While this is occasionally a wistful book, it isn’t’ sad. It’s as if the author has taken an epic novel covering five decades and expertly filleted it, casting aside excess characters and years to come away with a narrative that is wide-ranging but remarkably focused. “Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is a singular work of fiction in both senses of the word. Egan herself does not appear to be on Facebook, but A Visit From the Goon Squad will likely make her many new friends.” Her aim is not so much to explode traditional storytelling as to explore how it responds to the pressures and opportunities of the digital age. “For all its postmodern flourishes, Goon Squad is as traditional as a Dickens novel. Malena Watrous, The San Francisco Chronicle Like a masterful album, this one demands a replay.” When I got to the end, I wanted to start from the top again immediately, both to revisit the characters and to understand better how the pieces fit together. “Jennifer Egan is a rare bird: an experimental writer with a deep commitment to character, whose fiction is at once intellectually stimulating and moving.

“It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer.” Turn up the music, skip the college reunion and curl up with The Goon Squad instead.” Here, in ways that surprise and delight again, she transcends slick boomer nostalgia and offers a testament to the redemptive power of raw emotion in an age of synthetic sound and glossy avatars. triumph of technical bravado and tender sympathy. A deeply humane story about growing up and growing old in a culture corroded by technology and marketing. “If Jennifer Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile. Will Blythe, The New York Times Book Review (cover review) For a book so relentlessly savvy about the digital age and its effect on how we experience time (speeded up, herky-jerky, instantaneous, but also full of unbearable gaps and pauses), A Visit From the Goon Squad is remarkably old-fashioned in its obsession with time’s effects on characters, that preoccupation of those doorstop 19th-century novels.”

No one is beyond the pale of her affection no one is spared lampooning. Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart. Although shredded with loss, A Visit From the Goon Squad is often darkly, rippingly funny. Make a moving narrative out of a PowerPoint presentation? Check. Parody celebrity journalism and David Foster Wallace at the same time? Check. Is there anything Egan can’t do in this mash-up of forms? Write successfully in the second person? Check.

A visit from the goon squad audio book