “I” with “you.”  I kept forgetting that it was narrated this way and had to reorient myself every time I came across the word “you.”The other chapter that bothered me was the PowerPoint chapter, supposedly a presentation put together by a 12-year-old girl.  It's almost a shame because I found the girl's autistic brother to be interesting.  The brother is obsessed with pauses in songs, and I thought it was a cool concept.  Unfortunately, that distinctive character was masked by the quirky format for the chapter.Overall, I didn't really enjoy the book.  I admire the technique and writing style, but the lack of an end-to-end narrative and some overly gimmicky sections took me out of it.

I definitely think it's an interesting read. It's one of those books where several people's lives collide and they end up touching each other in some form of the other. I like that there are some big questions asked in this book. Questions such as what makes a person successful, what do you do when you regret parts of your life, and how do you people relate to another. For that reason, the psychological aspects of this book make up for the lack of clearly defined protagonists, a solid plot line, and the disjointed narration that others have complained about. Though I still don't understand why this book won so many awards I can say it is a solid book that deserves to be read.

I'm still mulling over what I thought about this book. I waver between it being just okay, and it being pretty good. It was a book about nothing and everything at the same time.

Hmm. I liked a lot of these as individual stories quite a lot. I'm not quite sure how it worked as a whole novel? It was fun to go back and recognize threads as they were revisited, and some individual stories in this were amazing. I also think maybe my standards for this were raised very high due to this having won pretty much every major literary award? I still liked it a lot but maybe I don't know if anything could live up to all the hype this book has?I remember reading Selling the General in [b:The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 821708 The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 Dave Eggers https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1382939274s/821708.jpg 2845176] and I think maybe that was my favorite story? But also it was one of the stories that seemed to contribute the least to the overall narrative of the story?Oh, also, the ending??? Was??? Ehhhh???

This started out as a good read but after about 50 pages I just lost interest in the subject matter (Punk music scene)! Book was the 2011 Pulitzer prize winner and winner of many other awards that year! Subject matter is what turned me off! David N.

6 stars!

13 stories with overlapping characters, and shuffled in time, that circle around characters that are in or adjacent to the music scene. At the beginning I was quite engaged, as the writing is good, but with every chapter/story it started to feel more like a short-story collection and my interest in the characters started to dwindle. The same structure worked well for me in [b:Homegoing 27071490 Homegoing Yaa Gyasi https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1448108591s/27071490.jpg 47113792]. Which must have been the exception to the/my rule.

The annual Pulitzer Prize winner read and I wasn't impressed. This should have been everything I like, music and strong females and something a bit grungy and grubby.
However, I couldn't keep track of the characters (usually I love a time-hop) and quite honestly, I just didn't care. There were snippets of interest and connection but then it would lose me again, there was no-one I liked or even had any emotional response to. Just blah, and don't get me started on the slide section - no, not impressed at all.

2.5⭐ scaled up because the writing was fine.

This book is at its essence a whole bunch of people's seemingly unrelated, messy stories woven into one story. It points out that people are much more connected than they realise, a beautiful thing about life on earth: we tend to run into everyone else every so often. Many of the stories were heartbreaking, and left my mind full of the sweet, poignant rhythm that is life. It was very interesting to read a book that doesn't stick to one perspective, but leaps all over the place from first-person, to third-person, to a chapter entirely composed of digital slides. This book is extremely relatable and all the characters are very real- I would recommend it to any person who is alive.

Whatever it's literary bonafides (I'll leave that to the pros) this book is just very cool. If I had read it in high school I would have been obsessed with it. The stories set in the past made me think of Douglas Copeland, while others (particularly “Selling the General” and “Pure Language”) remind me of George Saunders. The last three chapters are my favorite, and however gimmicky “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake” may be criticized, it is also the most poignant.

“Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.”

“A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan is about being young and getting older and brought back so much nostalgia for the grunge days of my youth in the 90s. And of course, interconnected short stories! It's a beautiful way to structure an expansive narrative to show perspective and navigate scope without overwhelming the reader. And the wonderful characters are certainly no goons. They're all rock gods in their own right.