A Visit from the Goon Squad

A really great story about aging, art, time, and more - but leave your expectations at the door

Sometimes I wish that it was possible to erase your knowledge about a piece of media before you experienced it - that you could go in divorced from the hype or the praise or whatever else you were already aware of. Such is the case with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that’s held up as one of the great books of the 21st century, because after all, what book could possibly live up to those expectations? And indeed, I can’t help but feel like my reaction to Goon Squad was shaped by those expectations, because while I enjoyed the book greatly, I never found myself bowled over it, and finished it with a sense that I was still waiting for something to click into place that turned it from a very good book to a great book. A series of short stories all orbiting around a music producer and his assistant, Goon Squad follows various characters backward and forward through time, seeing how small connections ripple out over time, watching how human relationships are shaped at different ages and in different eras, and helping us see how people evolve during their lives. (If you’re going to say “hey, Josh, maybe you were harsh on this because it sounds like it’s in David Mitchell territory and you love David Mitchell so much,” you’re probably not wrong, especially since my beloved Cloud Atlas came first (and did some of this better, in my opinion).) Egan writes wonderfully, and the range of stories here is great - there’s a blackly comic story about war criminals and public relations, a quietly heartbreaking about a closeted gay man at the end of his rope, and yes, the famous one that’s told entirely through PowerPoint slides (which works really well, even if I’m never quite sure that the gimmick fits the story). I liked Goon Squad a lot, don’t get me wrong; I think it’s a really good book, and one that I think is sharp, clever, well-crafted, and imaginative. (To say nothing of how eerily on track her predictions of the future turned...