I can see what you're saying Paul. There's a strong statement about class with Bennie's story especially as it compares to Scotty's later story with the fish and all. That said, I don't think the novel was about class. In fact, I'm not really sure what it was about.

Sorry I'm getting to the party late but I really slowed down at the end due to my waning interest in the characters and writing style. There's no doubt that Egan can write but her self-awareness of this fact bothered me throughout.

Other than a few moments that I really enjoyed like Scotty's performance and some of the Powerpoint stuff, I was pretty bored for most of the book.

We haven't yet chosen the next book, but we'll probably talk about it tomorrow.
Even if you haven't read Goon Squad you should come. There will be chatter about other things.

My vote is for non-fiction next. I'm reading "The World Without Us" right now, and it's blowing my tiny mind.

I saw it as a collection of stories that was unapologetically about a group of upper-middle and just plain upper-class characters. I can only think of a couple of people in the book who are flat broke, but even they seem to me to be fugitives from the upper class: Scotty springs to mind, but even when he's flat broke it seems to be more a mistake than his his true lot in life, and all that was standing between himself and his status as a rock star was his own failure to see his true, prosperous self. Likewise Sasha, on the run in Italy, was only hiding out from her family who were reasonably well off, and the college students in the Chapter featuring Rob are college students, who live in a kind of alternate economic state that is a kind of combination between poverty and prosperity, which is to say that even if they're low on funds at the moment, they probably won't be for long.

I don't mean to sound cynical here–nothing wrong with people who have done well for themselves in either real life or in fiction–but I couldn't see anyone who was flat-broke busted here. (No doubt just after I post I'll suddenly remember an entire section of the book titled "the trials of poverty featuring the ghost of charles dickens.")

I read a bunch of other people's reviews after I finished the book because I couldn't decide if I liked it or not. Part of this ambivalence is probably due to the way they book is structured. On the one hand, I love, love, love the idea of writing about a network of people from different character and age perspectives. Egan goes so far as to outline the epilogues of some of the more minor characters' stories, much like a character sketch in which you knew if she wanted she could've devoted a chapter to each outline. Because of this, I liked the challenge of the pacing of the book. I liked having to keep track of who and when and what details I knew already. Talk about getting all wrapped up in other people's drama! On the other hand, there were particular chapters I didn't much care for, and unlike other novels where the chapters don't so clearly dictate the structure, I'll boldly make the case that GOON can be judged chapter by chapter. Trying to give the overall book a score is tough, and to echo many of the reviews I've read, Egan is clearly quite clever and was showing off a bit with this book.

I have to disagree, Paul, I think many (if not almost all) of the characters were middle-class: if not always in terms of cash in their pockets, certainly in terms of cultural values and social aspirations. The constant preoccupation with "selling out," shared by several characters, from Bernie to La Doll to Scotty to Alex, strikes me as a particularly middle-class concern.

More to say on this topic, but they're finally boarding my plane! I'll post a related question tomorrow.

I felt pretty "meh" about this book. Maybe that's because I just finished it in the Philly airport where I'm still waiting to catch a plane back to Seattle that's been delayed for over 4 hours (!!!), but I agree with Misha: it felt like Egan was trying too hard to be edgy and didn't always succeed. I was especially annoyed by the last chapter. However, I did enjoy her writing style -- she's clearly got a major gift for description and characterization. And the PowerPoint chapter was unexpectedly charming and moving -- though I agree that Sasha was completely unrecognizable.

I haven't finished reading this yet (I'm about to start the Powerpoint chapter). It's been taking me a long time because I can't stand the characters, any of them. I know that's not supposed to matter to me and it usually doesn't, but these people are giving me a hard time.

Also, some of the details of the music scene don't ring true to me (Rhea and Jocelyn, with safety pins in their faces, are supposed to be impressed with Lou in his denim and copper bracelet, really? little things like that), which makes me doubt the whole thing.

It seems mostly like a strong, not perfect, technical accomplishment, but I don't think it does anything that David Foster Wallace didn't already do, and I don't particularly enjoy his fiction. I respect this more than I like it.

I liked it. I guess I wasn't expecting anything, having been completely aware of all the buzz but never actually reading enough about the plot to know what I was getting into. It took me probably three or four chapters to get into the rhythm of the changing perspectives, but after that I liked the style fine.

I am a totally character-driven reader, so this could've been an ideal book for me, but I felt like it lacked heart in a few places; she kept it just a little bit darker than I could appreciate for a book about nothing. It was complicated and interesting and I'm learning to love books even when I don't love/care about the people in them. But there was a hollowness here that made me feel a little odd. I did think, overall, it was just what I want from a book- I thought about it a lot when I wasn't reading it, I want to talk about it with y'all, parts of it were really memorable. I just don't think I'll love it forever. I'm going to lend it to the next person who asks and probably forget they have it, you know?

Probably like a lot of other people I read it just after it won the Pulizter and a few weeks before the book club popped up, and my impression of it then was that I liked it but didn't love it. I have to admit that I prefer a single, sort of grand arc, and the chaotic timeline and mash of characters in Goon Squad left me feeling distant.

But when the book club came up I took the opportunity to go through it again and fill in all the holes in my understanding of story and character, and the better I knew it the more I liked it. I don't often take a second run at books I bounced off of the first time, but I'm glad I did here.

All of which is to say, I liked it quite a lot.

Here is my one complaint, and the thing that might have turned it into a specacular book for me: As I see it, the chapter with the slides is meant to be Sasha's redemption, but I can't see the mother in that story as being Sasha no matter how hard I try. Since it feels like a different person, I find it difficult to feel the satisfaction I think we're meant to feel for her. And it's not that I expect a happy ending for everyone– I can think of any number of books I love that have melancholy endings for their protagonists, but this wasn't one of those. This was a very happy ending that somehow landed on the wrong character.

It's absurd to be nitpicking, because it's obviously a beautiful piece of work, but I guess I find myself more willing to dish out criticism for things I find to be so, so close to being spectacular, and the closer it is to spectacular (without actually touching it) the more I want to know what's wrong with it. And so that's how I feel about it: it was very nearly something that would have gone onto my shelf of favorite things, but the tiny distance by which it missed makes me feel nitpicky.

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.

I enjoyed Egan's book, but I didn't love it. I read and enjoyed her book "Invisible Circus" years before, and in some ways, found it more emotionally resonant. I will have to try "The Keep" as well.

I appreciated her skill and her character development. But there were times when it felt like she was trying too hard--to be edgy, hip, etc. Some of this worked, and some of it felt forced.

My feelings about the book also suffer from the fact that I read it around the same time that I read Tom Rachman's debut, "The Imperfectionists," which has a similar short story structure but somehow was more satisfying for me.

I also wrote about both of those books briefly for a blog post, here.

I liked it a lot. I didn't love it. I was bowled over by the quality of the writing -then again, I'm pretty easily impressed.

My main criticism of it is that it lacked humor. I need at least a chuckle now and again. It offered a pretty bleak look at human nature. Maybe that's why I found the slides section so uplifting. The powerpoint presentation gave me chills.

I've gone back in the text looking for evidence of this and haven't quite found it, but am reporting it anyway: I read this scene totally differently. I didn't think he did it to spite Bennie or to prop himself up or get social validation. I felt like he just impulsively wanted them to have it, that he saw them as fellow musicians and in his sort of zen-like, the world is x's and o's kind of mindset, that he didn't see a difference between using it to help himself and using it to help someone else. Re-reading, I can't find textual evidence for that response but I remember feeling a sort of genuine warmth from him, damaged as he is, to give some young dirty folks a shot at something cool. Maybe it's his insistence that they actually call Bennie? The whole "I felt helpless. I could do this only once; I would never have that card again" part. Dunno. But I liked it. And I don't think they're the first people he sees- he remembers them and knows them from the park, and it sounds like he likes them or feels kinship with them.

I really enjoyed it a lot. I sympathize with Paul: expectationsand hype and all that can so flavor a book. Fortunately, this was the first thing of Egan's that I'd read, so I wasn't saddled with any comparisons to her other works, and I guess I tend to view most literary awards as largely meaningless, so I felt able to ignore that aspect too. (Reviews, on the other hand, I do not find so easy to get out of my head, so I deliberately didn't read any and won't until we're done here - I think the only review I read was the video review where Ron Charles put on black lipstick and stood in front of his furnace).

I have to admit that I didn't really give it a chance. I read the first chapter and gave it to a friend.

I wanted to be able to chat about it here, but alas it bored me out of the gates.

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.

"I guess the expected path of a B side of a novel would be that it would be a darker, less poppy, more eccentric version of the A side"

When I hear B-Side, I assume "not good enough to include in the album, but thrown in anyway." I mean, with music, wouldn't major thematic/tonal changes just save the songs for another album, if they were good enough to keep?

I didn't see any significant theme-change in the book that matches either theory. I mean, the Powerpoint was a neat technique, but disjointed with the rest of the book. I had to enjoy it on its own merits, and it didn't really unify with the rest of the book well.

Hopefully the TV series can use a little er, emulsifier to unify the few neat ideas with a more compelling story.

Interesting, Paul: I get what you're saying about it not feeling like an ensemble piece, and yet I also can't feel there is really a main character. Maybe this says something about the way that all these diverse narratives neverthless seem to contribute to the same set of concerns about living or the same feelings or - (dare I say it?) - the same 'theme.'

ew, icky, ptooey: hate that theme word. But I do think it applies: perhaps the main character is the Goon Squad, with all that entails and implies. Time's fell hand rests of all these characters and their paths in a way that it is hard to ignore.

I wonder, Annabee, if that desire to reconnect with Sasha - also mentioned elsewhere here in the post about if there is a main character or not - might have been something the author wanted to foster. I recall (spoiler) that I felt a real sense of loss at the end of the book when we realize that there is no getting back (from B to A, if you will) to the Sasha of so many years ago, and that sense that things fall apart, that the past is in the past, seemed one of the most explicit 'messages' I got from the book. None of this would have worked if there wasn't some sense of attachment with Sasha. Of course it is only natural that we invest pretty heavily in the first protagonist of the book, but the author seems to rely on that connection at the end of the book, to give us this feeling of disconnection, or loss, or.... however that final episode felt to you all.

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.

I also haven't finished the book yet, but I wanted to add that I'm totally into not only the shifting character focus from chapter to chapter, but also the setting and time shifts. I love how you get to see the characters at different ages and in different roles (single woman dating/assistant, creepy music exec/father, etc). I find it to be a way to describe a network of people, their experiences, and their relationships with each other that feels uniquely real.

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?

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.

I hadn't thought of it before this question, but taking another look I can see a certain B-sidedness there, especially in the slides and in both stories involving Kitty Jackson; there was at once something darker and more playful in all three of those chapters than in anything in the first half. The Kitty Jackson bits because as much as their subjects were obviously horrifying (attempted rape, genocide), I couldn't help reading them as comic pieces (the indignant tone of the journalist and his page-long footnotes, the general and his hat). And the slides seemed to be bucking the idea of even being a written story (though I think they make the most poignant chapter).

So I don't know that it says anything as a unit, but if you were to put together a bunch of singles, sure, I think you might end up with more b-sides from the second half of the book than from the first.

I don't know that there's a real answer, or at least I can't tell. The story directly preceding that switch is where Scotty asks Bennie "what happened between A and B," and then there's the break to the B section, whose first chapter is called "A to B." So I got kind of excited assuming we'd revisit everyone we met in the first half, somehow adding a sort of B-side note to their story or their personality, or demonstrating how they got from a place in their life we'd heard about to when we saw them last. Instead it just kept on chugging, with the same draw-a-thread-out-of-this-story-and-spin-a-new-one style. I was actually a little disappointed. But hey, I'm not finished yet, maybe there's something more cohesive to come? Don't get me wrong, I'm loving it. I just want to talk to Sasha again, okay? Jeez.

Also, I think it drives home how solitary/isolated/detached all the characters are from each other. I feel like she's been working up to this in her other books, but this is the first time the weird structural bits and back and forth really work.

I think a series would probably pick out Sasha/Bennie, but neither could then really keep true to the book. It's so much easier to take this as a series of sometimes-interconnected vignettes than a novel, with each story having its own main character than the book overall.