A Visit From the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan

Rating: 4.5 stars

I used to have a friend who always complained about non-STEM people or whoever using physics/math concepts in their writing while having no idea of it, such as relativity, quantum entanglement, wormholes or a billion other things. This same friend liked Star Trek, so uh, I guess they did their technobabble fine. My point is: there was a fake Rolling Stones-esque celebrity interview halfway through the book, and the fake author uses quantum entanglement incorrectly then goes on a lengthy page-long half explanation. Until I got the larger context, I was groaning my way through it (chapter 9, by the way, which is kinda funny once you get the joke of it).

Since I’m talking about negative things, I might as well get them out right at the beginning. Someone in 2011 should never have made the mistake of writing about the near future. The last chapter is absolutely full of it, which makes it needlessly drag with its predictions of future texting would be like. It also necessitated a bunch of exposition. Believe me, I get the point it was trying to make, but the exposition dump at the 11th hour feels a bit tedious. I do prefer parrots as a name over influencers or whatever the better word is (I’m not hip so I don’t care to find out what the most up-to-date lexeme is), but the book vastly overestimated how people would view paid content/advertiser-sponsored stuff is and underestimated the influence of autocorrect, which, as someone who likes correct spelling, is great. Also did she really think she could rewrite the rules of how people write/have been writing shorthand (since at least the invention of typewriters)?

Okay, last complaint is that the story’s message is postmodern. In fact, there’s a review on the back of the book that said all the suffering through postmodernism was fine because this book was its end product. It was fairly good book, I agree, but I don’t agree with the other assessment.

Okay, the good things. I think people who are into music from the 70s to 90s and various trivia (more friends than I should admit even though we’re all millennials). The book is well written and keeps people intrigued despite the fact that it does not have any of the typical structural characteristics of a book. The narrator changes every chapter, there’s no hook or act structure. The relationship between the narrator of the last chapter and the current one is pretty obvious, and it can be a bit expositional (oh, it’s you, sister first name. I remember you, sister first name last name, of that sort) because it doesn’t challenge the reader very much in that capacity.

Quick aside. I then that ask the question, how does the book challenge the reader? Well, I don’t think that was the point. I’d say that the point was a broadening of horizon. As the characters say, ‘time is a goon’ so, like, the reader gets a bunch of snapshots in time? The stories talk about the fallibility of people in weird exposition dumps about what happens to characters after the end of the chapter, taking away a bunch of suspense, but it works. I don’t have a logical explanation for why. It’s just okay.

I guess Is should talk about the story and why I liked that because I definitely wouldn’t have been so happy with things if that were not true. It’s the story of Bennie, a music producer/executive and his assistant Sasha. The book is a collection of episodes from their lives, sometimes written in first person, one in second person, and one the chapter features neither of them.