A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Corsair, $24.95.
“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” As if anyone can stop the clock.
This exciting novel, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, takes us on a wild ride across 40 years in the lives and loves, hopes and disappointments, of a dozen or so interconnected characters based in New York.
They’re a cool bunch, by and large — record executives and celebrity journalists and burnt-out punk rockers, brothers and bosses and friends-of-friends running a criss-cross relay race through each other’s lives, blind to the chaos they cause and those who stumble and fall around them.
Stripped of the of hip and hype, though, they are people like us, wanting to be special and different and wondering when and how it was we actually gave in and grew up.
It sounds sad, and ultimately it is — time being the great leveller — but it’s also funny, fresh and brilliantly done.
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