Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Cannonball Read 3 Review #16 - A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I suggested this novel for the June meeting of my book club, not because I like hype, because as one could tell from my distrust of Jonathan Franzen and my late-coming to Harry Potter and the Millenium Trilogy, I'm not into hype. I wanted to read the book because I heard it was written from various people's perspectives, over many years, and one of the chapters was in PowerPoint format. That is creative and intriguing, and I had to read it. Oh, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, too. That's probably something I should mention, but again, not really my main reason for choosing the book.

The novel is divided into chapters that could almost be short stories from people who are either closely or distantly related from each other. Bennie, a big-shot music producer and Sasha, his long-time assistant bookend the novel and show up throughout, and the rest of the novel is fleshed out by people they are sometimes close with or only tangentially associated with. But even those people distanced from them by several degrees or generations are still shown in vivid close-up. We see intimate snapshots of these people's lives over time and come to know them deeply, even if we're with them for just a chapter. The characters' lives weave in and out of each other's over a lot of time, showing how we change, how our lives diverge from what we expect, and ultimately, how time marches on. Egan uses rock music and technology, even her ideas of where technolog is going and what our future looks like in terms of how we connect with each other personally, as a backdrop for a truly modern reflection on human relationships and how we deal with aging in today's world. That's what Goon Squad is about: about time rushing at us like a bullet train as we sit on the tracks, oblivious, smoking, drinking and having a picnic. We make plans and make decisions that change our lives in big and small ways, and before we know it, it's twenty years later and we're shocked at how we got here. But Egan isn't trying to bum us out, she also uses the story to show how humans connect, and how even the briefest of contact can change us and stay with us over time. In one scene, Sasha's uncle gently tries to reach out to his lost, defiant, friendless niece, telling her "You can do it alone. But it's going to be so much harder." Time flies by, bringing with it unexpected disappointments and surprises. The connections we have with the people around us are what stay with us through it all.

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