What the blurb tells us about A Visit from the Goon Squad:
A Visit from the Goon Squad vividly captures the moments where lives interact, and where fortunes ebb and flow. Egan depicts with elegant prose and often heart-wrenching simplicity, the sad consequences for those who couldn’t fake it during their wild youth – madness, suicide or prison – in this captivating, wryly humorous story of tempation and loss.
Wonderguy recommended Jennifer Eagan‘s book to me because I like reading short stories and this book is structured like a collection of short stories — though not quite. I read in one review that Egan herself does not like to categorize this book, even though a lot of readers feel the need to know for sure — have the author tell them, so to say –—whether they are reading a ‘novel’ or a ‘short story collection’. However, I don’t share this need for classification since it works just fine for without being filed and categorized, so let’s just roll with it.
Not your usual novel …
I love books like A Visit from the Goon Squad, with their many overlapping narratives and large cast of different characters that all somehow ‘work together’ to tell one wide-ranging story — even though they are challenging for me because I am awful at remembering names. So while I’m all for diving into the lives and stories of different people I’m also all about forgetting their ties to the overarching story and why I’m reading about them. However, with the help of a notepad and some common sense I was able to stay on top of it (most of the time).
Egan lets those various chapters and stories dance with each other, like a well choreographed and fluent harmony of moves and interactions, so as to paint a giant picture of different lives that crossed and at times clashed with each other. With some protagonists one may think “well, he/she definitely got what he/she deserved,” not necessarily in a positive way (I will not give away names, because I don’t want to spoil all the fun; also, it helps that I’ve already forgotten most of the names anyway…). Then again, the fate of others may take you by complete surprise, leave you elated or rather crestfallen as to how this could happen to them.
Thanks to Egan’s excellent storytelling, while I might not always have remembered names, I always remembered the characters. In creating them she added a certain feel to every single one so as to make them stand out not only in an artistic, but rather quite intuitive way (which sounds way more esoteric as I wanted it to). It’s one way to portray them as smart, but quite another to give them a smartass aura. For me, it worked.
Long story short: A Visit from the Goon Squad is a harmonious composition of life stories that are anything but harmonious, glorious or even positive (in some cases), arranged in a versatile, diverse, and, in some instances, rather unusual tone and style. With helluvalot of names…
What’s next?
After finishing A Visit from the Goon Squad I was hooked and wanted to read another book by the author. I decided to go for The Keep next.
Let’s first take a look at what the blurb tells us:
In the wilds of Eastern Europe there is a mysterious castle that has stood for hundreds of years, steeped in blood lore and family pride…
Then in steps Danny, a damaged, cynical, 36-year-old New Yorker who rarely goes anywhere that isn’t Wi-Fi compatible. He has come to help his enigmatic cousin refurbish the castle and turn it into a luxury hotel.
But then things start to get weird. A sinister baroness, a tragic accident in a fathomless pool, a treacherous underground labyrinth — as terror overwhelms Danny, he discovers that ‘reality’ may be something he can no longer afford to believe in…
What starts out as a seemingly ordinary tale of a guy who had to get away from his life for undisclosed reasons turns out to be a much more complex and polyphonic tale about life and what we make of it. Here too, people meet and get to know each other, some for better, some for worse, and a surprising twist brings together two (and even more) storylines that initially don’t seem to have any connection at all.
Much to lose?
There are some main features of the protagonists who seem familiar in one way or the other, not only in Egan’s writing; failed lives, losers, who don’t want to acknowledge or have not yet realized that their sole accomplishment in life is that they are still alive and breathing. Even though they hardly recognize it themselves, Egan’s failed protagonists indeed sound like failures; contrary to Willy Vlautin‘s ‘losers’ (of whom I will write in another post), they are not lost, trying to fight their way back, but they DO lose, actively participating in their own downfall. Though in some cases, they’re also trying to get back up again, too.
Of course, Egan does not limit her scope of characters to people fighting their own happiness. There’s the guy who overcame a deeply traumatic experience only to relive it once again; the mysterious countess who makes being a member of old German nobility sound like being a member of the A-Team (sans B.A.’s jewellery, yet with much more insanity than Howling Mad Murdock); a protagonist who seems to be the epitome of the euphemism “professional teenager”; and a teacher who is overly committed for some unusual and unforeseen reasons. Oh my, I spoiler! Though only because the cast of The Keep is more manageable than in A Visit from the Goon Squad 🙂
Egan and me
As with a lot of other authors, I appreciate Egan’s voice, I can ‘hear her talk to me’ — or worse, I can ‘feel’ her voice, to sound a bit corny. I appreciate that this ‘feel’ for her voice guided me through the variety of names and characters in Goon Squad. It’s not something that happens easily to me. However, while I enjoyed both of her novels, which I read in succession, I favored the Goon Squad simply for the many perspectives and stories it shared. That’s not to say that The Keep isn’t good; it’s just completely different to Goon Squad which I read first. Call it the fallacy of misguided expectations — I was simply surprised about the clear and consistent narration after reading so many different voices.
For the sake of completeness I should mention that while I may have found Jennifer Egan rather late in her career, others were less unknowing than me and even awarded her the Pulitzer Price for Fiction in 2011 for A Visit from the Goon Squad. So if nothing else, you may give this book a try — delve into stories that are intertwined and autonomous at the same time, life paths that run alongside each other, meet, divert, cross, and sometimes even clash, only to part and sometimes reunite again.
I highly recommend it 🙂