Book Review: A Visit From The Goon Squad

A Two-Minute Book Review

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

From GoodReads, “Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.”

It’s a crazy quilt of a book. Each of the 13 chapters has a different time period and POV. Each is its own square, seemingly unrelated until you see the pattern. Then you bask in the fascinating connections. (Though I did break down and make an org chart — second picture.)

It’s beautiful, gritty, compelling, and odd. We jump forward in some stories, back in others. We change POVs. One section is set in the dystopian future. And it all works! Even as an audiobook, Egan gives reference points to help readers orient themselves in the story.

I heard about chapters with nothing but PowerPoint slides and wondered how that would play out in an audiobook. It worked! Between each slide, you hear a “Ka-chunk” sound like a slide projector carousel. I went to Egan’s website to see the slide show after finishing the book.

I loved this Pulitzer Prize-Winning GEM of a book so much that I immediately picked up the “companion” collection, A CANDY HOUSE, published this year. (Review coming tomorrow).

If you want to read A CANDY HOUSE, I strongly recommend reading this first.

Trigger Warnings include drug use, addiction, suicide, and a particularly disturbing attempted sexual assault from the perspective of a bipolar attacker.

I listened to this as an audiobook loan from my local library via the Libby App.