ILX Book Club - Jennifer Egan: A Visit from the Goon Squad

As promised, we are now supposed to be reading Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad

Week one (2nd - 7th May) - Part A and Part A to B (page 1-136)

Week two (8th - 15th May) - Part B 137 - 336 (end).

For nominations for future ones, go here: ILX Book Club Nominations (Rolling thread)

Good work, will be on it shortly. In the meantime, anyone got any particular direction they'd like discussion to steer in?

(I'll post a poll for the next one next week.)

For myself, not yet. I plan to start tomorrow.

Suspect I will want to talk about mid-70s rock :-)

Awesome! I was gonna start this thread after buying the book on Saturday.

I'm about a hundred pages through. Will post a few points in a few hours.

I went out and bought this book today, partly because of this thread. Also, in this lonesome world, I had nothing else to do.

It cost me £11.99. That seems expensive, actually. I wanted to buy a guide to Berlin. I couldn't find a good one. I am unhappy that my trip to Berlin is already a failure before it's started.

I went to a bar near the river to start on the book. I tried a taster of a lager, then ordered a pale ale. It was an awful pint of pale ale. I could tell immediately. It was flat and even tasted bad. It cost £3.70. I took it out to a table in the wind. I drank some of this pint while starting on the book.

The book was about a kleptomaniac. I didn't like it. It was about therapy, which I don't really like, and also dating, a subject which depresses me, especially in novels, because it excludes me. But I should add that the fact that I didn't like the book was predictable. I dislike most things when they start. Maybe one day I will be found talking about 'those classic pages at the start of Goon Squad'.

The pint wasn't getting any better. I decided to give up on it. I put the book away and took the last third of the pint in and left it on a shelf. It is very rare for me to do this. I can barely have done it in twenty years.

I have just read that people plan to read 200 pp a week of this book. I don't find that very realistic. Even if I can manage it with this book, now, I probably couldn't with another book, another time.

Great book, btw.

I have just read that people plan to read 200 pp a week of this book. I don't find that very realistic. Even if I can manage it with this book, now, I probably couldn't with another book, another time.

I read about a hundred pages a day :;

Plus, more than eighty pages of this consist of charts and notes.

I am on p.17 (are UK and US pp different)?

I can't identify with this kleptomaniac lady. There are lots of human traits, some of them dangerous, that I could identify with, like alcohol dependence, lust, fear, depression, resentment and aimlessness; but the urge to steal things like this lady has just doesn't make any intuitive sense to me.

The book seems largely plainly written so far except occasional touches like the alliteration and rhyme at the bottom of p.7.

I just got to the aforementioned charts and notes.

So far the book is a pop riff on As I Lay Dying's structure.

pinefox on some definite anthropologist-from-mars steez in this thread

Pinefox I'd persevere, the perspective changes throughout the book and some bits are more moving than others.

I really enjoyed this, fwiw. She's great at making you care about her characters even when they're particularly outlandish or reprehensible. There's one section where a character is about to do something utterly horrible and she makes it very difficult not to like him, or at least find him funny.

There's also another section, towards the end, that initially seems gimmicky and then feels heartbreaking.

I loved the first chapter, and could have happily spent an entire novel in the company of Sasha's neuroses, but none of the subsequent sections have quite lived up to it for me, so far (I'm currently on ch8). I'm presuming the various threads are drawn together into some elegant David-Mitchell-esque narrative bow in the second half? As with Mitchell I find some of the individual chapters a bit thin and pastiche-y - the Safari section made me think she had been impressed by Norman Rush's Mating at some point and had been moved to produce a sketchy homage.

There's also another section, towards the end, that initially seems gimmicky and then feels heartbreaking.

yeah, not to spoil it for anyone (if i'm right about what chapeter you're talking about), but i totally groaned when this chapter came up, but uhhh, it pretty much made me cry. on the bus!

60 pages in and I've liked the Bennie section the most so far, with his memory flashes of crushing embarrassment; I should empathise, I'm sure we all do, but they're just comic, especially when he distills them down to their song-title essence.

DC, I will most certainly persevere. I paid £12 for the book, after all, for one thing.

A book that I found myself unable to persevere with, btw, was ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN (a title that doesn't get any better) which I bought cheap. Every time I have started on it again, I have had to stop again. I seem to recall that this was connected to my problem with reading about 'dating' again.

Stevie's comment is mysterious to me, as I cannot imagine being as enthusiastic about the first chapter as he is. Stevie mentions 'neuroses' but I can only think of the aforementioned kleptomania, and as I have said, I could not feel any connection to this condition or way of grasping it, and the book seemed to make no effort to help me make such a connection.

I like pastiche in theory but I don't think I have yet encountered significant pastiche in this book.

I cannot yet see a connection with Faulkner.

oh pinefox you're going to hate this book and break my heart, aren't you?

i liked this book a lot. i don't remember a lot of the details anymore but it was so much better than "freedom" which seemed to be the other contender of big novel of 2010

It seems very unlikely that my not liking something could break anyone's heart, at this late stage in the increasingly meaningless mid-table game of my life. Thus I am very flattered by that question, whatever its real meaning.

As I said, horseshoe, I usually start off by not liking things; and I usually have problems with things that are distant from my own experience or assumptions in some way. I remember having a lot of problems with The Fortress of Solitude for these reasons, for instance -- and yet, if someone asked me now what contemporary novels had been important to me, I might well name that one. Therefore, it's quite possible that I will like this Goon Squad book once I find a way to do so. People have indicated that it's very varied.

I think the (UK) cover design of this book is quite good, overall, though I'm not sure that the interior design of the pages is so good.

Ten pages from the end!

It seems very unlikely that my not liking something could break anyone's heart, at this late stage in the increasingly meaningless mid-table game of my life. Thus I am very flattered by that question, whatever its real meaning.

i take your take on books very seriously fwiw!

read that hbo optioned this & is developing as a series

whoa

WHOA

horseshoe, did you know that invisible circus got made into a movie?!

yes but i am afraid it's terrible (i know nothing about it, really) so i've never seen it.

cameron diaz was on the cover of my copy of invisible circus like she wrote it or something.

i think i am a little weird about books i like :/

egan will supposedly be a consultant but yea makes me sorta :|

I just finished it!

I should wait for my impressions to coalesce, but like n/a I'll recommend it. It's a good pop novel: Egan doesn't linger over the pathos longer than necessary, and most of the chapters are well paced (the Africa interlude is an unfunny joke though: the worst parts of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and Henderson the Rain King). The Powerpoint section sunk under the weight of its novelty. Not only will it date quickly, but the best parts of the Lincoln-father relationship deserved elongation in conventional narrative.

My favorite chapter, and I don't see it mentioned much in reviews curiously: the uncle visiting Sasha in Italy. It reminded me of James' The Ambassadors yet contained so much unsaid.

alfred when you get a chance, you should read the keep

i liked this book a lot. i don't remember a lot of the details anymore but it was so much better than "freedom" which seemed to be the other contender of big novel of 2010

haha otm - also i kinda feel like i posted a lot about it already & have nothing more 2 say

I could not feel any connection to this condition or way of grasping it, and the book seemed to make no effort to help me make such a connection.

Well you get the first person view of what's going through her head as she takes something, you get her own post-hoc rationalisations of her motivations, and you get her psychiatrist's alternative analysis - what else do you think would help you make this connection?

i dunno, from

"I can't identify with this kleptomaniac lady. There are lots of human traits, some of them dangerous, that I could identify with, like alcohol dependence, lust, fear, depression, resentment and aimlessness; but the urge to steal things like this lady has just doesn't make any intuitive sense to me."

to

"I could not feel any connection to this condition or way of grasping it, and the book seemed to make no effort to help me make such a connection."

is kind of a step in the right direction

yeah er i gave my copy of this away so i'm not going to be a lot of help in this thread. good book tho

here is a really rather dense review by someone i vaguely know, if that helps

I am not far into the book, so perhaps the kleptomaniac issue will be clarified or enriched later.

Perhaps other readers do feel that this trait is fully realized and made plausible and understandable by the author.

My own angle, again: when John Self in Money says he wants a 6-pack of beer and a dozen Blastfurters for breakfast, we wouldn't exactly imagine ourselves doing this, and we know it's a comic exaggeration -- but we can grasp the idea, the impulse, because we like eating and drinking a lot too, and can possibly imagine wanting to live like this, sometimes, if there were no ill consequences or moral prohibitions. But -- when Sasha in Good Squad steals a wallet or a bit of paper, or keeps all her stolen items on a table, I can't imagine wanting to do it, and can't see why she wants to do it, because I don't think I share that basic impulse to steal things. Her impulse is alien to me - just as it always seems bizarre and hard to understand when eg Lindsay Lohan steals a bracelet.

In this situation, I think that some onus is on the author to make the character's action comprehensible to the reader. Unlike other readers, I don't really feel that the author has yet succeeded in that, at this early stage in the book.

we wouldn't exactly imagine ourselves doing this, and we know it's a comic exaggeration

Speak for yourself, mister.

pinefox how do you deal with books featuring

i. people who own land or other serious capital
ii. people of different sexual orientations to yourself
iii. literal aliens
iv. metaphorical aliens
v. childbirth
vi. politicians
vii. violence
viii. symptoms of mental illness that aren't kleptomania

i'm guessing thats covered under -

In this situation, I think that some onus is on the author to make the character's action comprehensible to the reader. Unlike other readers, I don't really feel that the author has yet succeeded in that, at this early stage in the book.

One answer is that, as I said earlier, I often find it quite hard to relate to these very different experiences. Politicians, though, don't seem so different, as most of us have political ideas and feelings.

Another is that, as I indicated in my last post (and just saying says), an author or a book can work to make these things more understandable and fully imaginable.

Maybe, as I also said, some people think that Egan did succeed in that; or maybe she does so over the longer course of the book, just not at the start.

I don't think I feel much of a need to relate to the characters within a novel, or understand them. Personally I don't think it's essential to what a novel is.

'what a novel is' is a very big category and certainly one should be careful about prescriptiveness in it.

Maybe the most one can say might be: this seems to be a Type A / P / X novel and in that kind of novel it seems important that xyz is done right.

Having said that, I don't think I share your feeling or view, NV, and I do want 'understanding' of character at least.

I am going to take a guess that the kleptomania business will turn out not to be that important in the book, and 300pp later the reader will have been bombarded by lots of other things, so that issues around kleptomania will not seem important.

Even if this is true, though, I think it is still OK to report on how things seem as a book goes along - these details are precisely what easily gets forgotten once you've finished a book. And I think that I imagine that such ongoing response is part of the point of this 'book club'.

xposts --

I don't really feel like there are a basic human set of desires which it isn't the author's job to make comprehensible: so I distrust the argument from eating and drinking, etc.: it's ____-centric, I can think of at least two things to fill in that gap without thinking too hard

I think, also, that there's a clue in the word 'kleptomaniac', which we're using, and which I think is used in the book: a kleptomaniac Wants To Steal Things. In much the same way, if we're presented with an 'alcoholic', we will accept that they Want To Drink Things. similar with 'anorexic', say. (And it's fairly obviously wrong to say 'well, I have an automatic empathy with alcoholics because I fancied a pint after work yesterday', or with anorexics because I want my suit to fit better.)

Which we can imply causative things for, if we want. We can write a novel in which Jim Broadface is an alcoholic because, say, his mother beat him and his husband left him, or in which Sally Okayface is anorexic because of women's magazines and daytime television. But, I mean, these are pretty boring novels, which I'm writing; and I don't think that they're actually doing anything to explain what's wrong or interesting about Jim and Sally. Which, anyway, is what it feels like you want done with Sasha: either that you can't understand that someone's wiring might just make them Want To Steal Things, in which case, well, that's kind of your problem? or that you want the novel to supply that, ah, Sasha wants to steal things because (x).

xp

Yeah I was trying to open up my thoughts about character. I know there are people who would argue that it is central to The Novel. Disputing about how well developed a character is feels like primarily a question of taste, whereas the question of how important that development is is more a question of what we want a novel to be.

also, yup:

I am going to take a guess that the kleptomania business will turn out not to be that important in the book, and 300pp later the reader will have been bombarded by lots of other things, so that issues around kleptomania will not seem important.

ding ding -- also, there's at least three reductive versions of (x) you could go for, if you wanted, which is part of why i don't like the book so much

i think i dislike the use of "cause (x)" in fiction because it feels like a fictional account of human consciousness, for me it doesn't reflect the reality of our interactions with other people

or with ourselves, either. many people with, for example, addictions have stories that they tell themselves about how the addiction came to be, but they aren't reliable judges imo

In this situation, I think that some onus is on the author to make the character's action comprehensible to the reader. Unlike other readers, I don't really feel that the author has yet succeeded in that, at this early stage in the book.

I think she deliberately leaves some things incomprehensible, or comprehensible to some readers and less to others. I can't really identify with kleptomania and suspect that a lot of readers can't. At least part of the book is about impulses that are difficult to understand. The kleptomania stuff isn't that important over the course of the novel, although you could say it's one of many symptoms.

My favorite chapter, and I don't see it mentioned much in reviews curiously: the uncle visiting Sasha in Italy. It reminded me of James' The Ambassadors yet contained so much unsaid.

This is OTM. As a book it's full of gaps, temporal gaps but also gaps in how the characters understand one another (and how we understand them).

Also "pop novel" is an excellent description.

I had fun reading it. I am mystified as to why it won the Pulitzer.

I had similar feelings to Pinefox about the kleptomania at the start of the book, but Matt is right that it isn't important from the perspective of the novel as a whole - and also, I think, in his explanation why. Peoples' motives are often inexplicable, sometimes even to themselves, and that's one of the realities the novel reflects. Too much of that kind of stuff would make the novel frustrating and dull but Egan doesn't over-indulge.

Just read the magazine profile chapter over lunch, which seemed to confirm my feelings about pastiche - felt like a pale imitation of DFW/Eggers-y manically footnoted journalism, though obviously taken to certain gonzo extremes. And then the next chapter I've just started feels like an exercise in second-person narrative, like an early Lorrie Moore story. I can admire Egan's versatility, but it's not really involving me or moving me, or really even impressing me on simple prose level. I didn't particularly like FREEDOM, but it feels like a more serious or significant book than AVftGS, so far.

in retrospect i really really hated "freedom" but there's probably a better thread for me to post about that

I agree with a lot of what has been said here. The novel didn't suck me in right away. And I did a lot of eye-rolling with all of the 'pop' elements. I have a really hard time with band references in novels ... not sure why ... maybe it just feels like shorthand for characterization, or, like the author is trying to convince you that she is cool ... or that the book is trying too hard to appeal to people who want to consume fiction that reaffirms their own self-image of a person of xyz tastes.

But then, last night, I ended up reading 100ish pages pretty late at night when I should have been sleeping. The device of switching focus to different characters is done really well and creates a unique reading experience. So I end up with thoughts like: "yeah, I was wondering what happened to that person" and "I hope I can get see more of that guy" etc.

The pop references in this are generally less cringeworthy than those in Freedom (which are astonishingly cringeworthy, especially the Bright Eyes scene).

I never knew 'The Invisible Circus' was made into a movie!

yeah i thought the band stuff in AVFTGS was pulled off better than that kind of stuff usually is

I don't know much about the kind of bands Egan writes about so I'm liable to miss awkwardnesses that might grate on others. All the same, I thought the "music used to be real but now it's all overproduced, over-commercialised, manufactured pap" theme running through the novel was pretty silly. It was a point of view mainly identified with Bennie but it was obvious Egan endorsed it (confirmed in an interview I saw). Egan seems too intelligent to fall for this kind of guff. It didn't ruin the book for me but it was a definite weakness.

All the same, I thought the "music used to be real but now it's all overproduced, over-commercialised, manufactured pap" theme running through the novel was pretty silly.

Definitely a theme in punk and post-punk era in SF.

Those remarks fit the characters who utter them; I saw no evidence that the book endorses those views, especially when you realize the characters themselves are pathetic.

They're kids, ffs!

My gf passed me this earlier this year. Egan is a little older than we are but the SF parts were eerie in their versimilitude.

A theme for punks everywhere of course, but I'm talking about a much later nostalgia for that the punk period itself (and earlier) compared with the more recent past. I think it's absolutely fine to have a middle-aged music producer think music has gone to the dogs - most of them probably do - but it's Egan's job as an intelligent observer to have some perspective on why his judgement might be suspect. I'm wary of spoilers for folk still in the early stages of the book, but this all feeds through into Scott's concert, easily the silliest thing in the novel.

Alfred, Egan made it very clear in a tv interview that she agreed with Bennie's views about music being less "real" now. Although I think it's clear there in the book as well.

i think i dislike the use of "cause (x)" in fiction because it feels like a fictional account of human consciousness, for me it doesn't reflect the reality of our interactions with other people
― bell hops (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 4 May 2011

I cheerfully and wholeheartedly agree with your implicit call for an art or fiction which is realistic in giving us a depiction of the subtlety, contingency and fascination of real people and real life. I have made this call for years and years, not that I have ever expected anyone to answer it.

I think your critique of 'cause x' is something of a straw target shoot, as it ought to be possible to imagine kinds of determination and causality that are not crude or reductive. (It must be, because real life is presumably dominated by all kinds of determination.)

Unlike you, perhaps, I am not sure that I found quite this subtle, realistic depiction of real life, etc, in the first chapter of the novel.

On the next theme, re music and sound, I also noticed this Benny or Bennie character saying that everything had been ruined by being too digitally precise. I found this line asinine, if that's the right word. As someone who has tried, and failed, to record things, a bit of precision would not come amiss. I am not that surprised to hear that Egan perhaps agrees with him, though of course he is only a fictional character. Of course, I should admit that 'recording techniques are worse' and 'modern music is worse' are two somewhat different claims.

but it's Egan's job as an intelligent observer to have some perspective on why his judgement might be suspect.

No it's not! Could a lecherous, middle-aged man in the music industry have plausibly said something along those lines at the time and a teenage girl believe him or at least defer to his better judgment? Absolutely! I was going to concerts at the Mabuhay, the On Broadway and the Farm and whatnot in the early 80's and it reads quite true to me.

>>> a bit of precision would not come amiss <<<

I'm afraid I was accidentally conflating two different things here:

1. the chance to record anything successfully without things going wrong would not come amiss -- a feeling specific to me, not really relevant to the novel; after all the recording artists probably don't have such problems and have people to make things OK for them

2. precision is good, full stop, in recording -- this is the real point that is relevant to the novel and makes B's thought seem vapid to me, if I am not misremembering it.

ch 2 I thought not great, but not terrible. It reminded me a bit of The Sopranos, a programme I do not like, but without the criminal dimension that is the reason I don't like it.

I wonder slightly if this is a novel where characters have their gimmicks: the kleptomaniac, the bloke who has lost his lust. But, I should admit that the Bennie character is a bit more fully drawn than that. JE seems to want to take this character very seriously.

ch 3 seems to be about people's cool youth. Here I have a standard problem, which is roughly, envy and exclusion, because people in fictional narratives always seem able to have cool youths in a way that was never offered to me. This makes me resentful and / or sad. But then, also, I don't generally much like punk rock, so I wouldn't really want to stand around hearing it like these cool youths do.

So far I agree with Stevie's view that the novel is not especially distinguished at the level of prose. Very little writing as such has impressed me so far. This is a bit surprising given the novel's reputation, if I can say that it has one already. But, I understand that there are other ways for a story to be good. Maybe the relative plainness is delberate or will stop.

I think the pop references are more cringeworthy than the pop references in Freedom, or at least they make you feel sad, because you are old now, whereas in Freedom you are believably bratty and young.

I think JE does female hopeful sad dissolution best.

Egan actually created a soundtrack with a song for each chapter:

http://knopf.knopfdoubleday.com/2010/07/08/soundtrack-to-a-visit-from-the-goon-squad/

(If you're a music snob, you might not want to check it out.)

I just finished the book. Now I'm going to crawl back into my hole.

More thoughts later, but a few notes, having just finished it:

Really enjoyed it, but slightly surprised at the sheer scale of the love for it.

Blurb was totally misleading, making me think it would be all about Sasha and Bennie, so it took me a while to realise that the chapters about other people were not interludes (not Egan's fault, obviously)

Powerpoint bit worked well, despite my reservations about gimmicky nature of same

Every review I've read made it seem as though it was about the music industry, which it really wasn't

Changing Earth's orbit for global warming reasons? There's no fucking way this could be done, what the fuck, that's a mad idea, so out of place, argh

Alfred, Egan made it very clear in a tv interview that she agreed with Bennie's views about music being less "real" now.

Not surprised, but I wipe the floor with authorial intention.

ch 3 seems to be about people's cool youth. Here I have a standard problem, which is roughly, envy and exclusion,

I get sort of the opposite feeling--as someone with a deeply uncool youth, I'm deeply envious when I read pieces like this chapter (though sometimes relieved at what I escaped), and the only way I'll ever experience things like that is fictionally, so bring it on, as long as it convinces, which this chapter really did

The final Scotty concert really didn't work, though, in that world-altering musical events like this never seem to convince in fiction. And how do these "pointers" work, anyway? If babies are downloading stuff, presumably their parents are paying for it, otherwise where's the money coming from that fuels the market that the producers are so keen to get into? Why are they choosing to pay for stuff on the basis of semi-random reflexive movements?

Has Jennifer Egan's writing changed much since The Invisible Circus? Because I thought that book was a more literary Sweet Valley High. In a bad way.

her writing has matured, but you probably still wouldn't like her. can i just say that that kind of dismissal of egan really irks me?

ugh i read some review of AVftGS squad on av club or somewhere, and the reviewer referred to her earlier work as 'chick lit'. and also recommended that it would be a good idea to publish her non-chick lit stuff under a pseudonym so ppl aren't put off reading it.

Blimey. I no way does what I've read of her (this and some stories) make me think "chick-lit".

it was actually a review of the keep: http://www.avclub.com/articles/jennifer-egan-the-keep,3817/

"Jennifer Egan should adopt a nom de plume—"J. Egan" would do quite well. An unfortunate side effect of the popularity of chick lit and poetic, memoir-ish "women's novels" is that a woman's name on the cover creates a certain expectation about what's inside. "

ugh i read some review of AVftGS squad on av club or somewhere, and the reviewer referred to her earlier work as 'chick lit'. and also recommended that it would be a good idea to publish her non-chick lit stuff under a pseudonym so ppl aren't put off reading it.

― just1n3, Wednesday, May 4, 2011 11:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is basically what i'm getting at. i have read "chick lit" and i'm not trying to get into a whole thing about the ghettoization of that genre but i can only figure egan's work as chick lit if writing about women automatically means chick lit, which pisses me off.

xp i guess it's not just writing about women but also being a woman. god. look at me is also about a model, which i guess is a double-strike against it.

you know what that review is about, too: The Keep was her first novel where most of it is told from a man's pov.

after 'visit' 'look @ me' is the one i like best. its... not really chick-lit.

i love look at me. i have gotten in so many arguments where i recommend that book to people and tell them what it's about, and they're like "so, it's about a model? ..."

yeah i have absolutely no problem with chick-lit either and read tons of the stuff - i hate that it is used to refer to works that reviewers want to pan bc of content but can't bc they're actually good and well-written. and also: i def didn't feel that look at me or invisible circus or emerald city fell into the 'chick-lit' category by those standards.

just1n3 otm

" An unfortunate side effect of the popularity of chick lit and poetic, memoir-ish "women's novels" is that a woman's name on the cover creates a certain expectation about what's inside. "

! what is wrong w/ this person

i hate to be all thread police, but can we not have spoilers for bits we're not required to have read yet?

Finished this last night. Will hold off saying anything particularly spoilery until next week, but offhand I can't recall a more disappointing final chapter to a novel.

Also finally read the LRB review - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n07/pankaj-mishra/modernitys-undoing I had been saving up until now. And that is even more disappointing than the book! The kind of generic postmod novel criticism 101 undergrads were writing back in my American Lit classes over 20 years ago!

Uh-oh !!!

Was this the kind of thing that was encouraged by the dim-witted Christopher Bigsby?

whenever i see that kind of criticism of criticism, stevie t, i wonder: gosh, did undergraduates really get that much more stupid in the intervening fifty years? that much less able to turn out a sentence?

ffhand I can't recall a more disappointing final chapter to a novel.

I'm not thrilled with it either.

I liked the marketing and technology-related bits of the final chapter, the part with the concert was a dud, it seemed designed to appeal to beardy Bon Iver fans or something.

Really? I can't really stand it when novels start including CRZY YNG PPL TXTMSGSPK - found Supersad True Love Story unreadable for pretty much this reason. Also the horror of street teaming as cultural apocalypse seemed a little overwrought. There seemed an awful lot of editorialising in this last chapter. I was willing to give Egan the benefit of the doubt re rockism as being just Bennie's pov, but she seemed to be ranting away pretty directly here.

I don't think "street teaming as cultural apocalypse" was really the point, although I don't think I can elaborate without spoilering. Certainly being seen as a trusted source on the internet would have had increasing cultural importance in that situation.

Yes, I meant to say it is more cringeworthy because there is less distance.

ch 3: punk rock, teenage drug taking, orgiastic party, illicit sex - no. Not for me.

More broadly, the structure so far - marginal character in chapter A turns out to be central in chapter B, kind of connection - reminds me of something else which might be Mitchell's Ghostwritten. I realize that there must be many other relevant comparisons; and that this novel has a long way to go and is likely to change more.

So far I don't find this novel especially good. It seems to be treading water; and again, none of the writing has seemed distinguished. But, it could change. And one kind of change that can happen, which is hard to admit when things are not great, is that the sheer duration of the novel somehow drags it up in quality and the stuff that seemed not great later comes to seem part of something great. Maybe that will happen with this novel?

ch 4, safari in Africa ... feels like a Mitchell sort of idea, where can we go now? - but without the quality of prose and density of observation (which I think DM has; some don't like him I'm sure). Or maybe all this talk about Mitchell is too elevated - maybe it's more like Julian Barnes' *history of the world* 'upstream!' chapter.

the 'structural affection' etc schtick in italics here (pp 64-5) strikes me as quite lame: a predictive self-exculpation for writing clichéd relations between people.

the bit where the girl and the driver (from Minehead, for goodness' sake - an ATP touch?) are heavily breathing at each other and don't realize an old lady is in the same jeep (p 69) is daft. and for goodness' sake, why is the hot chick into the bloke from Minehead ... oh, I remember, it's 'structural desire' (65). what a load of BS that seems.

paras of massive foreshadowing - '35 years later this tribesman will own a loft in Tribeca' - I'm afraid I don't like at all, though I can see some kind of ambition at work in the attempt to jump around in time. (but again, I have to say, Mitchell would never do it so clumsily - though he can be a bit clumsy too in his way, esp in Black Swan Green.) (Actually, a bit more like eg White Teeth here - '40 years ago, Archie Jones was a corporal in Germany, but that's another story' etc?)

how about this?

'At eleven years old, Rolph knows two clear things about himself: He belongs to his father. And his father belongs to him' (p.63).

That strikes me as bad writing full stop - mainly because the thought it conveys is so imprecise and phoney; it doesn't stand up to many moments' thought about whether such a resounding, exclusive, simplistic, sentimental sentiment could actually feel true, to an 11-year-old or anyone else.

i can't believe you think the writing is undistinguished! crazy talk!

the 'structural affection' etc schtick in italics here (pp 64-5) strikes me as quite lame: a predictive self-exculpation for writing clichéd relations between people.

this is just a joke at grad students' expense! how can anyone not enjoy that?

as always happens when you dislike a writer i like, i like the lines you quote about Rolph. i guess there's no real way to argue that stuff. i am pretty sentimental, i guess.

I have insisted on noting that I'm only talking about the early parts of the novel, and that maybe the writing gets better. But in the first 4 or 5 chapters, I haven't seen much that I thought was good writing.

I used to be a graduate student and I'm not sure I see how that would work as a joke against the person I was, when I was one. I admit that the phrases do seem to be located in Mindy's thoughts.

are you from the USA, horseshoe?

Meanwhile: in ch 4, more of that foreshadowing stuff. I don't think it's well done or effective - BUT I do feel that JE is trying to do something different here, breaking with suspense, the unknown future of a sequential narrative, etc; making some kind of new move. What precursors for it there might be, many could probably say.

ch 5 I actually thought an improvement! Mainly because it talks not much about that cool punk rubbish but about loss, sadness and age. I found a couple of lines that I thought quite good: 'a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth' (87) - OK, maybe; and the smiling mother: 'exhaustion has carved up her face' (88): yes, this is getting nearer to something real.

ch 6 so far is narrated in a clownish eccentric way and again I think it's better than earlier chapters, has the courage of a schtick. The lines about 'not thinking about somebody' (92) for instance are OK. Here I think JE is getting a bit closer to whatever good thing she might have taken from Amis (whom she named as an influence): his bold way with an extreme voice; not so extreme here, more Flight of the Conchords, but still a bit better than a lot of pages before it.

mindy's a sociology grad student, right? or some social science? and she's enamored of analyzing everything personal structurally? including sex and romance? that rings pretty true to me, meaning that i recognize myself.

i am from + in the USA. i lent my copy of this book to a friend right after i read it, otherwise i'd be hunting up lines i liked from the very beginning. i love the way she writes!

i will admit that i thought the end was a bit of a letdown. but that is my only admission!

i am enjoying your commentary btw, pinefox!

Enjoying p-fox commentary way more than I'd probably enjoy the actual book

oh shit! I forgot I finished this book two days ago.

And?

Library fees?

guess i really should have stopped reading this thread till i'd finished the book ;_;

seriously, wtf.

Surprised the Pinefox feels in some way excluded by the punk rock kids chapter when that chapter is specifically about being excluded from the punk rock kids (or hanging out with them and feeling excluded). It doesn't strike me as particularly nostalgic either, there's too much mess and violence and sordidness.

paras of massive foreshadowing - '35 years later this tribesman will own a loft in Tribeca' - I'm afraid I don't like at all, though I can see some kind of ambition at work in the attempt to jump around in time. (but again, I have to say, Mitchell would never do it so clumsily - though he can be a bit clumsy too in his way, esp in Black Swan Green.)

It's not really foreshadowing (these elements don't really go anywhere) and definitely not a Mitchell-esque thing to do. Whenever she uses that trick it's for a very minor character, the sort of character that writers don't usually bother filling in at all, I like that she bothers to give them a resolution, that she cares about what happens to some African waiter or whoever, and that we as readers might care too. It's actually one of my favourite aspects of the book.

Much as I enjoyed it, I'm surprised it won the Pulitzer and I'm not sure it deserves it. I've not read her previous books, I think she almost certainly has a better book in her.

Wow, I'm really sorry if I've spoiled things for people. It's hard when you get into a debate about aspects of the book that get clarified later on, and I personally I don't find that my enjoyment of a book is much affected by knowing what happens (even with thrillers) which maybe makes me careless. I should have been more sensitive.

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Frankiemachine - I've deleted your most recent post, and I'll undelete it once the time period for reading the book has passed.

thanks for the apology frankiemachine - yeah i do find that the emotional impact of scenes can be heavily blunted if they've been spoilered.

fwiw since reading/discussion of the rest of the book is 'officially' scheduled to start sunday, i'd say it's all fair game from there on (and i would consciously avoid the thread from then until i'd finished myself). this might be a little unfair to slower readers but i think it's a reasonable compromise.

Thanks Matt, appreciated.

fwiw, ppl not reading the book, e.g. what the pinefox describes as 'orgiastic party' is 'some teenagers smoke dope and feel a little depressed about the fact that one of their number is sleeping with an older dude in the next room'; as always the single malt of the pinefox's often considerable insight is diluted by the tesco value cola of his sometimes plain baffling conceptual filters

or something like that, i didn't sleep very well

I want to read this book now. I will probably hate it in a way that holds my interest enough to make me continue.

PF, we are all of us living lives of mid-table mediocrity, but some of us are looking at an impending takeover by a consortium of anonymous businessmen from the Far East.

haah my gf's away at the moment + she took this w/ her + i just got a text saying 'that book is so bloody good isnt it!!'

I like it! And I just wrote something long, but realised I was including some second half stuff. Then I wanted to respond to a couple of pinefox's observations, but I've got work to do now. Also slightly wary of becoming backlash egan stan straw man fan. Well.

as always the single malt of the pinefox's often considerable insight is diluted by the tesco value cola of his sometimes plain baffling conceptual filters

I want to read this book now. I will probably hate it in a way that holds my interest enough to make me continue.

Also want to read it to see where the Armed Forces connection comes in, if any.

ch6: the business about 'it's all xs and os' and 'we are all made of information' seems a bit lame, actually - sub-Pynchon: not that this reads like Pynchon, but that this kind of talk feels like something that a Pynchon fan would say or want to write. I can't make out so far, across the novel, how far JE is pastiching things like this and how far she means it.

Bennie and Scotty meeting across the desk was OK - the Scotty voice has something; I like its fresh approach to reality. I think I can identify with this outcast and decrepit loser who is shunned by the world but still interested in it, more than I could with any other characters so far.

pp.117-8:
'His father had been an electrician; Bennie could light anything'.

Novelists seem to be keen on this kind of statement. The sentence seems to imply a causality that is meant to carry obviously and naturally from one side of the semi-colon to another. It looks tough and knowing. You wouldn't mess with this sentence.

Actually, guess what? People do not necessarily inherit the skills and knowledge that their relatives have. Any one of us could say 'my mother was X, but I can't do xyz things that her job required'.

OK, a character might pick up some electrical skills from an electrician - or he might not. Would being the son of an electrician (though not an electrician yourself, but a record company executive) mean you could 'light anything'? The causality would be contingent, the skill would be variable, sometimes non-existent; it wouldn't have the kind of natural status that I feel is implied by that semi-colon.

This is like (in the old lament of the 1980s) the way that when Tom Cruise played a barman, he had to be most talented barman in NYC; or when he played a racing driver, he had to be the most daring driver on the track - etc. It's bravado writing - it's a weak sentence in its assumption of strength. It's also like that bad sentence about Rolph and his father earlier - again the writer grasps at a patently misleading symmetry or clarity and it rings untrue.

there's no armed forces connection iirc

Wow, I'm really sorry if I've spoiled things for people.

Me too--I read it all in one day off work, which is a vote in its favour, and got carried away in my commenting. Sorry!

Can't agree with that reading pinefox. The causal relationship you read into this isn't necessarily there. An analagous sentence might be something like:

Bennie's father was a professional golfer; Bennie was a keen amateur who played off scratch.

The second half of the sentence tells us something about Bennie's interests and aptitudes; the first suggests how and why those interests and aptitudes may have developed. The sentence as a whole doesn't mean that Bennie's interests and aptitudes flow inevitably from his father's profession.

I'm reminded of the legal principle that if the wording of a statute can be read in two ways, and one of those ways produces an absurdity, then we ought to assume that the draughtsmen intended the meaning that is not absurd. Your reading of the sentence renders its meaning absurd, and since it is perfectly possible to read it in other ways that are not then I think we ought to give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that the non-absurd meaning is the one she intended.

D'oh draftsmen.

I don't think I understand your disagreement.

It seems pretty clear that the sentence implies a causal relationship between its two halves.

It doesn't say 'was a keen amateur' or 'did at least know how to fix a lightbulb', but 'could light anything' - that's a big part of the problem, the overemphasis. It's like bad Hollywood logic, not real life logic.

The main issue here for me is not the detail that the character could or not be a good electrician, etc. It's something about authorial judgement - the way she lapses into the over-emphatic cos it sounds cooler than something less emphatic; the way she takes a path of least resistance into the over-emphatic option. I think the earlier sentence I quoted re father & son also showed a failure of judgement, so there may be a general problem here, from my POV; though the more general problem I really have is the one that others have noted, namely that the writing doesn't do anything very special.

Given the way this book is going, I can imagine that there may well be a chapter about how B. became an electrician, which would I suppose make the sentence look less lazy and more earned.

clarification: that is, there may well be a chapter about how B. followed his electrician father around from job to job and, through close observation, aquired the skills to LIGHT ANYTHING.

Meanwhile:

In person, Egan is slight, modest, at odds perhaps with the force of her prose, which is lit by a casual brilliance and so compacted as to be almost tangible.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/may/07/jennifer-egan-life-goon-squad

In person, Egan is casual, tangible, brilliantly lit by the son of a local electrician, at odds perhaps with the slight modesty of her prose.

Thought about getting this from the library but all I got was 482 holds on first copy returned of 115 copies- dang, this thing is popular. Read the ebook sample and gotta say that I was having the same anthropologist from mars reaction as the pinefox. For instance, on the first page there is this: We live in a city where people will still the hair off your head if you give them half a chance. Oh really? Who are these people? What do they do with the hair? What is it worth on the street? Is there a hair-legging operation being run by some Williamsburg wig merchants? Maybe in Chapter 7 this will be revealed? Probably not, probably it's just an "inventive" way to say this is a tough town, watch your back.

You might say I am misreading, picking on the poor sentence, but despite all the reviews about the modern, luminous, diamond hard prose, and the 482 holds on the 115 copies, Nabokov it ain't.

aargh. will steal the hair off your head

But maybe it should be "still," which would lead to exciting revenuer chase scene hijinks in Chapter 9.

115 copies of a new novel? your local library must be Alexandria, if not Babel, or possibly Deptford.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/WilliamCrump63/libraryken.jpg
http://www.nypl.org/

If you look closely, Ken C is trying to intercept one of those 115 copies en route to the legitimate next borrower for his own nefarious reading pleasure.

What's wrong with these people who don't know how to use a library?

really that line bugs you?

and saying 'well shes not nabokov' just reminds me of that shakey mo thread abt modern fiction - there are a lot of authors who arent navokov! he was one of the best authors of the 20th century!

and some of us think Nabokov is overrated too!

That line does feel like she was about to write "where people will steal the shirt of your back" and then thought "Woah cliche alert! Hmmm let me see..."

Agree with pinefox also about the bennie/electrician and rolph/father lines, they're aiming for a solidity that just breaks down under analysis.

I have a horrible feeling the Rolph line is an allusion to Proust :(

and saying 'well shes not nabokov'

so you were exaggerating

Don't know about that. Recently I downloaded and was reading or re-reading the first chapters of some of his books and really liking his sentences, such as this from The Gift: "The van's forehead bore a star-shaped ventilator. Running along its entire side was the name of the moving company in yard-high blue letters, each of which (including a square dot) was shaded laterally with black paint: a dishonest attempt to climb into the next dimension."

That line does feel like she was about to write "where people will steal the shirt of your back" and then thought "Woah cliche alert! Hmmm let me see..."

Speaking of author's opinions differing from their characters, I recently read a collection of short stories that I liked where there was a lot of mocking of characters for liking The Grateful Dead. Later I read an interview with the author and he said that actually he was a big fan of The Dead, but he knew a lot of people felt that way so he put that in. Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever it was called.

That's such a typical contemporary US title !!!

I hoped at first glance that you were referring to 'The Dead', which I have just reread.

xxpost i've been meaning to read that! so it was good?

Just a few thoughts: identification, not sure how much this bothers me generally. I like liking and disliking characters in books, and identification can play a bit part in that (on on the widest existential level Josef K for instance). Other times not identifying doesn't matter to me - the characters in Dostoevsky's The Idiots for example, or a satire like the Apes of God, although that book has colossal problems perhaps partly to do with alienation of reader sympathy. Only thing that can really put me off with characters is going 'oh ffs' a lot.

I'm not sure how much identification matters in a novel of many different equally weighted characters. Is there a lack of identification with all the characters? I mean, I'm genuinely not sure, it's not rhetorical disagreement. Sympathy is quite an important element in Good Squad, so I guess if there's no feeling for any of the characters then that could be a problem.

My feeling is that much of A is to do with alienation from those around you, usually because of a specific psychological detail - kleptomania, shame, Scotty's dissociative (is that the right word) perception, or indeed the anthropological stance in the African chapter. B feels like how you reconnect with those about you, but prob best leave that for the moment. Anyway, that alienation, that feels sympathetic to me, and interesting when perceived from different angles.

Not sure that D Mitchell isn't a bit of a red-herring tbh, Cloud Atlas had specifically nested narratives, these feel like looser connections, and so time has a slightly different, not so important element, that feels more to do with an aesthetic. Like with that foreshadowing that you felt was clumsy, I felt that was more like trying to include time in a picture, long perspective.

re: 'cool youth' i know what you mean in a way, although people forming bands happens quite a lot at school, they just don't have the success, but more importantly they're not happy and i thought this chapter really drew out teenage interaction really well, the internal envy and exclusion you are talking about feeling here.

Not sure any of this would count if I didn't like the style, but I do. Possibly for the same reasons that lead pinefox to call it plain. I like the easy way it included things like drugs and music, which are frequently, in fact in my limited experience always badly handled.

So, RJ's "I have a really hard time with band references in novels ... not sure why ... maybe it just feels like shorthand for characterization, or, like the author is trying to convince you that she is cool ... or that the book is trying too hard to appeal to people who want to consume fiction that reaffirms their own self-image of a person of xyz tastes" I disagree with I think. Or at least I definitely agree with it a lot of the time, but I think JE avoids it.

Sorry this is a bit long, I wanted to catch up a bit, but it's probably a bit cumbersome. Also need to have a shufti at the book again because I've only got vague impressions floating around at this remove.

xxpost i've been meaning to read that! so it was good?
Very good. I liked it so much that I immediately bought one book with a similar cover color scheme- I guess they are both Harper Perennials- but I couldn't get into the other one, which was What He's Poised To Do.

Ha, pinefox, I was thinking same thing whilst typing.

Oh

'His father had been an electrician; Bennie could light anything'.
Novelists seem to be keen on this kind of statement

completely otm.

Thanks Fizzles for your approval + for your interesting comments above.

But

people forming bands happens quite a lot at school

what school? not any school I ever went to.

Which goes back to the whole point about finding things exclusive - which doesn't make the writing bad, but does make it harder for me to like the story.

re Mitchell I believe I was specifically referring to Ghostwritten. But sure, I don't say that this novel is really much like that. As far as I can tell, JE is a much less gifted writer than DM (though not awful). It was just one relevant comparison that came to hand.

The 'btw this African tribesman 35 years later was an art dealer in NYC' thing I can understand working in the abstract -- I just don't think, somehow, that JE pulls it off in practice, hence 'clumsy'.

Actually, guess what? People do not necessarily inherit the skills and knowledge that their relatives have. Any one of us could say 'my mother was X, but I can't do xyz things that her job required'.

people forming bands happens quite a lot at school
what school? not any school I ever went to.

Bog standard comp, five form and sixth form I guess. It just seemed to be something people did. Not many of them performed in any meaningful way. Glee it wasn't.

As I say, I feel that exclusion is the whole deal with the first half of the book, although obviously that's not at all saying that if you feel excluded from the book, the characters' feelings of exclusion are going to feel at all sympathetic. They're not the same, clearly.

I thought Goon Squad did seem quite gifted really. I liked her easy way with the psychology of social interaction. The mechanics of how we get on with people. I feel I'm perhaps being a little critically naive tho. Is this what Alfred Lord Soto meant by it being a pop novel? As in pop psychology, or was that just to do with the music?

Now I'm hearing in my head Jerry Garcia and Christopher Walken harmonizing the words "upon all the living and dead." Must drive it out with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy27p86zjF4

Also will probably have to pay the $9.99 for the rest of the book to continue participating in thread.

I liked her easy way with the psychology of social interaction. The mechanics of how we get on with people

I think that this sounds like excellent subject matter for a book, or an excellent thing for a novelist to do well.

In the first 100pp or so, I don't think I've found JE doing it especially well.

All things considered, I've realized that I don't the first 120pp have been very good in any way at all.

But, there is a long way to go and I think that numerous things could change.

i like that optimism!

well, the book is more protean than most - if any book could improve radically halfway through, this one seems a candidate.

Didn't make too much of an impression. None of this -- manias, the scene, time jumps -- particularly bothered me one way or another. Nor did the 'not real anymore' guff that Egan/Bennie mouth off as it does reflect what people at a certain time and place would think, and would keep thinking. Many think it today.

Having said all that I'm looking forward to the Powerpoints. Don't care if its a gimmick as long as it works on some level.

But so far, its clearly nowhere near as exciting as The Last Samurai.

Has anyone come across any negative reviews for "Goon Squad"?

After I finished the book and felt pretty let down by it, I went googling for dissenting views and I didn't find any. Although, I lost my stomach for the search after reading one too many lines like this (from The Denver Post):

"Here, in ways that surprise and delight again, she transcends slick boomer nostalgia and offers a testament to the redemptive power of raw emotion in an age of synthetic sound and glossy avatars.

Turn up the music, skip the college reunion and curl up with "The Goon Squad" instead."

(That's in reference to the ending, which I am really eager to discuss but .... gotta wait, right? )

I felt the same and eventually came across this vaguely mixed review:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/a-visit-from-the-goon-squad-by-jennifer-egan-2264678.html

she transcends slick boomer nostalgia

Precisely what it doesn't do.

Re: the penultimate sentence of that Independent review, although it's an imperfect and in many ways unfair analogy, I do kind of feel that Goon Squad is X&Y to Underworld's OK Computer.

xpost - I haven't, although I only read a couple of reviews. Like most people I expect I don't have the stomach for blanket praise, and find myself obscurely thinking less of the work being reviewed. I start feeling with dissatisfied - disagreements with the reviewer become disagreements with the book. When I read it, I liked it because it felt fresh and fun, but the impedimenta of praise + expectation start making it look 'important' and I'm not sure it can really support that. Actually I think there are reasons why it could be seen as significant, but wdn't want to push them too hard. As I say, I enjoyed it, but when in trying to enthuse as an antidote to disappointment, I find myself wishing I didn't have to. I enjoyed the reading of it, and am pleased if other people enjoyed it, but I don't really want to defend it against those who, perfectly reasonably, didn't enjoy it. That's rather resigned isn't it? Maybe I'm not book club material.

get caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire
"will die in a fire"- wonder if this is a tribute to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

will never read this book but enjoying this thread

Interview in the guardian today, can't find it online though.

pinefox linked it upthread

omg beaten at IT by the pinefox :/

... disagreements with the reviewer become disagreements with the book. When I read it, I liked it because it felt fresh and fun, but the impedimenta of praise + expectation start making it look 'important' and I'm not sure it can really support that. Actually I think there are reasons why it could be seen as significant, but wdn't want to push them too hard. As I say, I enjoyed it, but when in trying to enthuse as an antidote to disappointment, I find myself wishing I didn't have to. I enjoyed the reading of it, and am pleased if other people enjoyed it, but I don't really want to defend it against those who, perfectly reasonably, didn't enjoy it. That's rather resigned isn't it? Maybe I'm not book club mater

Yeah, I hear you. I'm pretty sure I would have had a more positive reaction to the book if I had read it pre-hype. As it is though, I'm responding to the hype as much as I am to the book. And I tend to be reflexively contrarian when responding to critic's darlings so I probably had a grudge against the book before even starting it (and I'd bet I'm not the only ILBer in that camp). I definitely agree though that the novel felt fresh and fun. And it is very "of the moment," which I think a lot of readers and reviewers found refreshing, and that aspect speaks to a lot of the discussion of the importance/relevance of novel-reading that seems to be in the air.

It was entertaining, very readable, but the last 1/3 left a bad taste for me. Not a total failure though. And I liked the powerpoint chapter too. I'd definitely like to hear positive responses and reasons why you or anyone else find the book important/significant Obv it is important in one regard: a lot of people are reading it and even seeing it as some kind of cultural touchstone ... and that says something about the present cultural moment ... but, well, dealing with that involves responding to the context of the book which, again, is problematic ... but unavoidable, right? I think that we are probably over-eager to find cultural touchstones, to see ourselves reflected in fiction (which brings up my earlier point re: pop-cultural references), just as the majority of this particular "we" (ILB folk) are probably over-eager to disavow these cultural touchstones that seem (wrongly, arbitrarily) assigned to us.

Oh, and that slightly negative review from The Independent was pretty insubstantial. Where's James Wood when you need him?? Haha.

Agree with the well-expressed negativity above.

140pp in, on the train through SE London, wound up thinking: really, for all the hype, reviews, interviews, for all the fact that we all wanted to read it, and for all my attempts to say something positive about it -- this book has been utterly mediocre so far.

I think that's true, but it's also possible, even likely, that I am 'projecting' somehow from real life as I know it. I suppose the correlative of that is, if I was happy and positive about things, I would like the book. But would I, even then?

I've skipped quite a lot here, but I just wanted to tell you, my real friends, that I did a very strange thing today: I went into and actual book shop and bought this actual book and then, as if that wasn't enough, on my way home I started reading it! And now I'm going to read some more!

FWIW I liked chapter one and had no difficulty relating to kleptowoman. I also thought it was "well written".

MORE LATER...

on the one hand it seems crazy to me to call this book "mediocre," but on the other i think a lot of my favorite books might be described that way, in the sense that they're about people and their relationships and are not...i don't know if "important" is the right way to describe it, but "difficult" i guess? feel like i always end up getting into this kind of argument about books. not just on ilx, really.

Yeah horseshoe i know what yr saying, i mean i have a feeling ppl would say the same thing abt alice munro and shes my favourite author ever so

I enjoyed this a lot more than the last samurai fwiw

snyone who says alice munro is mediocre is a fool

Yeah, pinefox, your microsurgical nitpickery--although entertaining and probably indicative of larger issues you have with the book--seems to suggest that you are a bit predisposed to looking for flaws here (as am I, I'm a fellow prose-snob with my own set of problem sentences).

horseshoe while yr here, which jennifer egan shld i read next

yay! my personal favorite is look at me, but i think that's because thematically the whole women/beauty thing is endlessly fascinating to me. she gets too ambitious with the many-stranded plot and it doesn't really hold together completely. i think the keep might be her best book. it's also crazy imo.

Thanks!

just1n3 might have an egan recommendation, too. i would be interested to hear it!

Shit, dudes, ain't no such thing as a perfect book. Some of us like books that dig into the subtexts of personal relationships more (a la Alice Munro), and some of us are more into books that explore "bigger" questions (a la Delillo, who I've seen AVFTGS compared to in a few reviews). To Egan's credit, she at least tries to go both routes and does it in a stylistically unique way that itself can be seen as a comment on both the inner and outer worlds of her characters. So she gets my "good college try" props (and i'm not trying to be as condescending as I probably sound right there).

'Mediocre', for me, has nothing whatsoever to do with being about people's lives and personal relationships. Lorrie Moore is still probably my favourite living author, despite the car crashes of her last novel.

hopefully we can all agree on the amazingness of lorrie moore

(but probably not)

"The Keep" sounds interesting to me, actually, because I feel like I'm in a bit of a gothic phase right now (with books not looks, thankfully). But it's gotten slagged a lot.

Egan's books in general sound appealing. The summaries all sound really interesting, like books I would go for, but I think I'll stop with this one, mostly because I'm a big prose-snob (with newer stuff but not so much with older books) and I found a few bits in GS that were particularly irksome prose-wise.

(I've tried with Lorrie Moore, but can't seem to be able to get through a whole book. But I have that problem with a bunch of contemporary short story writers that are of the MFA-type school.)

all right i know there's no use arguing this stuff but egan's prose is great you're all crazy!

While we're talking about good and bad writing, a dishonorable discharge for the scene on p.124:

'I don't get what happened to you'.
'I'm like America ... our hands are dirty'.

I think I can see ways that this is pretty awful writing, incredibly naive, sententious and crassly portentous. I don't think I can find a way for it to be good.

which characters are those?

scotty + bennie?

Stephanie and Jules.

ha okay. i mean, jules is kind of horrible!

horseshoe, we are like literary soulmates:

on the one hand it seems crazy to me to call this book "mediocre," but on the other i think a lot of my favorite books might be described that way, in the sense that they're about people and their relationships and are not...i don't know if "important" is the right way to describe it, but "difficult" i guess? feel like i always end up getting into this kind of argument about books. not just on ilx, really.

i mean, i wouldn't be surprised if i'm the only person on ilb who loves a..m. homes and (early) douglas coupland

the thing i love about egan, specifically AVftGS, is that she takes some things i like a lot about other writers and just does them... better.

as for egan recs:
the keep is amazing - just so odd and compelling and surreal
look at me has this really sinister undertone throughout; it's easy to get lost, and def the kind of book that benefits from solid time blocks of reading (i was all over the place with it and don't think i did it justice)
emerald city is great, esp if you like munro-type short fiction
invisible circus is ... i'm not really sure how to describe. it's weird - but not like the keep is 'weird' - good. but it felt sort of bleak to me.

i need to read emerald city

I found the book vaporous -- I haven't thought about it since finishing it on Tuesday. All it boasts is an anachronistically novel way of playing with time and a couple of vivid confrontations.

book dismissed

Just finished ch8, 'selling the general'. The worst yet. Just an atrocious lot of nonsense.

What's striking me, and what contributes a lot to my loathing of this episode: the apparent radical arbitrariness of this book. There is very little sense of moving along a trajectory, through any kind of narrative or thematic logic. We just jump from one thing to another, in no evident order (maybe there's a reason for the order, but after 165pp it is not in any way apparent or intuitively available), as JE makes up one shallow character and empty scenario after another.

I have to try to remember that things could change - that all this could somehow look different later. But I'm nearly halfway through the book - it's a bit late for it not to have developed any kind of momentum or sense of direction.

There is very little sense of moving along a trajectory, through any kind of narrative or thematic logic

Am I allowed to say that I think that's point? While recognising that me saying that is a very good basis for fisticuffs and p'raps the throwing about of phrases like 'precious twat'? (which I originally wrote as 'previous teat' - a better insult imo).

That selling the general chapter is pretty bad tho, agreed. Although again, momentum and sense of direction, not sure this is quite what it's about. Very much short stories with threads I think. I think that's a strength.

I guess it's Sunday now so the rest of the book is fair game...

Yeah I hated that chapter; thoroughly unconvincing all of it, the PR campaign, the disastrous party, the wayward actress who released "several thousand" lemurs from a Disney movie - there probably aren't several thousand lemurs in captivity in all the world. It's all so obviously absurd I think that taking it at face value must be missing the point - but then I have no idea what the real point is.

Kitty's story in the chapter - washed up actress agrees to desperate PR campaign, turns the tables and accuses the General - is just about the only part that hangs together, the only plausible psychological picture. But that's destroyed by showing her on the General's arm at the end, a move which is seemingly there only to enable Dolly's triumph - which itself is only necessary for her daughter's later part in the story.

If this is a book of short stories, I don't think they're very good short stories, so far, to put it mildly.

I have read five chapters. It has gone right downhill after the first chapter. Next time I see a book describing itself on the front cover as "wildly ambitious" I will know what it means. I will persevere because of the £12, but really the best thing about this book was the thrill of actually going out to a shop and buying an actual book without it being on offer or anything.

If this is a book of short stories, I don't think they're very good short stories, so far, to put it mildly.

its not a book of short stories. its probably a mistake to think of them as 'stories', maybe.

i do think theres a quality of 'explaining ourselves to ourselves' that i liked abt the last third or so of the novel, where she starts to expand on some of the ideas she seems to have abt 'identity' & 'connectedness' but i dont think thats the best part of the novel. i think the best part of the novel is how compassionate it is, & how much she seemed to want to give all her characters the benefit of the doubt, to do them justice. & that made me eager to spend time in their company, to know them & to empathize w/ them.

yeah that's exactly right...some of them are kind of awful, but she's really on their side.

PJM, it goes downhill quite a bit more yet.

I share your feelings about the £12 and all that. Also don't forget the cover design which I think is the best thing about the book so far.

"The PowerPoint chapter manages, somehow, to be very moving and only works, she says, because the medium underlines a structural point she was trying to make about brevity: specifically, the awkward, silence-imbued relationship between a boy and his father. It's not merely a gimmick [...]"

I thought it was about how in the new modern world of the future, ver kids will be into powerpoint instead of paragraphs. It is written by the daughter after all, so I don't see how her choice of medium underlines anything about the relationship between the son and the father. I actually kinda liked it; it's a good gimmick, but it is a gimmick, and ultimately it says a lot less, and doesn't really offer anything more, than a normal chapter would have done.

I have now read nine chapters and I like it a lot more than I did after I had read six. Not sure why - I suppose I must prefer Kitty to Lou.

I am reading this very quickly by my standards, and the standards of my life.

xp i guess it's not just writing about women but also being a woman. god. look at me is also about a model, which i guess is a double-strike against it.

― horseshoe, Thursday, May 5, 2011 4:07 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you know what that review is about, too: The Keep was her first novel where most of it is told from a man's pov.

― horseshoe, Thursday, May 5, 2011 4:08 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark

yah smth i was thinking about this book, i mean, goon squad -- it's the sort of book that it is er easier for a man to have written, in some ways. not that men are any better at the writing half, obviously; just that there's a well-worn path of neurons for ppl to receive this kind of thing when a man does it. tho i don't know, the across-the-board good reviews (plus pulitzer) would seem to run against that, obviously. possibly it blinds us to other stuff that she's doing that we're not used to.

i think the best part of the novel is how compassionate it is, & how much she seemed to want to give all her characters the benefit of the doubt, to do them justice. & that made me eager to spend time in their company, to know them & to empathize w/ them.

― Lamp, Sunday, May 8, 2011 5:29 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

tho as i mentioned i think this is totally the worst part of the novel! like when we go back in time and find out the sleazy record exec wasn't ALWAYS a shithead, that was enough thanks, we don't need to go forwards in time and find out that he's mainly a sad figure by the end. -- i don't know. even if you believe we're all redeemable in some fashion it seems odd to have a 100% success rate in any given sample. (this novel made me wonder what religious tradition she was raised in.) though: i do think the whole thing about the pause is kind of an elegant way of acknowledging what she's doing. is there a pause in 'goon squad'? there isn't, i don't think; it'd be nice if there was, but

i'd forgotten the PR section with the general. i liked it! i was willing for it to be operating on its own logic for a while. certainly various sections (the interview + the last chapter, in particular. also maybe the diversions in italy and africa) are off operating on a different level of realism to a lot of the u.s. stuff, this probably depends on your tolerance for it

just1n3 i also really like a.m. homes, i haven't read early douglas coupland in years but hey i even liked jpod

the_pinefox your justification for considering most of them 'shallow characters and empty scenarios' seems to be along the lines of 'these people have desires i do not personally have and/or have done things i never did': this is problematic, insofar as literary criticism goes

also i think i am going to read the keep this evening, i am kind of hoping i will actually dislike it because then i get to come back online and complain about her a lot

what book are you guys reading next

This GOON SQUAD book just keeps getting better and better. I think I might even finish it tonight.

what book are you guys reading next

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Sunday, 8 May 2011 Bookmark

ILB Summer Group read POLL

PowerPoint chapter - A++++++++++++

About 20 pages to go, but I am so very very sleepy, I should save them for tomorrow.

But I think this book certainly rewards one's perseverence. I think I'm going to think it's fairly great.

The PowerPoint chapter was A+ in that I finished sixty pages in 10 minutes.

Yes, that was part of its appeal. Came at just the right time.

I read to the end, but I can't remember much about it. Still, successful experiment on the whole. Left with a slightly empty feeling where massive satisfaction should be.

The musical elements were as crap as ever, I think.

Don't know whether to read James Yorkston or Melvin Van Peebles next.

I think there is something PowerPoint-presentation-like about the book as a whole, maybe, and so that chapter comes as less forced and more heartening than it otherwise might; I'm not sure how I would gloss the notion of the book's PowerPointishness, though. On Egan's website she notes that she had a previous attempt at a PowerPoint chapter, I think an actual presentation, that one; so the ambition to write something of that sort had been there a while.

I put off The Keep because I was rereading sections of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, so I have only just started The Keep and I would like to add to the assertion, upthread, that there are individual sentences of Vladimir Nabokov's which are better than individual sentences of Jennifer Egan's, that there are individual sentence of David Foster Wallace's, too, which are better than individual sentences of Egan's. However.

There's a line in the Guardian interview that she originally intended to include a chapter in Byronic epic verse because "epic verse and PowerPoint in one novel, come on. Irresistible!" - which does add to the feeling that the structure is just plain arbitrary and gimmicky rather than driven by anything in the story. Which is feasibly fine, but I'd like to think that an arbitrary and gimmicky book should be a bit more fun! Can't help feel that the formal play is more than that though: for a book so concerned with a culture consumed by marketing and pr, seems to me the novel enacts something like that desperation to appeal to as many different markets as possible, like a singer including a dubstep lite track, a power ballad, a pseudo altrock on their debut album.

Was willing to give the book the benefit of the doubt until the final chapter, where it just capsized, I think. Not just for the txt msging, or the terrible mawkishness of the bit where Alex says "What happened to me?" and Bennie twinkles back "You grew up - just like the rest of us", not even the whole disastrous scene of the final concert (especially when she seems to have borrowed Laura Barton's Greil-Marcus-for-beginners manual: "Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on slide guitar") but mostly for the reappearance of the Kenyangrandson - where it felt like Egan wasn't just tying up all her threads, but putting a pretty bow on them for good measure.

I like that last, but then I have no problem with grace laps, but then I guess you have to believe that you've won a race to justify one, or even that the race you're running against yourself is an interesting one. Yes?

I think there's a more interesting argument coexisting with the 'authenticity, maan' one that is all anyone is seeing in that last section: the sentence before that one you quote, in fact: "a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering". But oh well.

I'm wondering about this "two generations of war and surveillance", since the last chapter happens, according to my irrefutable calculations, somewhere between 2015 and 2020. One generation of ubiquitous surveillance, maybe. War is of course eternal. But yeah I thought the whole thing was ridic; the txtspeak of course, the 'pointers' - oh right we're just going to abdicate all our aesthetic decisions to toddlers? - and the ethics professor collecting examples of 'calcified morality' - oh right we're just going to throw 300 years of moral philosophy in the bin and become practising moral relativists?

oh right we're just going to abdicate all our aesthetic decisions to toddlers

er

?

i mean i'm sorry if that is an unfair characterisation of whatever her ridiculous scenario is exactly.

i'm torn between "b-but we did already!", "b-but that's not what she suggests!", "b-but we're not operating in a realistic mode here!". i think the third one comes closest to having legs.

Ok I'm also sorry for being mr super boring realist. I would like to hear more about alternative interpretations...

I don't think the book would have been any worse had it ended with the Powerpoint presentation actually, but I think Egan actually undercuts the rockism of the Scotty performance by showing everything that's happening behind the scenes, it's not actually as "real" a cultural moment as the narrator suggests, just as the punk rock so-called golden age isn't as much fun as various narrators want us to believe in hindsight.

I still don't like the final chapter much, it annoyed me that the war was just glossed over, and I'm not sure how we're supposed to get those last-chapter characters without understanding what they actually went through.

I'm happy overall that I read it before they hype, I wasn't really aware it had any particular rep so I approached it wanting to have fun rather than to understand and appraise a Pulitzer winner.

xpost
I got the feeling that the concert was supposed to be even REAL-er as a result of transcending all the backstage shenanigans and marketing!

I read 2/3rds of this a while ago, enjoyed it immensely & have put it aside for a day when I need something breezy and modern to read.

I'm with n/a and lamp overall - I liked it a lot, but don't have very much to say about it. It had a tone I enjoyed - generous, confident, melancholy - and I don't remember significant problems with prose or characters (Not sure why Nabokov got dragged in upthread. I don't remember Egan trying to be Nabokov, or really sharing territory with him, so pointing out that it isn't as good as him shows… what?) Just1n3's comp to early Douglas Coupland felt nearer the mark (he was a bit stronger at images iirc, but Egan's got more range & the knack for drawing a plausible character quickly; that annoying journalistic-aphoristic streak in Coupland also seems to tempt Egan a bit).

Its current rep is a bit out of control, yeah, but I can see why it's happened - the book does feel like it's cracked or caught something – comfortable, poppy, likeable, a bit sad.

Tho' I should finish it before saying more I guess. Not sure I like the sound of this last chapter.

"comfortable, poppy, likeable, a bit sad." - as I said upthread, it's the modern lit equivalent of a Coldplay album!

nahhhhhhhh p sure the structure would be more linear if it were coldplay lit.

Tho i suppose the formal stuff might be the equivalent of 'getting Eno in'.

Not so much structurally as in its tasteful mode of reference: a tasteful bit of Eno, some dutiful nods to Radiohead, a teensy bit of Arcade Fire-y rabble-rousing, a dash of U2 uplift... and some James Blunt sappiness. Except here it's a hint of DeLillo, a splash of DFW, a soupcon of Proust, a modish dab of Shteyngart...

But it doesn't seem hugely like those things, or not in a distracting way: to take Proust, I know she's talked about how she likes the effect of seeing a whole life & the effects of time on 2ndary characters in A La Recherche, and it's something she wanted to get at by other means (and is the epigraph from proust? Don't have my copy here), but I mean that's totally normal, it's just writers thinking about other writers.

i think -- tho the comparisons from music are, i suppose, invited by the thematic material -- they're ultimately not all that enlightening, and get in the way of noticing what this book actually does well.

ledge: like i said, i think that section (and the similar sci fi effects in the powerpoint section) are a particular kind of departure from realism: whether that could be signposted better i'm not sure, and it does depend on your tolerance for that kind of thing, and it could probably be done better. but complaining that these things wouldn't happen seems a little like complaining that the stuff on commercialism in the space merchants is impossible to take seriously, or that soylent green wouldn't ever actually be made from people. (for higher-minded precursors see infinite jest or like delillo or john barth or whatever.) i think the toddlers/'pointers' works as a fun & ridiculous but still kind of scary extrapolation from the shift in pop music consumption from adults to teenagers to tweens -- the creation of new demographic categories & new mediations of human experience thus.

or that soylent green wouldn't ever actually be made from people

i suppose the difference for me is that the rest of the book ('saving the general' and powerpoint chapters excepted perhaps) does work on a realist level, and yr soylent green or whatevers are at least solidly and consistently set in their alternate timeline. the jump to the last chapter in goon squad is a bit of a truck driver's gear change. or compare cloud atlas, where the shift through different times is much more smoothly handled. (setting yr alternate scenario only 5-10 years away doesn't help here either.)

What ledge said.

I do like the way that a book set over a long period of time doesn't just happen to finish in the present-day of when it was published. I just wish her future had made more sense. Also, it seemed odd that she didn't make up some extra silence-containing tracks that came out between now and then for the powerpoint chapter.

But I did find the book overall to be fun, engaging, what have you, and I'm very glad I read it.

I've given it two out of five, but I don't think I'll really make up my mind for a long time yet.

her future is a park slope dystopia of baby stroller traffic jams. the weakest part of the "novel" for me. and lulu was my favorite character, too!

No one will need text speak in the future, phones will autocorrect everything.

I've been avoiding this thread for fear of spoilers 'cos I'm reading slow, but I'm beginning to see it's not really like that. I read 'Safari' tonight and it was pretty excellent, the constant shifting of attention and perspective and horrible little surprises. Very impressive, I'm not sure I've read anything quite like it before.

Who's finished it?

Me

While it's not terrible, it's awfully pedestrian -- it's a bright MFA assignment.

totally agree. the altman-ish perspectival shifts are kind of pointless, more an affectation to simulate coherence than thematically integral. her first collection, emerald city -- though it starts out chick-litty -- is way better. the last story, "sisters of the moon," is one of the best of the 90s

the comment about 'a bright MFA assignment' strikes me a little like stevie t's about 'the kind of generic postmod novel criticism 101 undergrads were writing back in my American Lit classes over 20 years ago'. although it's possible that these are variations of the sort of rhetoric, above passim, that lead us to note that jennifer egan is not as good at writing sentences as is nabokov, i guess, although muted ones.

I don't need her to write sentences like Nabokov – I want her to write Deborah Eisenberg short stories. She should succumb to the temptation of writing more superficially than she's shown.

My comment was about the unusually banal LRB review rather than the novel!

I do agree with Alfred however: bright MFA assignment is pretty much what I said to a friend in conversation last weekend. I really don't understand the fuss about this book. Not just all the prizes, but, as has been noted, apart from this thread you'd struggle to find a single bad word about it anywhere on the internet! Even the folks here who like it seem sort of muted in their praise.

i know you meant the review -- i just think calling that 'undergraduate' or this an 'MFA assignment' is kind of ... expecting miraculously high standards out of undergraduates. and postgraduates

i am being muted in praise (if i am) because i think it is 'a pretty good new novel' or 'about twice to three times as good as jonathan franzen' or 'about as good as 'of love and hunger' by julian maclaren-ross or an ok waugh novel or something'

i think it does a good job of looking at a certain kind of social atomisation (structural loneliness, maybe): looks at it in a way that's aware that facebook is a good emblem or avatar of certain feelings or way of living, but aware, too, that it hardly caused them: looks at it in a way which does a good job both of operating in terms of the individual psyche and wider social/cultural/economic ... stuff

i think the structure is vital to that; i think there are bits that don't quite work, but within the structure they're worth it and function well

i feel like a lot of the complaints here are demonstrating a refusal to engage; that said, i think some of the perhaps overextravagant praise elsewhere is equally based on a refusal or inability to engage, really

a.l.s.: isn't eisenberg waaaaaay more MFAish? i don't know; i still didn't finish even the first story in 'twilight', which oops i have had hanging around ... maybe two years. the last book i read that i thought 'this feels like a damn MFA assignment' was that wells tower collection which is popular here

i mean if anything this book feels under-crafted in the light of what it's trying to do structurally/thematically -- whereas what i think of as 'MFAish' is being crafted to within an inch of its life but light on anything but the merest suggestion of thematic weight, no attempt at a larger structure than 'here is an incident that happened, once'

-

also, i read 'the keep', but it didn't seem very germane to discussing this book, maybe

saw this in the library last week and picked it up (hadn't heard of it outside this thread)

just more than halfway through, the thing it actually reminds me of more than anything is some of the recentish graphic novels by chris ware and especially dan clowes, in particular 'ice haven' by clowes - ie a story told in different fragments, by different narrators, in different styles, with a feeling of middle-aged regret and melancholy. clowes and ware have the beauty of their pictures to help overcome a certain sketchiness - two-dimensionality - in their characters, and the stories/feelings/situations that they create for them, whereas egan only has (to my mind) an essentially unremarkable prose style to fall back on. so her book feels very insubstanial, so far; and because she constantly foregrounds the question of authenticity - of music/culture, or of experience - it puts it in the forefront of my mind the entire time i'm reading the book , makes me think again and again that the whole is ersatz, fake, writerly affectation rather than genuinely observed or felt. I don't but it, basically.

buy it, basically

what i think of as 'MFAish' is being crafted to within an inch of its life but light on anything but the merest suggestion of thematic weight,

Precisely my complaint about this novel.

I forgot to take my book with me for the train today so I read this thread instead. It's very good. The book I like, though Scotty's chapter is a bit horrible.

Finished it, but wasn't that engaged. If she wanted to cover 'reflections on time' she should've done it w/MS Project. All those Gantt charts. That's about all I have.

I'm keeping a wary distance, but I did run across
this interview.

Ha, I'd like to see the "Patron Saint" review the result of his patronage.

Also like the wary distance policy.

the other thing is the song pauses listed by the kid in the 'difficult' chapter (which otherwise is awesome!) are sort of pathetic. "beds are burning," "need you tonight," "enjoy the silence," "i've seen all good people" and about a billion more songs would better fit the aspie kid's criterion than the lame ones egan lists

I did like the PowerPoint best, and silence/pauses in pop is a topic I would like to read more about (in some way). But then I was reading Susan Sontag's Aesthetics of Silence last week too, and while it concerns silence as an avant garde strategy and didn't include its uses as pop it was a nice coincidence.

As Ward says, hard to buy..

Well, I went and listened to the Garbage song and it was quite good and bizarre.

quick show of hands, of those of you who have read this and don delillo's underworld, how many think

a. they were both totally bullshit
b. they were both bullshit to a degree but this was more bullshit
c. they were both somewhat bullshit, but delillo more so
d. neither of these books could be described as 'bullshit'
e. i don't understand what you mean by 'bullshit'

b

Haven't quite finished, but (d) and don't understand what Underworld's got to do with anything, except the passing Truman Capote thing.

d!

d

Bullshit (also bullcrap, bullplop, bullbutter) is a common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism B.S. In British English, "bollocks" is a comparable expletive, although bullshit is commonly used in British English. As with many expletives, it can be used as an interjection or as many other parts of speech, and can carry a wide variety of meanings. It can be used either as a noun or as a verb. Used as an interjection, it protests the use of misleading, disingenuous, or false language. While the word is generally used in a deprecating sense, it may imply a measure of respect for language skills, or frivolity, among various other benign usages. In philosophy, Harry Frankfurt, among others, analyzed the concept of bullshit as related to but distinct from lying.

i don't think underworld has aged that well; maybe that will be true of goon squad for me, too, but i have a similar devotion to both these writers tbh, i don't think i'd describe anything i've read by them as bullshit.

Libra was bullshit -- maybe batshit -- in the best sense.

Libra is excellent and one of the best-constructed novels I can remember reading. Underworld (opening section aside) is overwrought, overlong and cliche-ridden. Goon Squad is fun and cute and kinda lightweight. It's not actually like Underworld at all.

ik/matt: what underworld has to do with things is the piece that stevie t linked, and endorsed, which contains an argument i've seen somewhere else, but i forget where, that this is a 'lightweight' version of underworld

i don't think the comparison is that far-fetched, in that both books take personal-level relations of a wide cast of american peeps over a long period of time, but deal the passing of that period of time in a way that i am going to call 'ellipsistic', even though i am about two-thirds sure that that is not a word; both books, too, can be seen to advance some sort of thesis about historical progress as they go along

unrelated: i saw in an interview, perhaps one linked here, that egan agreed with me about the powerpoint chapter making her recognise a powerpointishness about the novel of the whole. i liked that.

the novel as a whole, rather

Okay, thanks, I didn't spot the link - will finish book tonight, then will read. I do see the temporal skipping parallel, but deLillo dealing largely with the past-past where Egan is all past-present, plus the sheer bloody scale of the thing, means it'll have to be one convincing piece!

aha it's a cast-off line at the end of a review, i shouldn't put too much weight on it

Done! Liked it a lot. The powerpoint thing was very moving - though I don't see why that format was required, it would've been moving anyway.

d

Never really got on with Underworld, tho 'bullshit' seems a little harsh - I just found it slightly tiresome. Disappointed that a lot of didn't really get on with Goon Squad, because it's nice when people like something that you've enjoyed. My first reaction was that it was a contemporary novel that felt fresh and unaffected, with sympathetic and thoughtful characters. Its easy assimilation of music

I liked that it was a community of characters and a community of characters across time, so I saw it as anti-Romantic in a way. That statement probably needs glossing I realise - I'd just read Wells Tower, and felt that his post-Romantic world, where man and nature are reflective of each other, was rather at the end of its shelf-date. Goon Squad felt fresh in this respect.

I didn't see it as being like David Mitchell at all in its use of time, apart from moving backwards and forwards. Certainly didn't think it was all supposed to tie in together, as I said upthread, loosely yoked short stories felt like how it was working to me - a non-narrative network of a novel, which term I guess may make people suck in their cheeks as if eating a lemon, but I think it's a fair description. It's not, I don't think, like Mitchell's nested narratives.

I suppose the main problem for the reader is to work out the question Scotty poses: how do you get from A-B, and what is the difference in the parts? Well the obvious answer is that you go from A-B by getting older, becoming a victim of the goon. But the parts of the book work against this, at least for me. My reading was that the first section was about people isolated from those around them and from the world in general by a central psychological aspect - whether it's kleptomania or anthropology or shame, or Scotty's mental state. B was about how people reconnect and remember each other, whether it's through the fruit the general's agent sends, the mutual aid the washed-up journo and washed-up musician give each other.

There is quite a big problem here, which is that I feel the whole book implies that Benny's statement about music being less than it used to be because of the medium is false. It is that communities continually form themselves around art, for whom it has the same value art always has, regardless of its specific features - the excitement remains the same. So the girl seen going up to the first woman's flat at the end is indicative of new stories starting all the time. This feeling of recurrence is why I guess I didn't really mind the final chapters, all the talk about calcified morality, cultural relativism, that the journalist can't really accept or keep up with, and the massive concert where people are brought together in new ways by new mediums and technology - that all feels right in the terms of the book. But then I didn't really mind the text speak either, although it didn't seem at all likely or natural. But it felt ok as a distancing effect.

The reason all this is a problem is of course because both the Proustian epigraph and clearly Egan herself in interview (from what people have been saying) seem to be saying something closer to Benny's pov about the degradation of art over time. Agree with A, Lord Soto that authorial intention shouldn't dictate one's view of a book, certainly because a book is not always what an author intends, and good ones shd probably be more than they intend. Nevertheless it can make you suspect that you've misread things somewhat.

I really can't be arsed to go back into it again tho, but as I say, without any weight of expectation I liked it thoroughly and felt in some small ways to be innovative and skilful, and its ease to be part of its skill.

That's a nice analysis, I liked that.

Thanks Ismael, it would help if I wrote in proper sentences and finished them from time to time of course, but I plead being persistently interrupted at work while I wrote.

fwiw - 'Its easy assimilation of music as part of the fabric of people's lives and the novel itself felt pleasingly different from something like Hornby, where its used as fetishising music, something special, weird, rather than everyday.'

Playlist of gappy songs from PowerPoint chapter:

http://open.spotify.com/user/pjm230568/playlist/3NCddROLVtZmIHvTk2AMoG

I am waiting for the PF final solution on this book.

I might get another book today.

read this on sunday afternoon, very fast, thinking all the way through oh-i-should-go-back-and-check-who-this-one-is. should probably reread, slowly. i got it a few days ago and read the first chapter, put it aside because I found her attitude to her kleptomania too real and painful. none of the following chapters really lived up to that feeling, though the ppt chapter was delightful.

the thing it actually reminds me of more than anything is some of the recentish graphic novels by chris ware and especially dan clowes, in particular 'ice haven' by clowes - ie a story told in different fragments, by different narrators, in different styles, with a feeling of middle-aged regret and melancholy.

it's funny, though i don't read a lot of graphic novels i really felt the graphic-novel-ness of it.

i wonder if the graphicnovelishness of it is the same thing as the powerpointishness of it

It has not been easy to motivate myself to go back to the Goon Squad book, after the very disappointing first half.

But I have begun.

ch9 seems to me the closest so far to a DFW pastiche. It also has a slight echo of Paul Morley, which reminds us that PM likes DFW anyway. I don't sympathize with the narrator as he tried to rape and kill someone.

ch10 is full of people taking drugs. This is another experience alien to me, but the chapter seems a bit better written than some earlier ones. In using the second person it reminds me of something - not Lorrie Moore the obvious comparison but probably just the way that the first part of The Fortress of Solitude does this occasionally.

I don't sympathize with the narrator as he tried to rape and kill someone.

haha PF, you have such high standards.

I read this over a year ago, so I can't participate too much, but I remember liking the book progressively less as it went along, culminating in that horrible Powerpoint thing. I liked Bennie Salazar's character a lot--I would have been happier if the book focused more intensely on him.

It has not been easy to motivate myself to go back to the Goon Squad book, after the very disappointing first half.

But I have begun.

I'm astounded and impressed by your persistence! If I'd disliked as much as you have I'd've thrown into a corner long ago and confined myself to lurking on the thread with a raised eyebrow.

I worry that I'm going to see the last remnants of the book dismembered in front of me, as I mutter to myself 'I can't believe I ever enjoyed this wretched thing'.

Thank you for your kind words, Fizzles.

I do not for a moment imagine that my view, if expressed, will change your view.

Having bought the book new and read half of it, I don't really feel that not finishing it is an option.

But clearly my idea of acceptably 'finishing it' is spread out over a much vaster time scale than those of other people here.

The last bit I read was about a bloke predicting the internet. I quite liked where this was going though perhaps my response was naive.

I do not for a moment imagine that my view, if expressed, will change your view.

Oh not at all, in fact I'm thoroughly enjoying your pinefauxian literary midrash.

Funny thing is, I can't remember any of the things people are referring to here - rape? Internet? All I can remember is PowerPoint.

This morning I bought The Wind-up Girl, so it had better win.

Funny thing is, I can't remember any of the things people are referring to here - rape? Internet?

ha i had the exact same thought!

It's not a good sign, is it? Glad I'm not the only one.

This just in

--

Call for Papers

43nd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) March 15-18, 2012 Rochester, New York – Hyatt Rochester Host Institution: St. John Fisher College Keynote speaker: Jennifer Egan, 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Threads like this remind me how baffled I can be by the Pinefox's approach - I wonder how I'd be able to read anything if I were put off by writing about experiences alien to me, or without being able to suspend moral judgement about fictional criminals committing fictional crimes.

The bloke predicting the internet (p.199) turned out not to be doing it tht explicitly, more in a mystical way; but I'm pretty sure we are still supposed to think that's what he's doing.

I don't understand the plot line in ch10 of the Sasha character telling the Rob protagonist that he had to pose as her bf because she was being watched by a detective. eg:
1. he wouldn't believe it
2. even if it were true, it would make just as much sense for her to be seen NOT having a bf

- in all the whole thing seems preposterous. Probably it will be explained further in some way, but I don't think that such an explanation is likely to make it more plausible, as experienced in ch10.

But the Rob guy's unrequited affection seems plausible.

though ch10 wasn't great, it was probably one of the best chapters so far.

ch11 opens in Italy. someone way upthread said this was the highlight so perhaps I can hope for something good.

Oh, I assumed the point was she was just saying that so she cd get a snog out of him. The thing being that he didn't realise that she liked him as well as him liking her. Which is what makes his death tragic, and causes at least part of her life to be dedicated to him. Again, the second-half's obsession how we are connected through what we give in remembrance.

I didn't know he had died.

I certainly didn't get the point that you got about their relationship.

That might be because you have read the rest of the book.

assuming that what you say is correct, Fizzles - it is still preposterous that someone (she) would concoct that detective story and conduct a relationship on that basis.

But again, I'm still reading the book. It seems that I have much to discover.

Oh. I wouldn't be sure I'm correct. I just vaguely remember a bunch of people doing stuff. That would be my synopsis of an awful lot of books if you asked me, which you'd be sensible not to.

The paragraph about sports on pp.208-9 is possibly my favourite in the book thus far. The exclamation marks ('not a sport!' - this genuinely gently amuses even this Goon Squad sceptic) point up the fact that this (chapter or start of chapter) is the closest the book's trail of modes has come to Lorrie Moore.

I don't remember any of those bits either.

It's like I haven't read the book at all.

You may have been too busy reading ROCKABILLY.

Postage-free ordering with 22% discount (currently) from here: http://www.bookdepository.com/Open-City-Teju-Cole/9781400068098

Fucks, sorry, wrong thread AND it looks like spam. That's for the US edition of the next selection, Open City by Teju Cole.

I just finished this.

More of a collection of short stories than a novel, but I enjoyed almost all of them. The final, SF chapter was the only one I didn't like. (It's set in around 2030 and they're already changing the earth's orbit! I balk at this.)

Seemingly misjudged sentence on p.218:

'thronged with what had to be college students (strange how they looked the same everywhere)': now, this initially struck me as a somewhat tired, lame truism, a would-be-interesting observation that might be written off as Ted's.

The odd thing, though, is that the sentence immediately specifies
'boys and girls in black leather jackets riding on Vespas, lounging on Vespas, perching and even standing on Vespas'.

This (certainly the Vespas, probably the jackets, not to mention the fact that they're all Italian) surely belies exactly what the sentence has already gone out of its way to say in that ill-fated parenthesis.

In the end, having said positive things about it previously, I couldn't make much sense of that chapter (11): the characters' feelings, motivations relations stayed opaque to me.

Now on p.261.

Not a great paranthesis admittedly, but surely the point is that despite the local details they look the same. The paranthesis is lazy I guess because it doesn't explain why despite the local details they look the same. For some reason Martin Amis' description of his 'thin, breakfastless face' as a student, springs to mind.

This is like watching a brave marathon runner stagger to the finish line btw.

You people still reading this?

No, I'm watching the pinefox read it. I can't read anything else until he finishes it. The suspense is killing me.

Ha.

>>> surely the point is that despite the local details they look the same

I don't think this is quite the sense that I get from it, Fizzles ... it first says they all look the same, then goes on to make them sound outlandishly specific. I think the thought of the sentence is less coherent than you're giving it credit for. I suppose I think Egan had one thought, then another, and didn't notice that they don't really go together.

Amis's phrase jars for me because being a student certainly didn't put me off eating. And it's kind of meaningless really as a description (I think we agree?).

I like the idea of being watched, as a reader, by a chimp.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2281/5799661836_383400c935.jpg

I have been on the bottle a bit recently, admittedly. Very good picture of me last Thursday morning iirc.

(Oh and the Amis thing was about himself rather than being a general application, that was me who did that - I can still remember only a total of three or four things I ate at university.)

I sometimes wonder what on earth I ate at university.

Students don't look the same everywhere, at least not from country to country. Apart from perhaps they all look like idle perishers.

If that chimp were to be given pencil and paper he would draw the bars chicken wire of his own cage.

If that chimp were given pen and paper, he would write a better version of A Visit from the Goon Squad.

>:[ i thought you liked it, alfred!

Search: Bob Newhart, "An Infinite Number of Monkeys."

I thought I said I didn't!

i guess it was wishful ilxing on my part

You seemed to like it whilst reading it and then afterward said that it left no lasting impression and was 'vaporous.'

You got it.

I didn't eat very well at university. Like PJM I feel distant now from whatever I ate then. I was very ignorant and could not cook well. But I was young enough not to be damaged by it, then.

That is a good bunch of comments about the chimp.

I went up the road to my local pub and reached p.320 or so. The powerpoint chapter is indeed good for motoring through lots of pages. I thought that the technique worked quite well, but I didn't understand, or have much sympathy with, the mother's account of why pauses in rock songs are fascinating. Maybe she was just being indulgent towards her child. But, the theme of rock pauses seemed quite Freaky Trigger. I started to picture Peter Baran writing an article about them.

Oddly, the current chapter which is quite SF is quite interesting. At this rate, I might finish the book, in the future.

The pauses in rock thing gives the whole enterprise a sheen of Geezaesthetics. Every time I hear a Pause in Rock now I think of that book. I think this may be its only lasting effect.

In retrospect, the PowerPoint chapter seems sadder than the rest.

In retrospect I think she should have done each chapter in the style of a programme from the Microsoft Office "Suite". With the final chapter from the perspective of Clippy the Microsoft Office Assistant.

'It looks like you're trying to write a book'.

"Like"

and also

"LOL"

and also

"lightbulb on"

I get that except for the lightbulb.

(Also I think the only Office Suite thing I am familiar with is Word - or is Power Point part of it also?)

I'm looking forward to the Excel spreadsheet chapter.

Gantt charts people!

The Evening Standard today reviews this book.

Says it should have won the Orange Prize, is the best new novel of the year and everyone is recommending it to everyone else.

It describes the plot, or the sequence of chapters.

I recognized the description but I could not feel much in sympathy with the favourable things that the review said about the book.

i just finished reading this book yesterday night! and i'm not even in yr book club! i guess i just wanted to say hi and wow this book is awesome and made me feel like writing more things that i really enjoy writing.
it had a DFW kind of charm but with a more heartrending, optimistic sense of humour about lyfe

pinefox, I'm glad that your indifferent reaction to this uberpopular book has not seemed to make you feel like you have been outcast from life's feast.

welcome, rrrobyn!

nice to see rrrobyns positivity!

after reading this book my gf has gone on an egan reading spree

'this (pulitzer-winning) book should have won the orange fiction prize' is such a peculiar statement

that marathon runner should have won the egg and spoon race at my nephew's creche (woman's division)

But Orange is much more money & a far bigger deal in British medialand - I thought Pulitzer was just a journalism prize till a few years ago. It is a weird thing to say, but it feels more like 'this emmy-winning sitcom should have got a bafta'

you'd never read or seen a book with a PULITZER WINNING thing on the jacket?? tbh it never occurred to me there were people who took the orange prize seriously, though i suppose there must be

fun fact: in 2007 it was renamed 'the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.' in 2009 it was renamed again, back to its original name.

Not that I can think of, but I've never really followed contemporary american fiction. If I have seen it, I would have blanked it, I guess. I don't take prizes as a helpful indicator of anything, though I notice when the British prizes are handed out - I enjoy the broadsheets/PRs attempts to wring a story out of them.

I think publishing/books-pages world takes the Orange Prize relatively seriously. It's solidly part of the machine, makes the main section of most papers.

All this talk of egg-and-spoon races and oranges makes me want to read some P.G. Wodehouse. And hum a little song about oranges, something something oranges, can't remember how it goes.

The Orange Prize is a big deal because of the exposure it gives to female authors who might otherwise be overlooked, but the Pulitzer has existed since the 40s and some wonderful books have won it so it's hardly a flash in the pan.

the pulitzer for fiction/novel has existed since 1918 but i do not respect them much -- so many mediocre books have won.

The "pause in rock" thing was really good--I had forgotten about that.

I'm tempted to read this book again, this time with the benefit of the collective wisdom here.

Are you guys going to do "Open City" next?

I think so, at the end of the month iirc to give unamericans a chance to order it

I'm not certain about 'collective wisdom'.

On a sunny afternoon, out on the grass, with a pot of tea, I just finished the Goon Squad book.

This may be of a little interest or entertainment value to Fizzles the Chimp.

I may have to withdraw what I said about the last chapter being good. The SF side of it is pretty fine - the vision of people interacting with computers, and language changing: all this is quite plausible and well conceived, but I feel sure that 10,000 SF writers have done that equally well already.

The rock music side of it I didn't like. The description of the concert was quite remarkably lame. I dare say that JE *does* know a lot about rock music - but here she writes like someone who doesn't, like Salman Rushdie or something; stagey and gushing.

The long climactic para on 331-2 strikes me as remarkably bad, given the weight it seems to carry. The line about 'a man who had never had a page or a profile' or something is like 10th rate Pynchon. The line 'Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?' is horribly cutesy and deceptive. The issue it arises from, remember, is 'people said they were at the gig who weren't'. If you think of Dylan at the Albert Hall or the Pistols in Manchester, say, then you can see how phoney this is. You would NOT respect someone for claiming to be there when they weren't there - you wouldn't say: 'hey, those gigs are myth - they belong to everyone'. You know intuitively that the distinction between fact and fiction in this matter still stands, alongside the legendary and important status of the event. The idea that the gigs are 'mythic' is not really relevant to the question of a truthful account. I think this is part of why JE's fictional version rings so very false. Also, the sentence itself, the rhetorical question, is horrible - I don't know how else to describe the tonal problem than how I already have.

Like I say, it feels like music writing for people who don't really like music -- and this is strange cos I think JE *does* like music, probably more than most novelists.

The very very end, when they go looking for Sasha's old apartment - this rang truer. This moment made a bit more sense to me, I think.

But I didn't end with much sense of coherence, or sense that characters had come together or been developed and realized. I felt like the characters remained pretty cardboard. Or, if you prefer, that they were simply underdeveloped from not having been on stage long enough; all the cutting stopped JE getting momentum on any of them, or anything else substantial.

I don't dislike the idea of a work that is internally multiplicitous. Some of my very favourite works are like that. I think this book sounds like quite a good idea in the abstract, but I am not too sure that the idea has ultimately been well executed.

Are you guys going to do "Open City" next?

― Virginia Plain, Friday, 10 June 2011 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think so, at the end of the month iirc to give unamericans a chance to order it

― Ismael Klata, Friday, 10 June 2011 Bookmark

Ismael its w/c 27th June - I have ordered this through the library but doubt I'll get it before then.

Can you make up a thread or do a chapter breakdown on the existing one at the time if that's ok? Let me know..

Yeah, okay. I'll just use the existing thread. Goon Squad was two weeks, which worked well and I liked, but I'm thinking Open City seems a bit denser and might need a little more time. On the other hand, after the success of this episode I'd rather leave too little time than too much.

Any views?

And will starting the 27th leave enough time for the pinefox to finish Goon Squad?

So its 270 pages. I'd say two weeks again just on that (although not exactly 50/50 split?) but I'll defer to your judgement.

On a sunny afternoon, out on the grass, with a pot of tea, I just finished the Goon Squad book.

I have done you a disservice

As the cameraman said to Terence Stamp at the preview of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Was really enjoying reading about the pinefox reading this book and am sad that it has come to an end

Open City's in two parts, with the break at page 147. That seems like natural way to do it, so over two weeks it is.

Thank you, mr Blecchs, or Goldwax, etc; that is nice of you to say, or I hope it is.

Is Fizzles the Chimp now liberated to read anew?

I've been flying through a cataract of hitherto pent-up books, thanks pinefox. Words everywhere. Total mess. Babel.

Like JR&tBs have thoroughly enjoyed watching you reading from behind the chicken wire, even tho, and partly because, it differed from my reading, and differs from my reading more generally, which although at times I find perplexingly individual, instructs my own reading by contrast, and is entertaining and interesting for the particular insights it brings in itself.

I might read Goon Squad again now. Might be good to spend the rest of my life grappling with it.

For the record, I downloaded a pirated epub of Open City, but I haven't had a look to see if it's OK or not. In terms of layout and stuff, not in terms of morality. I know it's not OK morally.

As if to add insult to injury, Goon Squad is now available in a slightly smaller £7.99 edition!

GOON SQUAD will be discussed on More 4 Book Club this evening. Presumably by Dave Spikey and Ade Edmondson...

7.30

did they like it?

Still waiting to hear the answer

So about the whole hair-stealing thing: it turns out that there ARE hair thieves. Only they don't steal it off the top of your head, they break into boutiques and steal it before it is made into extensions. The best hair is apparently from India, where it is shorn for religious reasons and therefore is in the best condition, although I forget exactly why this is so.

I haven't watched it yet, but I recorded it.

Just finished this. Generally I liked this a lot though like many here I found it surprisingly lightweight considering the awards it's won. I so often find that novelists succumb to sentimentality and moralising at the end that the last chapter didn't really disappoint - I was expecting those flaws and it still had emotional weight for me. I don't mind a bit of rockism per se - the conversation about selling out and the scary, unsentimental modernity of Lulu resonated with me, and punk rock seems like a natural vehicle for ideas about youthful ideals vs middle-aged disappointment and fear of the future - but Pinefox is OTM about the show:

The description of the concert was quite remarkably lame. I dare say that JE *does* know a lot about rock music - but here she writes like someone who doesn't, like Salman Rushdie or something; stagey and gushing.

It reminds me not of Cloud Atlas or Underworld but The Imperfectionists, another novel of interconnected short stories, though it's stronger and more coherent than that. The patchwork format helps drive home the theme of time passing in an unpredictable way whereas The Imperfectionists doesn't really strike me as a novel at all.

Favourite chapters were the Sasha ones and the SF punk one. Most unconvincing was Dolly and the general. Jules's meta-interview was too Pitchfork Reviews Reviews for comfort, albeit more rapey.

I forgot to mention that as if to add further insult to insult after injury, GOON SQUAD is now available in the 2 for £7 offer in Sainsbury's, making it about £8 cheaper than when I bought it. Still, I knew it was shit* before the masses knew it was shit.

*Not really.

you can buy this in tesco too

£4.98

I liked a lot of this book, and really wanted to like it even more, but there's something about fake-text-speak and made-up near-future slang that make me want to curl up in a ball and die. I had to skim most of the last chapter and then when the concert, which had its own set of issues, started I almost couldn't finish.

I'm sure this was way better than Freedom or the Art of Fielding, neither of which I really have any desire to read, but I was still kind of disappointed. Old people shouldn't write about the future.

I really liked the SF punk chapter and the African safari. And most of the chapters about Sasha. The fake piece about the actress was as cringey as the last chapter.

I guess I'm basically saying the same thing as a lot of people on this thread already

i wish she hadn't written that last chapter

i am still a huge egan stan

i know, seeing you boost this book made me think better of it

you're sweet. i can't separate how i feel about egan's work from numerous chips on my shoulder so i think i can be a little single-minded about her.

i always enjoy pinefox's careful skewering of all the books i like, though, and i mean that sincerely

admittedly she's in a hard position, i mean im 25 years younger than she is and its kind of unlikely wed see eye-to-eye about aging and the passage of time and shifts in culture, though even given that she seemed to just not "get it"

i just found it frustrating cause i think shes a really talented stylist and she juggles the plot so deftly and grabs on to certain kinds of feelings and relationships with such accuracy... and then she completely botches "the future"

but anyway even with my disappointment im glad this beat freedom for the pulitzer prize, and i would be happy if this also beat the art of fielding for the pulitzer prize even though its not eligible

the futuristic elements in look at me are handled better, even though she loses her grip on the plot in that one. the egan novel i think you would have the greatest chance of enjoying fully is the keep.

not that you ever have to read an egan book again but if you ever wanted to one day.

*sob*

for you hs i would read any book

feeling ashamed now that i haven't finished warlock. i loved the first third so much that i haven't returned to it! but i will.

max, did you read Super Sad True Love Story, and if so what did you think of "the future" in that novel?

i have been avoiding for basically the same reason--i read the excerpt in the NYer and it was similarly embarrassing, though shteyngart is funnier than egan i think

i thought shteyngart's funniness made his future vision more palatable because it's more obviously satirical. tbh i don't remember the future stuff from goon squad at all.

yeah i prefer it, he knows what to avoid re: made-up pop culture and "not getting it" is also part of the joke.

i liked the the final few chapters a lot structurally, particularly the idea she has about how new scientific knowledge can be transmuted into the basis for shifts in 'cultural metaphors', that these kind of esoteric advances can easily become new prisms through which the world is understood/ordered. i guess in part i liked that she illuminated the whole of the novel that way, the conversation abt modes of thinking as metaphor for 'the novel' &c &c

its funny (i guess?) i was arguing in favor of this book vs. 'super sad...' w/ a bowtied 'literary figure' at a party recently by saying that even if her vision of technology/music was dopey the tone seemed right to me, it was less hectoring and 'you'll get yours' and so felt more honest and possible? idk

I just finished Look at me and really liked it.

:D that's my favorite one!

to return to the original post, no one i know has ever discussed this stuff at parties, even when i was in grad school. fwiw.

lol wrong thread

Ha that sounded like an xp to lamp!

I love all her stuff, too, but would rep for the keep as being her most 'successful' novel

i think 'the keep' breaks down worse than this one tbh but its a lot more fun

i still need to read that

xp

very last part of good squad was very much in the "why non-sf writers shouldn't do future projection" mold. (most of them shouldn't do it, either, tbh.) otoh i can't name too many sf books that punched me in the gut as hard as the best parts of this book.

very last part of good squad was very much in the "why non-sf writers shouldn't do future projection" mold

or MFAs.

i dont think egan is an mfa, actually

can we just say she is?

motherfuckin' author

haha

can we just say she is?

no, that would be lying

i think if we want to make up something about how all mfas are bad at the very least we should be talking about people who are actually mfas

like i mentioned on the "what are you reading" thread that i recently plowed through the three william gibson '90s books and while he got a lot "wrong" and a lot of the rest was obviously blown out of proportion for satirical/narrative effect, his "now" feels a lot more like our actual now than i think egan's future is gonna actually look/feel like when we get there. but gibson's characters are mostly ciphers/plot-drivers, whereas i was actually relieved to see in good squad that rhea (despite a lot of obvious bumps) was doing okay as an adult. all of which just means i guess that i think egan's real gift is for character and sometimes that got away from her with all the hoop-jumping and special effects, though in the abstract i think she should be applauded for trying to bring that gift to all the metafictional hoohah.

all of which makes it sound like i enjoyed this book a lot less than i did, but i actually really, really enjoyed it.

i think egan's real gift is for character

definitely

i think why i was so dazzled by goon squad immediately after i read it, even though on reflection i like look at me and the keep more, is that it's virtuosic in its tour of characters and it seems like egan sympathizes with them all.

Lamp said something about this upthread i think; he was otm

i think the best part of the novel is how compassionate it is, & how much she seemed to want to give all her characters the benefit of the doubt, to do them justice. & that made me eager to spend time in their company, to know them & to empathize w/ them.

― Lamp, Sunday, May 8, 2011 5:29 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

I didn't enjoy it much but it was too vaporous to despise. My favorite section remains the one set in Italy; its tone is subtler than the rest of the novel.

i'll kill u

lol

tbh i was kinda afraid of voicing any reservations about this book in front of horseshoe

haha i'm sorry! the days of the ilx book club on this book were hard for me but it was good experience to try to respond to pinefox's criticisms in my head. really welcome what all the smart people have to say about how they hate my beloved book.

hahaha never read this thread, pinefox is hilarious

pinefox on some definite anthropologist-from-mars steez in this thread

― thomp, Tuesday, May 3, 2011

"this thread"

j/k pinefox i luv u boo

I'd like to go to a party with horseshoe and change her experience - and mine - of what people talk about at parties.

I don't see what grounds Max has for saying Egan is a talented stylist. I think 'stylist' etc was already discussed in this long fractious thread. I think some of us think she seems stylistically pretty flat.

Max is very lucky to be 25 years younger than Egan. Let's hope he makes the most of that incredible boon! (I'm serious - there is nothing much more valuable than youth.)

I don't know Warlock but I can confirm that I have never finished THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN.

I'm actually only 23 years younger than Egan.

Oh no !!!

Oh no !!!

Now that REALLY shouldn't have posted twice.

hey horseshoe, have you listened to this?

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw061221jennifer_egan

<3 for "stephen king's salem's lot...a book that i love"

listening right now, thanks strongo! everything she's ever said about fiction is totally <3 ime

not fair for her to be so talented and so pretty btw

when i went to look up her age i figured she was gonna be like 30something, not 50

she lives near me btw

I don't like her as a writer

never read anything she wrote though

i don't like YOU as a writer

that's untrue tbh

she's just one of those contemporary writers who has won a prize so I lump her in w/ people like franzen or zadie smith or whatever, whose work I'm familiar w/ and think will not last in any meaningful way, probably shouldn't though

it's so weird that that happened btw...i guess she was on the fast track (i get the sense she's literarily *connected* maybe) but when i was first reading look at me it felt like this undiscovered gem that if any literary tastemakers ran across it they would probably dismiss as chicklit.

of course she was getting published in the new yorker so i was wrong, i guess

now that I am talking about books on a thread big ups to aero for recc'ing the rodoreda

I am actually a really easy reader once I actually read something though and like p much everything so when I read this I probably won't hate her

also, a lot of other good interviews on that show, hs, if yr not familiar. especially the robert stone ones.

jokes.

my hatred of robert stone is so kneejerk and reflects very poorly on me. it's basically the same as if someone dismissed egan as chicklit.

well he is very dudelit

marlboro man lit

god i know, right? i imagine he has a whiskey-roughened voice.

haha he actually kinda sounds like a kindly grandpa

but one thing i've learned listening to bookworm over the years is that insufferable writers tend to sound exactly like you'd think they would

for example franzen sounds like a total cock

If only! He sounds like a mare.

actually i should probably rephrase that to "writers have the exact kind of speaking voices you'd expect from their books." for example, franzen sounds like a total cock. dennis cooper sounds like a slightly bewildered teenager with a lot of ums and ahs. bill vollmann sounds like a mildly creepy loner who's unused to leaving his own head. and et cetera.

Since so many of these writers teach, I wish they learned how to create a character. Speak with more authority, as if an audience of hundreds were in front of you. The alternative, of course, is worse: the bumbling pseudo-nebbish injecting "kinda" and "sort of" into every glistening pearl of a sentence as a character itself.

she is something like fifteen years older than i would have thought. huh.

Waterstones seem to have her old books in stock in nice matching reissues.

I read an old interview with her (in something called BELIEVER) and she certainly seemed OK in that.

Another term for "stylistically flat" might be "conversational", which is, I think, what she is going for. There might be a bit too much conversational around, post-Franzen, but that's another debate.

Franzen isn't just conversational - he also writes striking, elegant, ambitious or lyrical descriptive prose, at times; quite a lot of times in The Corrections.

my gf has the book with her right now but as soon as i get it back ill try to defend my claims about style

thank you! i immediately lent this book to a friend after reading it. i think egan's an amazing stylist but i can only defend with passages from her other novels rn.

Stevie was right, the LRB review (which I remembered to read tonight) was dire. I'm not quite sure why. A lot of phoney certainty for one thing. I think I am coming to detect a particular LRB house view or tone which I don't like so much.

But anyway it compared this book to JLG's DEUX OU TROIS CHOSES - very arbitrary - and quoted a totally mediocre passage of dialogue from an earlier JE book as though it was really great.

It was really irritating.

did you guys know that jennifer egan used to date steve jobs

Explains the tech fascination

she was his rebound after he split with jane austen right

ummm........ jane austen died in the 19th century...... i think u have ur facts wrong..........................

what is life

Just read the book, then this thread. I love ILX so much -- so much otm on this thread, w/r/t my mixed responses. The rockism, and the awkwardness with rock at once. (Which is why it reminded me also of Underworld, and Rushdie's attempts to write about rock).

Reading this, I thought about a line from Amis' The Information, I think, about how one shouldn't be able to say what a book is about, because it's about precisely every word in the book, not a slogan for a bumper sticker. Goon Squad, on the other hand, is a book which you can say what it's about -- maybe not on a bumper sticker, but close. I could feel the seams and joins, second-guess the decisions, and generally see the conceptual skeleton for each chapter. And between the skeleton and the chapter itself, I didn't think a great deal was added. The characters also felt underdeveloped -- a collection of tics and roles, but not really having a rich interior life, no real places where they struggle between what they wanted to express and what they were able to, etc. And the movement was very linear.

I figured the book could redeem itself from just being short-cuts style loosely linked short stories by tying everything up neatly with the last chapter. But instead the last chapter, which tried for exactly that, got sort of high-handed and really gave the game away. And the closing image was really juvenile and painful.

I should also say that I enjoy Egan as a writer though, on a micro-level. No real bravura turns of phrase or whatever, but solid and compelling prose.

But the real issue I have with it is moral. So it felt like a rockist, boomer fairy tale. And the most fairy tale element was that even though some people went very bad, for the most part, people didn't. They lived dangerously and did stupid things to their brains for prolonged periods, and then ended up essentially middle class. So the reassuring myth is that all that youthful dicking about and frying brain cells ends up with some meaning and purpose, as opposed to for the most part creating hopeless burnouts and detritus.

For aesthetic and truthful reasons, but also reasons of basic social responsibility, I think it's bad to glamorize idiocy. And even though there's this "oh, they'll grow out of it" element, there's also a sort of endorsement of self-indulgent self-destructiveness that conceals a great deal. So throughout, I kept comparing Goon Squad, to Richard Hell's Go Now, which is one of the few music novels I really enjoy, and finding it lacking in comparison.

Also, from some article linked above: "very postmodern in that 19th-century way". Really? It bothers me when people describe anything veering from a certain very narrowly realist novel that very few novels ever really were as "postmodern." This jumped out at me on one of the blurbs of my copy of Goon Squad, and I'm not surprised, though disappointed, that Egan would herself describe things the same sort of way.

what makes a 19th century novel "postmodern"?

I suppose Goon Squad is postmodern in the way that Dracula is postmodern.

Postmodern like How I Met Your Mother...

http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6685358-L.jpg

I like Mr Clover's post!

I am terribly nostalgic for the time when I was reading this book, not admiring it, and imagining that my life was not going very well. I had no idea.

You mean things are worse now? I am sorry if so.

I haf downloaded some more Egan books. I might give one a try. THE KEEP, I think.

Oh, they're much, much worse now. The decline has been almost unimaginable, at least to me with my limited imagination.

One thing this has shown me is that I was largely mistaken to think that they were bad then.

re: Bennie and his electrician dad, I see no logical issue with that passage.
I work in construction because my father did. There is zero chance I would be doing so otherwise.

Not all sons and daughters of contractors become contractors themselves, but trades and skills being passed via family is hardly an unknown concept.

Typing on my phone is a pain, but I thought the last chapter was an enormous misstep in an otherwise very good book. Baby iPods and oh those wacky prim post-Millenials &c., the entire chapter felt out of place and unnecessary.

I am sorry to hear that (one month late), The Pinefox.

I hope things have improved.

Thanks for your thoughts, PJM.

Things have improved in the sense of stabilized a bit and allowed me to function more normally, but I do not really imagine that they will ever get back to how they were when I daftly thought they were not very good when we started this thread.

I am looking forward to the Pines' US tour, though.

Yes, that tour is going to ROCK.

I have deleted my Facebook account, so I am a bit out of the loop.

Perhaps I should start another one.

I am rereading this novel.

It feels somewhat better second time around. For one thing I am reading it more quickly. For another the hype was blown away by the first time. For a third, the relations between the sections strike me as slightly interesting (and the chronology is not entirely clear in my mind). It seems not offensive, not badly written, just a bit flat and not as interesting or exciting as one would want it to be.

I am only on p.140.

What on earth prompted you to read it again!

Professional reasons.

Ah. *touches nose*

a couple of chapters seem better: 2 + 10. The descriptions of NYC on p.203 are really OK, and I always quite liked the 1993 period flavour of that chapter, and the prediction of the www / social networks on p.199.

fake pinefox

the Naples chapter remains good too -I always thought it a highlight. But I still have a problem with motivation here - everyone is so fascinated by the Sasha character but there is no coherent sense of why she does what does, what she wants, at least prior to the powerpoint bit. Which is the problem I started out with c. April 2011.

There is a rather simple thing that seems clearer about the book this time round - that it is a novel by a middle-aged woman about middle age, about time inexorably passing, about getting older, about grieving for the loss of youth that will never return, but which can be ironized, revisited or rethought by this temporal-cut-up narrative.

Which seems a valid enough, indeed poignant and real, sort of subject - yet not especially what I ever thought anyone (the media or whoever) was saying the book was primarily about or primarily interesting for. Perhaps people here were saying it, I don't know.

Perhaps everyone everywhere was saying it, and I didn't notice amid the sense that this was meant to be a hip / youthful / rock & roll sort of book.

i thought the time passing theme was reasonably clear from the title and the few allusions to it dropped along the way - "time's a goon", and a few less subtle "where are the snowdens of yesteryear?" moments - but i don't think it was tackled with any kind of panache or insight.

A book about middle-aged aestheticization of youth would be interesting. But that would a be a book about this book, not this book itself.

I'm not sure who Rusty Egan is, but it would make a good title for whatever you're writing about this, PF.

Ha, Visage, etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_Egan

Also I have just realised that The Pines will be involved in some kind of duelling banjos scenario with STEVIE JACKSON.

True!