Reviews for Visit from the Goon Squad

Booklist Reviews 2010 April #1
*Starred Review* Egan is a writer of cunning subtlety, embedding within the risky endeavors of seductively complicated characters a curious bending of time and escalation of technology's covert impact. Following her diabolically clever The Keep (2006), Egan tracks the members of a San Francisco punk band and their hangers-on over the decades as they wander out into the wider, bewildering world. Kleptomaniac Sasha survives the underworld of Naples, Italy. Her boss, New York music producer Bennie Salazar, is miserable in the suburbs, where his tattooed wife, Stephanie, sneaks off to play tennis with Republicans. Obese former rock-star Bosco wants Stephanie to help him with a Suicide Tour, while her all-powerful publicist boss eventually falls so low she takes a job rehabilitating the public image of a genocidal dictator. These are just a few of the faltering searchers in Egan's hilarious, melancholy, enrapturing, unnerving, and piercingly beautiful mosaic of a novel. As episodes surge forward and back in time, from the spitting aggression of a late-1970s punk-rock club to the obedient, socially networked "herd" gathered at the Footprint, Manhattan's 9/11 site 20 years after the attack, Egan evinces an acute sensitivity to the black holes of shame and despair and to the remote-control power of the gadgets that are reordering our world. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

----------------------
BookPage Reviews 2010 June
A dazzling spin through time

Fans riding high from Jennifer Egan’s critically acclaimed The Keep have much to look forward to in her new novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which turns away from the neo-gothic and mind-bending while retaining the unexpected humor and postmodern breadth of her earlier work.

At the book’s start, we drop in on the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging record executive, and Sasha, his aimless, kleptomaniac assistant. Sasha goes on a mediocre online date, while Bennie brings his nine-year-old son to see a band he has signed but knows he can’t break out. Then the narrative takes an unexpected turn, making great leaps in time and location to show us not only how these characters got to be the way they are (and flashing forward to what they will ultimately become), but the ways in which the ancillary players in their lives have touched and connected them. We meet Scotty, Bennie’s former bandmate from the Bay Area punk scene; Lou, the group’s self-destructive mentor who takes his children and young girlfriend on a trip to Africa; Rob, Sasha’s suicidal college friend who struggles with his own identity in the Internet’s early days; and Alex, Sasha’s date from the opening chapter, who goes on to see a world in which technology and music intertwine in surprising, though not implausible ways.

Chapters jump from first to third person, from heavily footnoted magazine articles to PowerPoint presentations, yet Egan’s scope remains simultaneously manic and highly controlled. Indeed, one gets the sense that she knows so much about her characters’ lives that she had the luxury of curating only the choicest moments for our reading pleasure, the result of which is a series of pastiches that deftly and lyrically illustrates the ways people and culture change, yet stay remarkably the same.

Copyright 2010 BookPage Reviews.

----------------------
Kirkus Reviews 2010 April #2
"Time's a goon," as the action moves from the late 1970s to the early 2020s while the characters wonder what happened to their youthful selves and ideals. Egan (The Keep, 2006, etc.) takes the music business as a case in point for society's monumental shift from the analog to the digital age. Record-company executive Bennie Salazar and his former bandmates from the Flaming Dildos form one locus of action; another is Bennie's former assistant Sasha, a compulsive thief club-hopping in Manhattan when we meet her as the novel opens, a mother of two living out West in the desert as it closes a decade and a half later with an update on the man she picked up and robbed in the first chapter. It can be alienating when a narrative bounces from character to character, emphasizing interconnections rather than developing a continuous story line, but Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy that we remain engaged. By the time the novel arrives at the year "202-" in a bold section narrated by Sasha's 12-year-old daughter Alison, readers are ready to see the poetry and pathos in the small nuggets of information Alison arranges like a PowerPoint presentation. In the closing chapter, Bennie hires young dad Alex to find 50 "parrots" (paid touts masquerading as fans) to create "authentic" word of mouth for a concert. This new kind of viral marketing is aimed at "pointers," toddlers now able to shop for themselves thanks to "kiddie handsets"; the preference of young adults for texting over talking is another creepily plausible element of Egan's near-future. Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us.Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while affirming its historic values.First printing of 60,000 Copyright Kirkus 2010 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

----------------------
Library Journal Reviews 2010 February #2
Former punk rocker and current record exec Bennie Salazar and his employee, the mercurial Sasha, are at the heart of a novel ranging from 1970s San Francisco to a postwar future. Egan's previous The Keep was excellent, so I want you to try this; with a reading group guide. Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.

----------------------
Library Journal Reviews 2010 April #2

Time changes both everything and nothing in this novel about former punk rocker-turned-music executive Bennie Salazar and Sasha, his indispensable secretary with an unhappy past. A host of characters from San Francisco's 1970s music scene collide in ways that are hard to summarize, with peripheral characters in one chapter more fully developed in others. These well-defined characters and the engaging narrative are hallmarks of Egan's earlier fiction, which include Look at Me, a National Book Award finalist, and the best-selling The Keep. Here, we learn that power is transient, authenticity is not all it's cracked up to be, and friendships are often fragile, but the connections among people matter terribly. Often, we survive the self-destructive tendencies of youth only to realize that we've just exchanged one set of problems for another. VERDICT In the end, this novel does offer hope, but it is the grubby kind that keeps you going once you've been kicked to the curb. Readers will enjoy seeing the disparate elements of this novel come full circle. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/10.]--Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ., Arlington, VA

[Page 73]. Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.

----------------------
Publishers Weekly Reviews 2010 March #4

Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive in well in this graceful yet wild novel. We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie's one-time bandmate who all but dropped out of society, and Alex, who goes on a date with Sasha and later witnesses the future of the music industry. Egan's overarching concerns are about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, and lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn. Or as one character asks, "How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?" Egan answers the question elegantly, though not straight on, as this powerful novel chronicles how and why we change, even as the song stays the same. (June)