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  1 0 I thought that this book worked, for sure. But I know what you mean about arc. Because we all read for different things, or, as Nancy Pearl would say, want to walk through different Doorways (which she describes as the Doorways of Story, Character, Setting, and Language), we expect or ask different things of the books we read. Me, I read, primarily (but who wants to totally pin themselves down!) for character and language. So, I found Egan's book a little disappointing in that I wanted more, in some cases, of some of the characters. I usually like to follow a character over a period of time or period of growth. I finished the book wanting a bit more of Sasha. Although I have to say that seeing Sasha from her daughter's eyes via Powerpoint was a stroke of genius. mishalibrarian answered in Book Club- A Visit from the Goon Squad 11 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  1 0 I think she's playing with the way the tentative connections between the characters can form a whole. It's similar to how she plays with story and narrative in the slides chapter- the story is definitely furthered there, we learn more about the characters etc. even though it isn't prose. When I first started reading it, I felt the same way. A few of the stories were published in the New Yorker ahead of time. I vaguely remembered them, and it confused me- I thought "well these are just short stories, right?" But then as I kept reading I let the style wash over me, and now I think it works really well. She's messing with form in a way that makes the structure itself poetic. Did I just say that? Nancy answered in Book Club- A Visit from the Goon Squad 12 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  0 0 The Imperfectionsts by Tom Rachman has a structure that is also akin to a series of short stories, but Rachman has each story with a single main character who interacts with others who have their own chapter. Similarly, Prague by Arthur Phillips fits in the same mold. There's a fine line between linked short stories and a novel. It's so fine it may not exist. Algernon answered in Book Club- A Visit from the Goon Squad 12 months ago | Report 2 comments by Jay Jansheski and David Wright… 0 0 The Imperfectionists! I knew I was missing one. I haven't read Prague, but while we're on it, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is another example. Jay Jansheski commented 12 months ago | Report 0 0 The Imperfectionists was just terrific, I thought, though the stories stood on their own rather more than here, and seemed like more of an assortment (including some that were especially sad and at least one that was outright farcical). Another title to drag into the comparison pit is David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," which also has a great diversity of narrative voices, but which does play w/ time like Egan. David Wright commented 11 months ago | Report Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  0 0 A lot of novels-in-stories are just short story collections that an agent insisted the author turn into a linked collection because novels sell way better than short story collections. I don't think that's the case here; I think Egan has enough clout that if she wanted to publish a short story collection, publishers would happily buy that collection as is. I think she might be trying to tell the story of a very specific social group, from when people first met to the point where the group fades from the memory of the next generation. It's kind of a vague concept, but it's an interesting one. Do you know what kind of life your grandparents had when they were kids? I mean, you probably know some dry biographical details, but you don't know the people they hung around with, their friends. That's a huge part of a person, that kind of context is essential to knowing what a person is like. And it evaporates so easily. So if that's what Egan was trying to do—and I'm aware that I'm kind of stretching here—it's super-ambitious and she was fairly successful, too. Paul Constant answered in Book Club- A Visit from the Goon Squad 11 months ago | Report 1 comment by Jay Jansheski… 0 0 You know, I think you're right- I think that I wrote this question ("is goon squad really a novel?") after the first time through, and I didn't really get a sense of sasha and bennie as well as I did going through it again. Though I still feel a kind of distance between the characters that I'm mulling over– in a sense, that's how it is in life, because who, at age 20, is the same person they are at age 40? If you were to take something like... I don't know, like a John Irving novel, in which the author really just lines up every year of a character's life into the most linear possible story, and then you cut out all of the middle part so that all you had left was a short story about a 20 year old, and then, suddenly, on the next page, a short story about that same person as a 40 year old, presumably it would feel as disjointed, or maybe more disjointed, than the transitions between characters in the various points of their lives here in the Egan novel (and also that character would be a wrestling writer who has sex with a bear). I have forgotten my point. Jay Jansheski commented 11 months ago | Report Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  0 0 I agree with Paul: I actually felt the whole thing hung together in a very 'novelly' way. I may not have felt that way during the process of reading so much, but then looking back across it all from hindsight, it resolved in a way to something with the same (deceptive?) coherence as life. There's this great quote from Doris Lessing's autobiography: "Every novel is a story, but a life isn't one, more of a sprawl of incidents." I feel like Egan tells her story in a way that is cognizant of that: that narrative is a construction and stories aren't really what we live. She doesn't do that in an ostentatious or self-consciously postmodern way (like some other authors I could name), but I think the sprawl of incidents in this book helps her say something about life, and how it works and doesn't work, and to do so in a way that was pretty consistently interesting/diverting. David Wright answered in Book Club- A Visit from the Goon Squad 11 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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