A Visit from the Goon Squad: Jennifer Egan: Structure Through Disorder

This book won the Pulitzer a few years back. As someone who doesn't read much new fiction, I’ve decided to remedy the situation. This doesn't mean giving up on classics or anything like that, but simply adding to my diet.

The structure of this book is interesting, to say the least. Every chapter is written by different narrator (sometimes first person, sometimes third). The chapters also go back and forth in time. Most intriguingly, the chapters are not all about the same people. They are held together by a set of characters; but there’s no central protagonist. So the annoying boss of the protagonist in the chapter 1, who’s only mentioned a few times, becomes the protagonist in chapter 2. And then this boss is only a minor kid on the outside of a punk rock group in chapter 3. And so on.

I decided I like the book. Now, I like most books, so I’m relatively easy to please. But I (for the most part) bought Egan’s artifice. The beginning and end of the book were weak, but the middle was pretty terrific, held together by some really funny chapters. We are transported to the future by the end of the novel, and Egan falls into clichés as we are brought into a world of Uber- and spiraling commercialism (now kids don’t run the music market; babies and toddlers do, since they can order songs on their little computer-things); a world affected by the global warming crisis (the world is more of a dessert these days); and so on.

The novel is tied together thematically, focusing on the music market, the collective inability of people to understand and communicate with one another (especially across generational lines), the crux of moral decisions, and other such subjects. While Egan’s creativity makes the trip worthwhile, I got the impression of someone trying to make more of the human person and ethics than his or her own intellectual foundation allows for. Egan wants to believe in the worth of the individual, amidst the craziness of the world and consumerism and impersonal structures, and she tries to present him or her as such; but there’s a certain hollowness is the attempt, a result of the lack of intellectual (and dare I say, theological) underpinning to her worldview.

By the way, there’s a whole chapter in slides, like PowerPoint, with flow charts and the like. I was skeptical of it as I began it, but it was well done. Impressive – like the novel as a whole.