Somehow I had got it into my head that A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan was a Young Adult book and possibly dystopian. I really need not to base my opinions on the titles of books and to look more carefully at them but as I got to the end of choosing all the books for my 60 Books from 60 Years challenge I was just picking novels I had heard of but I hadn’t read from the variety of lists I consulted. Despite my misunderstanding I actually enjoyed this book and I am not sure that I would have chosen it had I looked harder at the reviews.
This book has an unusual structure. It is told almost as a set of short stories using linked characters. There are two main characters – Sasha, who works in the music industry and steals things, and Bennie, who is also in the music industry and is Sasha’s boss. Not all the episodes in the book relate to both Bennie and Sasha but they are all linked to them or to characters who are linked to them. For example, one character is Lou who is Bennie’s sort of mentor and we also get stories about his children and their lives. We also get the stories about what happens to Bennie’s friends from the past and the men that Sasha sleeps with.
The stories/episodes shift from the past to the present and are of varying lengths and set in different parts of the world. One episode is presented as a series of PowerPoint slides. Some are funny and some are sad but they all fill out the picture of a music industry and the people connected to it who live chaotic lives. The book reminds us that we move on and yet still have connections to other people who maybe meant something to us in the past – we exist in this network of people and events, some of which we may not ever know about.
Although this book is told in this unusual style I enjoyed it a lot. I thought that the author told stories about these people which revealed something about their times and attitudes. I liked the way that she brought everything together by the end and that the book was effectively circular. The “goon squad” of the title is actually death, and death and near death play a large role in this novel. I wouldn’t like all my reading to be written in unusual styles but I think that this one worked well.
Anne Is Reading 