A Visit from the Goon Squad

I am in awe of the different things that good writers can do. Jennifer Egan, for instance, has for twenty years anticipated what digital connection will do to us with prophetic insight, while also producing smart, witty dialogue worthy of Bogart and Bacall. “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is a perfectly calibrated piece of machinery, moving effortlessly between different characters in various times and places. The receptionist who is a marginal character in one scene is the central protagonist of another as a rebellious teenager, but then reappears elsewhere as a middle-aged mum. It’s like a blend of Cloud Atlas with Middlemarch. But then, at the level of the sentence she can also work magic with a powerful image. On page 217 she writes “he had taken the passion he felt for Susan, and folded it in half…” and then proceeds to develop that for a sustained paragraph, as if it were a poem. Just astonishing.