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

haha i'm sorry! the days of the ilx book club on this book were hard for me but it was good experience to try to respond to pinefox's criticisms in my head. really welcome what all the smart people have to say about how they hate my beloved book.

hahaha never read this thread, pinefox is hilarious

pinefox on some definite anthropologist-from-mars steez in this thread

― thomp, Tuesday, May 3, 2011

"this thread"

j/k pinefox i luv u boo

I'd like to go to a party with horseshoe and change her experience - and mine - of what people talk about at parties.

I don't see what grounds Max has for saying Egan is a talented stylist. I think 'stylist' etc was already discussed in this long fractious thread. I think some of us think she seems stylistically pretty flat.

Max is very lucky to be 25 years younger than Egan. Let's hope he makes the most of that incredible boon! (I'm serious - there is nothing much more valuable than youth.)

I don't know Warlock but I can confirm that I have never finished THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN.

I'm actually only 23 years younger than Egan.

Oh no !!!

Oh no !!!

Now that REALLY shouldn't have posted twice.

hey horseshoe, have you listened to this?

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw061221jennifer_egan

<3 for "stephen king's salem's lot...a book that i love"

listening right now, thanks strongo! everything she's ever said about fiction is totally <3 ime

not fair for her to be so talented and so pretty btw

when i went to look up her age i figured she was gonna be like 30something, not 50

she lives near me btw

I don't like her as a writer

never read anything she wrote though

i don't like YOU as a writer

that's untrue tbh

she's just one of those contemporary writers who has won a prize so I lump her in w/ people like franzen or zadie smith or whatever, whose work I'm familiar w/ and think will not last in any meaningful way, probably shouldn't though

it's so weird that that happened btw...i guess she was on the fast track (i get the sense she's literarily *connected* maybe) but when i was first reading look at me it felt like this undiscovered gem that if any literary tastemakers ran across it they would probably dismiss as chicklit.

of course she was getting published in the new yorker so i was wrong, i guess

now that I am talking about books on a thread big ups to aero for recc'ing the rodoreda

I am actually a really easy reader once I actually read something though and like p much everything so when I read this I probably won't hate her

also, a lot of other good interviews on that show, hs, if yr not familiar. especially the robert stone ones.

jokes.

my hatred of robert stone is so kneejerk and reflects very poorly on me. it's basically the same as if someone dismissed egan as chicklit.

well he is very dudelit

marlboro man lit

god i know, right? i imagine he has a whiskey-roughened voice.

haha he actually kinda sounds like a kindly grandpa

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.