A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I read this for a book club. Egan won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for this book. She also won a National Book Critics Circle Award, beating the hyped Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

The chapters of the book are a series of stories focusing on a range of characters. Some of the chapters, or stories, previously were published separately, such as in The New Yorker. Whether this book is best classified as a novel or as a collection of short stories is unclear; I think of it as a novel.

The most prominent characters are Bennie, an aging music executive, and his assistant for twelve years, Sasha. The stories zip back and forth through time, from the 1960s to the future, to at least 2020. There are many characters. The book reminds me of a Robert Altman movie, with a large cast of intersecting characters. No character is more important than or at the forefront of the rest.

The book did not leave an impression with me. But I read that Egan wanted to depict the flow of time, that time is not experienced as linear. She had been reading Proust when this book was conceived; she was inspired by Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

The goon squad is time. Time affects all of the characters differently. Over time, none of them achieve the happiness or the lives they once desired in their youth. As Egan says in an interview, "time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you.”