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

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.