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

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!

i'm about 100 pages into this and i'm not really sold. everything that happens is too important, if that makes any sense. every person is constantly being arrested by a memory that they can't shake or a sudden flash of intense emotion that they have to hide or the sudden realization that this is the moment where everything is going to be different forever etc etc. it feels very soapy to me. maybe there's something stylistic about young people (and those that wish to be them) that i'm missing, idk.

the interconnections and the time-shifting are keeping me going tho.

PJM, I didn't really get to duel banjos but I did sing harmonies during his set till he said I should come up on stage.

Then another night we were backstage and I said he should play 'black and white unite' and he started working it out on his acoustic, which was good to hear, and saying of one bit 'It's all Buffalo Springfield, simple as that'.