A Visit from the Goon Squad
Pulitzer Prize Winner
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3.9 • 63 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune).
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century • A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years
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 a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs.
“Pitch perfect . . . Darkly, rippingly funny . . . Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.”—The New York Times Book Review
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
You want a mind-blowing story? Look no further than Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, which examines American culture and the perils of the digital age. A Visit from the Goon Squad is composed of 13 story lines tenuously connected by two characters: a music industry executive and his damaged onetime assistant. The action leaps back and forth through time, from the punk-rock ’70s to the near future. Time itself is the brutal goon here, arbitrarily punishing and rewarding each flawed character—and reminding us of the power we have on one another’s lives, even if we’ve never met. Egan’s empathy and imagination are exquisite: You’ll feel exhausted and exhilarated, as if you’ve lived many lives in a few hours.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive in well in this graceful yet wild novel. We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie's one-time bandmate who all but dropped out of society, and Alex, who goes on a date with Sasha and later witnesses the future of the music industry. Egan's overarching concerns are about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, and lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn. Or as one character asks, How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Egan answers the question elegantly, though not straight on, as this powerful novel chronicles how and why we change, even as the song stays the same.
Customer Reviews
Slightly Underwhelmed
A good read that always demands your attention. Can not imagine starting this book and not finishing it. Way too much hype about this book. It is not ground shaking but it is life affirming.