Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad" keeps you on your toes. On the back on the book, reviews include, "The smartest book you can get your hands on", "At once intellectually stimulating and moving", and "A new classic of American fiction." I think all of these statements are true. I can't actually think of another book quite so well-crafted and entertaining with characters so flawed that you kind of despise them yet because Egan gives them all so much humanity, we want them to succeed. Egan is able to craft each chapter so that it alone could be a short, stand-alone story and luckily for the reader the chapters melt together beautifully, almost magically, story-lines weaving between an entire crew of characters, throughout decades of time.
Egan writes about one of the main characters, "Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he'd grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape..."
The concept of change brought about by time is one of the main themes of this smart book. Egan even includes two quotes by the master of all things time and remembered, Marcel Proust, on a page before her story begins. These quotes set a tone and signal to the reader that time, memories, and the uniqueness of an individual's perspective are ideas that will accompany the reader through her pages.
As I closed the book, just after reading the last of Egan's words, I had just one overarching thought - "wow".
