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

i just finished reading this book yesterday night! and i'm not even in yr book club! i guess i just wanted to say hi and wow this book is awesome and made me feel like writing more things that i really enjoy writing.
it had a DFW kind of charm but with a more heartrending, optimistic sense of humour about lyfe

pinefox, I'm glad that your indifferent reaction to this uberpopular book has not seemed to make you feel like you have been outcast from life's feast.

welcome, rrrobyn!

nice to see rrrobyns positivity!

after reading this book my gf has gone on an egan reading spree

'this (pulitzer-winning) book should have won the orange fiction prize' is such a peculiar statement

that marathon runner should have won the egg and spoon race at my nephew's creche (woman's division)

But Orange is much more money & a far bigger deal in British medialand - I thought Pulitzer was just a journalism prize till a few years ago. It is a weird thing to say, but it feels more like 'this emmy-winning sitcom should have got a bafta'

you'd never read or seen a book with a PULITZER WINNING thing on the jacket?? tbh it never occurred to me there were people who took the orange prize seriously, though i suppose there must be

fun fact: in 2007 it was renamed 'the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.' in 2009 it was renamed again, back to its original name.

Not that I can think of, but I've never really followed contemporary american fiction. If I have seen it, I would have blanked it, I guess. I don't take prizes as a helpful indicator of anything, though I notice when the British prizes are handed out - I enjoy the broadsheets/PRs attempts to wring a story out of them.

I think publishing/books-pages world takes the Orange Prize relatively seriously. It's solidly part of the machine, makes the main section of most papers.

All this talk of egg-and-spoon races and oranges makes me want to read some P.G. Wodehouse. And hum a little song about oranges, something something oranges, can't remember how it goes.

The Orange Prize is a big deal because of the exposure it gives to female authors who might otherwise be overlooked, but the Pulitzer has existed since the 40s and some wonderful books have won it so it's hardly a flash in the pan.

the pulitzer for fiction/novel has existed since 1918 but i do not respect them much -- so many mediocre books have won.

The "pause in rock" thing was really good--I had forgotten about that.

I'm tempted to read this book again, this time with the benefit of the collective wisdom here.

Are you guys going to do "Open City" next?

I think so, at the end of the month iirc to give unamericans a chance to order it

I'm not certain about 'collective wisdom'.

On a sunny afternoon, out on the grass, with a pot of tea, I just finished the Goon Squad book.

This may be of a little interest or entertainment value to Fizzles the Chimp.

I may have to withdraw what I said about the last chapter being good. The SF side of it is pretty fine - the vision of people interacting with computers, and language changing: all this is quite plausible and well conceived, but I feel sure that 10,000 SF writers have done that equally well already.

The rock music side of it I didn't like. The description of the concert was quite remarkably lame. I dare say that JE *does* know a lot about rock music - but here she writes like someone who doesn't, like Salman Rushdie or something; stagey and gushing.

The long climactic para on 331-2 strikes me as remarkably bad, given the weight it seems to carry. The line about 'a man who had never had a page or a profile' or something is like 10th rate Pynchon. The line 'Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?' is horribly cutesy and deceptive. The issue it arises from, remember, is 'people said they were at the gig who weren't'. If you think of Dylan at the Albert Hall or the Pistols in Manchester, say, then you can see how phoney this is. You would NOT respect someone for claiming to be there when they weren't there - you wouldn't say: 'hey, those gigs are myth - they belong to everyone'. You know intuitively that the distinction between fact and fiction in this matter still stands, alongside the legendary and important status of the event. The idea that the gigs are 'mythic' is not really relevant to the question of a truthful account. I think this is part of why JE's fictional version rings so very false. Also, the sentence itself, the rhetorical question, is horrible - I don't know how else to describe the tonal problem than how I already have.

Like I say, it feels like music writing for people who don't really like music -- and this is strange cos I think JE *does* like music, probably more than most novelists.

The very very end, when they go looking for Sasha's old apartment - this rang truer. This moment made a bit more sense to me, I think.

But I didn't end with much sense of coherence, or sense that characters had come together or been developed and realized. I felt like the characters remained pretty cardboard. Or, if you prefer, that they were simply underdeveloped from not having been on stage long enough; all the cutting stopped JE getting momentum on any of them, or anything else substantial.

I don't dislike the idea of a work that is internally multiplicitous. Some of my very favourite works are like that. I think this book sounds like quite a good idea in the abstract, but I am not too sure that the idea has ultimately been well executed.

Are you guys going to do "Open City" next?

― Virginia Plain, Friday, 10 June 2011 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think so, at the end of the month iirc to give unamericans a chance to order it

― Ismael Klata, Friday, 10 June 2011 Bookmark

Ismael its w/c 27th June - I have ordered this through the library but doubt I'll get it before then.

Can you make up a thread or do a chapter breakdown on the existing one at the time if that's ok? Let me know..

Yeah, okay. I'll just use the existing thread. Goon Squad was two weeks, which worked well and I liked, but I'm thinking Open City seems a bit denser and might need a little more time. On the other hand, after the success of this episode I'd rather leave too little time than too much.

Any views?

And will starting the 27th leave enough time for the pinefox to finish Goon Squad?

So its 270 pages. I'd say two weeks again just on that (although not exactly 50/50 split?) but I'll defer to your judgement.

On a sunny afternoon, out on the grass, with a pot of tea, I just finished the Goon Squad book.

I have done you a disservice

As the cameraman said to Terence Stamp at the preview of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Was really enjoying reading about the pinefox reading this book and am sad that it has come to an end

Open City's in two parts, with the break at page 147. That seems like natural way to do it, so over two weeks it is.

Thank you, mr Blecchs, or Goldwax, etc; that is nice of you to say, or I hope it is.

Is Fizzles the Chimp now liberated to read anew?

I've been flying through a cataract of hitherto pent-up books, thanks pinefox. Words everywhere. Total mess. Babel.

Like JR&tBs have thoroughly enjoyed watching you reading from behind the chicken wire, even tho, and partly because, it differed from my reading, and differs from my reading more generally, which although at times I find perplexingly individual, instructs my own reading by contrast, and is entertaining and interesting for the particular insights it brings in itself.

I might read Goon Squad again now. Might be good to spend the rest of my life grappling with it.

For the record, I downloaded a pirated epub of Open City, but I haven't had a look to see if it's OK or not. In terms of layout and stuff, not in terms of morality. I know it's not OK morally.

As if to add insult to injury, Goon Squad is now available in a slightly smaller £7.99 edition!

GOON SQUAD will be discussed on More 4 Book Club this evening. Presumably by Dave Spikey and Ade Edmondson...

7.30

did they like it?

Still waiting to hear the answer

So about the whole hair-stealing thing: it turns out that there ARE hair thieves. Only they don't steal it off the top of your head, they break into boutiques and steal it before it is made into extensions. The best hair is apparently from India, where it is shorn for religious reasons and therefore is in the best condition, although I forget exactly why this is so.

I haven't watched it yet, but I recorded it.

Just finished this. Generally I liked this a lot though like many here I found it surprisingly lightweight considering the awards it's won. I so often find that novelists succumb to sentimentality and moralising at the end that the last chapter didn't really disappoint - I was expecting those flaws and it still had emotional weight for me. I don't mind a bit of rockism per se - the conversation about selling out and the scary, unsentimental modernity of Lulu resonated with me, and punk rock seems like a natural vehicle for ideas about youthful ideals vs middle-aged disappointment and fear of the future - but Pinefox is OTM about the show:

The description of the concert was quite remarkably lame. I dare say that JE *does* know a lot about rock music - but here she writes like someone who doesn't, like Salman Rushdie or something; stagey and gushing.

It reminds me not of Cloud Atlas or Underworld but The Imperfectionists, another novel of interconnected short stories, though it's stronger and more coherent than that. The patchwork format helps drive home the theme of time passing in an unpredictable way whereas The Imperfectionists doesn't really strike me as a novel at all.

Favourite chapters were the Sasha ones and the SF punk one. Most unconvincing was Dolly and the general. Jules's meta-interview was too Pitchfork Reviews Reviews for comfort, albeit more rapey.

I forgot to mention that as if to add further insult to insult after injury, GOON SQUAD is now available in the 2 for £7 offer in Sainsbury's, making it about £8 cheaper than when I bought it. Still, I knew it was shit* before the masses knew it was shit.

*Not really.

you can buy this in tesco too

£4.98

I liked a lot of this book, and really wanted to like it even more, but there's something about fake-text-speak and made-up near-future slang that make me want to curl up in a ball and die. I had to skim most of the last chapter and then when the concert, which had its own set of issues, started I almost couldn't finish.

I'm sure this was way better than Freedom or the Art of Fielding, neither of which I really have any desire to read, but I was still kind of disappointed. Old people shouldn't write about the future.

I really liked the SF punk chapter and the African safari. And most of the chapters about Sasha. The fake piece about the actress was as cringey as the last chapter.

I guess I'm basically saying the same thing as a lot of people on this thread already

i wish she hadn't written that last chapter

i am still a huge egan stan

i know, seeing you boost this book made me think better of it

you're sweet. i can't separate how i feel about egan's work from numerous chips on my shoulder so i think i can be a little single-minded about her.

i always enjoy pinefox's careful skewering of all the books i like, though, and i mean that sincerely

admittedly she's in a hard position, i mean im 25 years younger than she is and its kind of unlikely wed see eye-to-eye about aging and the passage of time and shifts in culture, though even given that she seemed to just not "get it"

i just found it frustrating cause i think shes a really talented stylist and she juggles the plot so deftly and grabs on to certain kinds of feelings and relationships with such accuracy... and then she completely botches "the future"