Glenna's Blog

Each chapter of Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a story about someone who showed up on the sidelines of an earlier chapter. Some of the stories take place in the 1970s and some in the 2020s, they’re out of order, and the characters’ motivations change. But at the end I felt as satisfied as the first time I watched Wizard of Oz.

The patterns are more important than the points in Goon Squad, and the relationships are more important than the characters. Over and over Egan shows what happens between old men and young women, cool sisters and uncool brothers, ambivalent spouses, and jealous friends.

Goon Squad is the most enjoyable experimental novel I’ve read in a while, maybe ever. It reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room except that I liked it. Not only are the chapters arranged nonlinearly, but one of them is a poetic powerpoint presentation set in a world without grass that analyzes family dynamics and the use of pauses in rock songs. When I picked up Goon Squad I felt angsty about the limits of literature, but now I don’t.

On the downside, the book is fundamentally maudlin. It’s basically about how children are going to die. But Egan mostly redeems herself on this point with satire of African dictators and anthropology grad students.