Title: A Visit from the Goon Squad
Author: Jennifer Egan
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group | Random House
Pub Date: Jun 2010
Read: Sept 2010-Aug 2011
Source: Brooklyn Book Festival, 2010
Why: it sounded interesting and I loved the cover almost instantly though apparently a lot of people hated it. Personally I think the paperback cover is bloody awful and I’m thankful I bought it when I did though as you will see, I kind of wish I hadn’t bought it at all
Fulfills Challenge? No.
Notes: It took me about a year to read the entire book. I kept starting and stopping and that was a particularly bad idea when it came to this book. Really I should have just listened to my gut. When I first borrowed the book from my B&N, I read one or two chapters and then returned it. But then I saw Jennifer Egan at the Brooklyn Book Festival and thought, oh why not? let me give it another shot. I purchased the book and had her sign it. As mentioned, it then took me almost a full year to get through the whole thing. My review reflects this.

Review/Thoughts:
I recognize immediately that part of my problem with this book is that I read it sporadically (sometimes I’d stop in the middle of a chapter and not pick it back up again for months). I know this, and I know it’s affected my experience, but even with that knowledge, I also recognize that if I were more interested in the book, I wouldn’t have put it down SO many times. Yes, I sometimes start books and then not finish them for another 6 months, a year, sometimes several years even. It’s how I roll. Usually I stop and then once I decide that I’m ready to read the book again, I finish it with no problem (also I usually stop fairly close to the beginning). Sometimes I even end up loving it and am baffled by why I stopped in the first place. With this book unfortunately I went through the start-and-stop method many times, and I refuse to blame my mixed feelings on the way I ended up reading it. Knowing damn well the stories were linked and that the sheer number of characters would be hard to keep track of if I kept stopping, I still found it impossible to force myself to stay with it the whole way through.

For me the book’s strengths are also its weaknesses, and that’s a bit hard to reconcile. On the one hand I think, there are flashes of real brilliance here, the way things connect, the moments of clarity and revelation. The moment you realize that thing mentioned earlier was referring to this thing being brought up now, the way it all comes together. I loved that. Yet it still felt disconnected overall, and there were too many characters I couldn’t care less about. Just when things seemed to get interesting with certain people, we were on to something else. The book is inconsistent and at times, contrived. The chapter/story on Dolly and the General almost did me in. I thought, this is it…I’m never going to get past this, I’m never going to finish this book because of this chapter. I forced my way through it, bored, uninterested, questioning its relevance. Dolly was mentioned in the chapter before, the actress is mentioned in the following chapter, and the daughter is mentioned in the last chapter and still I don’t see why that chapter was necessary. The “powerpoint chapter” that everyone talked about was overdone. I felt it could have just as easily been rendered as a bunch of lists with bullet points and maybe a few arrows here and there. It was entirely too long and might have been more effective without all the extraneous detail that didn’t add much to the story.

The shifting narratives and the lack of chronological order pretty much killed it for me. Egan is skilled, and technically speaking, it works. But I found it difficult to care about anyone because I knew there would end up being a bunch of loose ends due to this very structure. I was afraid to invest in any one person because their story might not properly finish…or the finish would be a passing mention in a later chapter, or still worse, an earlier chapter. I even gave up on Sasha and Bennie, the main characters whom everyone else was connected to in some way. The ending is utterly forgettable and unsatisfying (much like Look at Me come to think of it), and while I suppose that’s in part due to the structure, a better episode should have been chosen for the ending. Also, at some point, when the very structure of the book is working against the book in so many ways, I can’t shrug it off anymore.

What pains me is that I can recognize how good this is supposed to be. Egan is an excellent writer, but for the second time now, I’m finding myself utterly frustrated with her work. My brain says THIS IS REMARKABLE, but my gut says THIS IS OVERRATED. So I’ve settled on giving the book three stars as a way of reconciling the two feelings.

Final Verdict: