‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is a spellbinding multi-genre book by the iconic American novelist, Jennifer Egan. The book was published to huge acclaim in 2010 and won the highly coveted Pulitzer Prize Award.
From a postmodernist standpoint and written into thirteen solid chapters, with each able to stand alone as a complete, single story, Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ explores how people, society, and culture phase out in the presence of time. This gripping – yet complex – tale touches on the experiences of the different caliber of characters, all harmonized by the rock music era of the 70s.
Jennifer Egan’s journey to become the author of the monumental, Pulitzer Prize-winning book ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is interesting and can’t be labeled straightforward.
The author’s literary road started out not so much as the regular spot popular authors did. To start with, Egan didn’t write from an early age. Her childhood wasn’t nearly as tranquil as most children would have because she moved around a lot with her mother (after her parents divorced when she was only two years old).
Novel writing wasn’t even in the top two dreams for Egan as she began coming of age. Her first passion was archeology and the author did take a year off after high school to explore that aspiration but it wasn’t going to be. Her next stop was modeling and the reason was probably not so tied to passion as it was hinged on the fact that she possessed a tall, model-slim frame.
After a couple of modeling trips to California and later to Japan, Egan returned to Pennsylvania and got enrolled in college, but would, after a first-year college break, take a trip to New York City and try to make something – still – from modeling. However, her booking days were less than enough to even pay for an apartment, so she left her career and concentrated on her college program.
Graduating college with a class of 85 with a degree in English Literature no doubt laid the groundwork for her later writing success – given that she had now been knowledgeable with literature theories and the art of good creative writing. Before penning her first novel ‘The Invisible Circus,’ first explored the terrains of mainstream journalism – publishing several award-winning articles for the New York Times Magazine.
Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ came in June 2010 as the author’s fourth book after ‘The Invisible Circus,’ ‘Look at Me,’ and ‘The Keep.’ The book took a non-conventional approach in the genre, narrative style, characters, and technique, exploring the passage of time (how time just never stops for anyone) – in the rock music world.
The book, even though not an instant commercial smash hit, garnered several positive reviews from top publishers and critics. The following year after its official release, it won a number of awards – including the Pulitzer Prize after impressing the literary community. Even after more than a decade after the release of ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ and with the author having published other award-winning books, Goon Squad is still powering strong as Egan’s finest work to this day.
‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ has been called a complicated and intimidating read by its critics for its sheer defiance of the rules of regular prose-type novel writing. Initially written as a thirteen-short story series for mainstream print publication, the book was later published by Knopf as a unified novel in 2010 and designed as fiction.
Despite being widely called fiction, ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is generally considered – even by the author herself – as a book that is (in addition to being fiction) experimental and uncategorizable. The book covers the exuberant lifestyle and struggles of punk music-loving teenagers and the overall punk rock music industry.
Every story in ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is gripping and captivating in itself – forming an independent narrative of their own while also having at their tail ends the right story transitioning techniques to help blend the thirteen stories in a single narrative.
The book is one of the most innovative books since the 2010s given that it’s studded with several unique literary techniques – among which are the use of non-linear narrative style, and a multi-perspective storytelling technique (told in the first, second, and third person). Additionally, the book also includes a whole chapter done in PowerPoint slides – and another in the form of a magazine news article.
While there aren’t many books decorated with such abundant literary features, some books can still be regarded as being similar to Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ masterpiece. One that is perhaps more worrisome to be included in this list is ‘The Candy House’ – which is a sequel to ‘Goon Squad‘ and follows a very similar literary prototype. Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ is another similar book in this category for the fact it’s more subtle than most books and deals a great deal in a non-linear narrative, including flashbacks and flash-forwards and trips to and fro through time.
‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is one of the few books whose impact cuts across all readers irrespective of their age, background, and social orientation. This is because it talks about the passage of time and its offsetting effect on people, their dreams, and aspirations. This is a common struggle everyone faces and even at one point or another has been a victim of the goon squad – time.
For younger people, a very important lasting lesson is the need to remember that there won’t always be time to pursue that passion. And that the earlier one starts working on their dreams, the quicker one achieves them, and the happier one becomes when they turn grey and look back in retrospect. The book also carries some vital lessons for older people who might have been a victim of time as it teaches how to move on from a terrible past and make something out of life.
On a literary level, ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is an enriched work of literature that examines what sway popular cultures – such as music and social media technology – have on the younger generations (with the book exploring the 70s through the 2020s). Academically, the book’s relevance shows in its inclusion as part of a course syllabus, while for the general interest reader, it is a mixture of thrills, grips, and spellbinds.
Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is innovatively written across different writing styles – effectively transitioning from newspaper article style to short stories collection style to novel writing style. The book is genuinely complicated, yes! But is also a worthwhile read with loads of introspective lessons to be learned.
Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ has at least three historical events that set the mood for the overall plot; the terror attack of the World Trade Center in 2001, the 1970s San Francisco punk rock era, and the advent of social media and the internet.
The inevitability of time is one unchanging aspect of reality that Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad hammered severely on. All her many characters – major and minor – are impacted by this phenomenon and there’s certainly more than a few admonitions for readers to pick out from the best quotes offered by the book.
‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ features an array of characters from different times, but core to these characters are the troubled Sasha Blake and rock music exec Bennie Salazar.
In ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ Jennifer Egan tries to explore the theme of time and how quickly it can flash before our eyes, often leaving us reminiscing about some good memories from the past or regretting having lived less than we planned to.
‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan follows a multi-style narration where some are done in the first person, some in the second, and others in the third person. The book consists of 13 chapters and each tells a complete, independent story with a different protagonist of its own.