“An interconnected novel about a music-industry executive, his assistant, and the people their lives touch across forty years. Pulitzer Prize 2011.”
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A Visit from the Goon Squad is Jennifer Egan's 2010 novel, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winner that established Egan as the most structurally restless major American novelist of her generation. The novel is interconnected: thirteen chapters, each centered on a different character, that braid together across forty years (from 1979 to a near-future 2020s) to tell the story of Bennie Salazar, a Bay Area punk-scene veteran turned record label executive, and Sasha, his kleptomaniac assistant.
Egan's project is to write a contemporary novel about the passage of time using the structural apparatus of contemporary fiction (PowerPoint slides, second-person interior monologue, near-future epistolary text-message exchanges). The PowerPoint chapter (Sasha's daughter Alison narrates a single Sunday afternoon as a PowerPoint deck) is the most-discussed structural innovation in twenty-first century American fiction and the chapter that almost broke the novel for some early readers. The Rolph chapter set in the late-1970s San Francisco punk scene is one of the strongest punk-prose passages in any American novel. The Sasha and Bennie material that braids through the entire novel earns its forty-year structural arc.
Recommended as required twenty-first century American literary fiction reading, as one of the canonical American postmodern novels of the contemporary era, and as the right Egan entry point. Read the 2022 sequel The Candy House next. The Roxana Ortega audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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