A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Pitch perfect. . . . Is there anything Egan can’t do in this mash-up of forms? Write successfully in the second person? Check. Parody celebrity journalism and David Foster Wallace at the same time? Check. Make a moving narrative out of a PowerPoint presentation? Check. . . . Although shredded with loss, A Visit From the Goon Squad is often darkly, rippingly funny. Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart. . . . No one is beyond the pale of her affection; no one is spared lampooning. . . . For a book so relentlessly savvy about the digital age and its effect on how we experience time (speeded up, herky-jerky, instantaneous, but also full of unbearable gaps and pauses), A Visit From the Goon Squad is remarkably old-fashioned in its obsession with time’s effects on characters, that preoccupation of those doorstop 19th-century novels.” —Will Blythe, The New York Times Book Review (cover review) “If Jennifer Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile. . . . A deeply humane story about growing up and growing old in a culture corroded by technology and marketing. . . . [A] triumph of technical bravado and tender sympathy. . . . Here, in ways that surprise and delight again, she transcends slick boomer nostalgia and offers a testament to the redemptive power of raw emotion in an age of synthetic sound and glossy avatars. Turn up the music, skip the college reunion and curl up with The Goon Squad instead.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post “It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer.” —Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times “[A] spiky, shape-shifting new book. . . . A display of Ms. Egan’s extreme virtuosity.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times   “Jennifer Egan is a rare bird: an experimental writer with a deep commitment to character, whose fiction is at once intellectually stimulating and moving. . . . It’s a tricky book, but in the best way. When I got to the end, I wanted to start from the top again immediately, both to revisit the characters and to understand better how the pieces fit together. Like a masterful album, this one demands a replay.” —Malena Watrous, The San Francisco Chronicle   “For all its postmodern flourishes, Goon Squad is as traditional as a Dickens novel. . . . Her aim is not so much to explode traditional storytelling as to explore how it responds to the pressures and opportunities of the digital age. Egan herself does not appear to be on Facebook, but A Visit From the Goon Squad will likely make her many new friends.” —Jennie Yabroff, Newsweek “Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is a singular work of fiction in both senses of the word. It’s as if the author has taken an epic novel covering five decades and expertly filleted it, casting aside excess characters and years to come away with a narrative that is wide-ranging but remarkably focused. . . . Vibrant and winning. . . . While this is occasionally a wistful book, it isn’t’ sad. Each narrative disorientation and subsequent reorientation reminds us of how we weave in and out of one another’s lives, staying connected through memory—our shield against the goon squad. By the time we get to the last page of Egan’s book . . . we’re left wanting more.” —Marty Pols, Time   “Clever. Edgy. Groundbreaking. . . . For all of its cool, languid, arched-eyebrow sophistication—that’s the part that will make you think ‘Didion’—and for all of the glitteringly gorgeous sentences that flit through its pages like exotic fishJennifer Egan   is the author of four novels:  A Visit from the Goon Squad ,  The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus;  and the story collection  Emerald City.  Her stories have been published in  The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, G...

Product details

• Authors: Jennifer Egan
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 31.07.2011
• EAN: 9780307948359
• ISBN: 978-0-307-94835-9
• Dimensions: 110 mm x 175 mm x 20 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature