A Visit from the Goon Squad

The Exit Nine Book Club is reading The Candy House for September and so I decided to start with A Visit from the Goon Squad since I had heard, in an interview with Jennifer Egan, that while Candy House is not a sequel, it does feature a few of the same characters. Also, Goon Squad is so well regarded in the literary world, it was time.

As often happens with me, at first, I hated it because Egan moves from one time period to another and one set of characters to another without a clear through line, and I am a traditionalist when it comes to novels. I also love at least one or two characters for whom I have some feeling and thoughts. For example, one of my favorite characters is Isabel Archer from A Portrait of a Lady by Henry James because she can’t own her own good fortune; she destroys her life by making a bad marriage choice because it’s impossible for her to let herself by loved. I also love Newland Archer (so funny that they share the same last name, but maybe not as I believe James and Wharton had a little thing) in The Age of Innocence because he is a weak man and can’t stand on his own two feet and so he follows society’s desires for him rather than his own love.

Great characters make a novel. In fact, when you think about “books” what you really think about are “characters.” Name something that happens in Moby Dick. Now name some of the characters. You probably know more of the characters than you do the events. So many characters are famous, but very few plot points are well known.

In the case of Goon Squad, none of the characters are memorable. Instead, it is Egan’s writing style that critics and scholars discuss. Her use of PowerPoint slides as a chapter (this was one of my favorite parts because one of the topics of the slides is “famous pauses in rock music”):

Still, I ended up enjoying this novel because of the writing, including the symbolism of the sun and the plot development through time which was, as I said, non-linear and yet what the reader ends up with are just the significant points rather than a lot of wasted narrative. Nevertheless, some of the characters seemed unimportant and sort of crazy in terms of the actual book (why La Doll’s story?).

I’m looking forward to reading The Candy House, in which Egan’s characters invent a “cloud” in which people can upload their consciousnesses. Would you do that?