A Visit from the Goon Squad

In case you haven’t heard, A Visit from the Goon Squad is made up of thirteen chapters following loosely connected characters at different points in their lives. Each chapter shifts perspective and style: some are in first person, some in third, one in second person, one is written as a satirical magazine article, and one is famously told through PowerPoint slides. The stories are also not in chronological order. In other words, if you go into this expecting a normal, straightforward reading experience, you’re probably going to have a bad time and be very confused. Even as someone who had an idea of what I was getting into, I still had to draw up several different character maps and timelines to fully understand it all. Personally, though, I quite loved it, because it felt like a puzzle and I love puzzles.

I think perhaps we all might reach a certain stage in our lives where it's hard to fathom how we got to where we are, and we can't always imagine how far off the future might look from what we expect. This is the reality that A Visit from the Goon Squad portrays so effectively (the "goon" here is "time"). We are introduced to characters experiencing one set of struggles, and then we are taken back in time to learn more about how they got there, and then taken forward to see where they ended up later on. With some side quests in between. We see how we can be on top in one moment, and on bottom the next. We see how people in our lives we thought were minor characters turn out to be massive influences, and how other people extremely close to end end up fading away into distant memory. We see how, as long as we live, we can't escape the reality of aging out of youthfulness.

One part of me feels like Egan tried way too hard to pull out every quirky literary trick in the book, but mostly I just get the sense that she had a lot of fun writing this book and getting creative with it. As much as I loved the structure, by the end I realized that I had been so distracted puzzling out the structure that I'm not even sure if the story itself was good or not, and I certainly didn't end the book with any particular attachment to the characters. But maybe that doesn't matter all that much when the structure alone is so impactful?

Book author: Jennifer Egan