Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad recently won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award. That sentence alone probably caused many of you to decide not to read it.

What is it about books that win the big literary awards that makes so many of us reluctant to read them? Well, for me I'd say that they're often very clever but not particularly enjoyable to read. Does this hold true for A Visit from the Good Squad? Yes and no.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a collection of interconnected short stories that, taken as a whole, tell a compelling narrative of a group of characters in the music business. The stories switch between characters, time frames, and locales. The style and tone varies (including one remarkable chapter told entirely in powerpoint slides).

The plot is secondary to character development -- which is interesting, to say the least. A minor character in one chapter could appear as a main character in another chapter and what appears to be an insignificant action in one chapter turns out to be important in another.

While I think this book certainly earned its awards, it's not a book I enjoyed reading. Perhaps because the reader doesn't get to know any single character well, it's hard to connect enough to any of them to care what happens to them. There's a thread of melancholy that runs through each chapter which quickly becomes tiresome. That said, it is the most creative book I've read in a long time and I suggest giving it a try.