Story + story + story = novel?

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)


This book won a bunch of awards. (Or a least the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer.) And I had been sitting on a Slate Audio Book Club podcast since last August. And fiiiiinally I got around to getting a copy.

Here's where it turns out that I had already read a bunch of the book. Probably a third or so. Damn New Yorker. About three stories in, I found myself really frustrated. None of this was really new. Sigh, grr, etc. But then, this is where the structure of the book kicked in and argued its case. For it's not just a collection of short stories. It's a collection of stories that tie together and interconnect. A character in one story reappears in another. And while it seems like the threads that connect them are weak and few in number, they build upon one another, and you realize that you're getting the rich backstory to a throwaway line from 150 pages earlier.

We start in what is roughly the present, then dive back, then way back, then hang out somewhere between the 70s and now for awhile, and eventually finish in the future. Each story uses its own devices - third person, first person, at least one tale told in the second-person you. Another is an article (of the DFW persuasion) detailing a celebrity interview we already know (from however many stories previous) ends badly. But then there's chapter 12, "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," written by an adolescent daughter of characters we knew before. It's essentially a PowerPoint presentation, and it's tremendously effective for all that it's gimmicky. I waxed poetic about this to my boyfriend, venturing out into a reverie on why all the white space is so meaningful in a story about pauses and what is left unsaid. And so he's taken the fall for you, who only have to know that I had lots to say - of varying coherence - on the topic.

And I love the idea that in the not-so-distant future, this is how I children will tell stories. That in its own way, the PowerPoint can be a surprisingly eloquent medium. And then I lost it in the final story, which takes place roughly in that same period(ish). It's a mildly dystopic future NYC that looks quite a bit like Shteyngart's, in which handheld devices have kinda taken over (with a bit of Brooklyn hipster resistance thrown in too). For whatever reason, this felt overdone. Or at the very least out of place with the rest of the book. Ends get tied together, sure. But I didn't need this final story to feel the heft and power of the whole.

(next post coming after I actually listen to the audio book club podcast, scheduled for tonight's drive home...)