A Visit from the Goon Squad

• Jennifer Egan's prose is exciting, her method of bleeding one story onto the next, of building up these, what Mario Vargas Llosa so eloquently calls, "communicating vessels," is a true feat. There is an avalanche effect of moods and tones, which is why the last story, perhaps not the best in the bunch, carries with it the hefty stigma of all those that came before it. I also really enjoyed a whole chapter displayed in Power Point format.

• Egan follows a bunch of characters who work in the music industry, ping-ponging from life to life, from the present, to the past, to the future. It makes total sense: time's a goon; it will creep up on you as quickly as turning a page. Nostalgia is a trap too: I don't miss the good old days for what they were, but for what lay ahead of me, the time I've already spent in-between then and now. This book encompasses all of that, allowing us to see it all.

• The "goon" in the title of this book is time. It opens with a quote from Proust, the poet laureate of memory, about how we cannot recapture the people we were in past the places where we were those people, but rather that those people exist within us, always. And that, it seems to me, is more or less the book, in a nutshell. But, oh, how it gets there. How the story unfolds -- stories, really -- is breathtaking. This the best book I've read this year.

• This is not an easy book to summarize, but it is a deeply delightful read. The difficulty in summing it up comes from having so many characters, leaping back and forth across time and space without a rigid order, and shifting the protagonist, center, and periphery from one chapter to the next.

• A novel filled with great choices. First and foremost, structuring it into chapters that can work as standalone pieces. Breaking free from conventional novelistic molds allowed the author to offer a much wider view of our times—something that conventional constraints of time, setting, and traditional character tracking would have made far harder, at least within the same page count.

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