Jennifer Egan’s
experimental and brilliant book, A Visit
From the Goon Squad came out in 2010. I hesitate to call it a novel – although
it was marketed as one – because it seems to lie half way between a novel and a
collection of short stories. I would
probably call it a collection of interconnected short stories – but I suppose if
Egan had called it that, perhaps less people would have bought it. And I’m not
going to complain about anything that made more people read this book, because
it’s strangely and thoroughly brilliant.
In the first story of
the book, we meet Sasha, PA to the CEO of a record company, with an obsessive addiction
to stealing. In the second we meet Bennie, Sasha’s boss. In the third we meet
Rhea, a friend of Bennie’s from his days of teenager punk rock. In the fourth
we meet Charlie, daughter of Lou, who is the boyfriend of an old friend of
Rhea’s. And so on and so on. Each story is linked in some way to a character
we’ve met or heard of before, often in the previous story. Sasha and Bennie
crop up more than the rest, and threads of families and connections weave
through these stories in the most incredibly exciting way.