A novel that sits perfectly as a summer read, or an on-the-bus-commute-companion and was endorsed by the Richard and Judy book-club and yet still won the Pulitzer is a curious proposition. A novel that does all this and has a chapter that is a powerpoint presentation and that ends in a dystopian vision of a technologised society that can only be described as sci-fi is definitely a tantalising prospect.
A Visit From The Goon Squad deserves its acclaim. Whether it is a novel or a short story collection is something more skilled readers can dispute. While the chapter that apes and surpasses Coupland is impressive, the one that does the same in homage to David Foster Wallace is audacious and the slide show is going down in history as epic, the thing I liked most about the book is the consistently insightful and real descriptions of the internal lives of human beings, especially as they are buffeted around by time that refuses to be eternal.
One such section has an art history scholar approaching middle-age ruminate on how he ruined his marriage because he was scared of love.
Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both.
– Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Good Squad, p. 217.
Your Correspondent, Has already reached his all-final end and is already off on his new-starting future.
It was definitely my favourite book of last year. In fact, this sounds ridiculous but it was also one of the most spiritually inspiring reads. She teaches you to look out for the tiniest personality in one story because they may be a major player in another, and over the course of this decades-spanning work you empathise and care for more characters than I’ve experienced on a novel. No human character could know all these people so intimately in their youth, in old age, in their strength, in their weakness, in poverty, in wealth… It gave a fleeting glimpse of how God could perceive the world and what it might mean to know as we are fully known. The notion that this might be a gaze of love seems to incredible to take in.