It's totally entertaining and enthralling. The more I am writing about it, the more turgid and complex it is sounding, but that simply isn't the reading experience. Some characters re-appear at various stages of their lives and a character that is a walk on part in one story may find themselves the lead role in the next, usually at a different point in time. Each vignette story is almost perfectly mastered to ensure that the reader is engrossed in the lives of the people covered. In terms of time span, we travel from the 1970s to sometime in the near future. The stories take in many locations, from San Francisco to New York, from Naples to Africa. But Egan's story has that mystery X factor in spades and it's a terrific, enjoyable and often very funny read. Without soul to the book, these would have made it at best 'interesting'. One chapter is presented as a newspaper/magazine article one is set in the near future and uses a lot of text speak and one, most memorably is presented in the format of a PowerPoint presentation. Each chapter is written in a different literary way - some will be first person narratives, some third person and even one that is second person. To give you some idea, it is not really a novel, more a collection of related short stories or episodes that run back and forward in time. It could so easily have been a triumph of form over substance. Goon Squad is also the title of an Elvis Costello track, continuing the music theme as Egan uses the music industry as a lens to examine time.įor a myriad of reasons this book could have gone wildly wrong and been thwarted by its ambition.

Her central character, if one can be said to exist, is Bennie Salazar, a music mogul who we encounter both directly and tangentially at various stages of his up and down career. Egan's subject area is all loosely based around the music world. Apparently there's a saying that 'time's a goon' - no, I'd never heard of it and to be fair, neither had the first character to whom it is said in Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad', but together with a pair of epigraphs from Proust, it's clear that time is very definitely what is being explored here.

Book review a visit from the goon squad