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

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'.