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

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.