A Visit from the Goon Squad
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A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Literature
James Mustich
Jul 27, 2018
What kind of novel would Marcel Proust have written if he’d listened to the Rolling Stones instead of Beethoven’s late quartets? The answer might well be something very much like A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s virtuosic and open-hearted tale of music and mortality. Like the music it evokes, Goon Squad is catchy, inviting in both form and duration: It moves with the tempo and tunefulness of rock ’n’ roll. In fact, like a vintage pop LP, it’s divided into two “sides,” A and B. Each chapter is a kind of musical track as well, a freestanding “song” that slots into the larger concept album; each takes place in a different time period, from the late 1960s into some year in the near future; each focuses on a different character; and each is written in a distinct narrative style (one chapter, devoted to “Great Rock & Roll Pauses,” is composed in PowerPoint slides). All of us, Egan suggests, get mugged by the “goon squad” of time. And none of us really sees it coming.
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Jessica
Dec 12, 2024
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