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

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...