A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city's demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life--divorce
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Linked stories follow a punk-era music scene and the people circling it, a record exec, his troubled assistant, friends, lovers, and bandmates, each chapter shifting time, voice, and form.
Yes. A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Jennifer Egan followed it in 2022 with The Candy House, a sibling novel set in the same world.
Both. A Visit from the Goon Squad is structured as 13 interconnected short stories that share characters across decades. Egan has called it a novel; some readers and critics treat it as a story collection. One chapter is famously presented as a PowerPoint slideshow.
A Visit from the Goon Squad was written by Jennifer Egan, published in 2010 by Anchor.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is 352 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Visit from the Goon Squad takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a standalone novel by Jennifer Egan, not part of a series.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
