A Visit from the Goon Squad: Pulitzer Prize Winner

Jennifer Egan

Jun 2010 · Sold by Anchor

About this ebook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption "features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human" (The Chicago Tribune).

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. 

“Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review

Ratings and reviews

I really wasn’t impressed with this book. I had high expectations as it was a many lists for top books of 2010. The first chapter is a flop, but then, the second one is a gem. And all the subsequent ones are inconsistent and unoriginal. The storyline is weak, and style experimentation doesn’t make up for it. Unfortunately I don’t think this book deserve the hype it received.

A book of disjointed stories that have characters that are interwoven, but I just didn't understand the lack of chronology. We went from present to past to future and I just couldn't handle the ride. My other main complaint lies in how the chapters were ordered and presented. With a lack of chronology, with each chapter it took me a moment to find out where we were in the years - it made things hard. The other point that I found extremely hard to read was not knowing who the heck the chapter was about until I was at least 6 pages in and then there would be about 14 more pages, where I would get hooked and then the chapter would be over, wasn't a fan. I say all these things because this was a read for book club and after attending, I appreciated when other people enjoyed it while I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it. If I reread this book, I would put it in the pile.

An arc of interlocking stories about music, love and the spaces in time that separate us.

About the author

Jennifer 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, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.