A dark, seething read

Usually, I mistrust hype. But if you get the chance over this Bank Holiday Weekend and the next, grab a copy of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, which has just won the Pullitzer and would doubtless sweep the Grammies if it was eligible. I have just started it and it was immediately beguiling. It’s a book of contradictions: self-regarding then mysterious; constrained and then epic; foul and at a turn inspiring. I can’t wait to get out into the sun and read it at leisure.

It’s much too early to fathom my own response to the book. So here is Cathleen Schine, a devotee of Egan, writing hers in the New York Review of Books last November:

‘Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a moving humanistic saga, an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche. It has thirteen chapters, each an accomplished short story in its own right; characters who meander in and out of these chapters, brushing up against one another’s lives in unexpected ways; a time frame that runs from 1979 to the near, but still sci-fi, future; jolting shifts in time and points of view—first person, second person, third person, Powerpoint person; and a social background of careless and brutal sex, careless and brutal drugs, and carefully brutal punk rock. All of this might be expected to depict the broken, alienated angst of modern life as viewed through the postmodern lens of broken, alienated irony. Instead, Egan gives us a great, gasping, sighing, breathing whole.

Like her earlier work, it is dark and often cruel. But there is a new buoyancy to this novel as well—a buoyancy of tone, of technique. With great openness of spirit, fluency, and a comic vision that balances her sharp eye for the tragic, Egan has employed every playful device of the postmodern novel with such warmth and sensitivity that the genre is transcended completely. We are left with a narrative that is elegant, revealing, and urgent. Because the novel looks both forward and backward in time, and because the facts of its characters’ lives are doled out so unexpectedly, so fully out of the obvious sequence of events, the reader acquires an omniscience that is almost godlike, but is nevertheless shadowed with mystery. We know certain things must happen, will happen, essentially have happened, since the author is able to tell us so. But we don’t know how. Egan’s characters encompass not only their pasts but their futures as well.’