A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Published 2011 · 352 pages · 77,648 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction

How hard is A Visit from the Goon Squad to read?

A Visit from the Goon Squad scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
Contemporary American prose, music industry vocabulary.
Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
Varied across chapters; PowerPoint chapter is distinctive.
Abstraction: 45 out of 100
Questions about time, music, and identity emerge through characters.
Information density: 47 out of 100
Each chapter efficiently establishes new voice and context.
Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
Connections between chapters implied; readers assemble timeline.
Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
Music, time (the goon), pauses carry thematic weight.
Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
Egan maintains affection for characters while showing their failures.
Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
Characters continue; time's passage is the resolution.
Structural complexity: 37 out of 100
Non-chronological linked stories, including PowerPoint chapter.

How A Visit from the Goon Squad is regarded

A Visit from the Goon Squad holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where A Visit from the Goon Squad sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (149 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, A Visit from the Goon Squad scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic (shading Ironic)
It jarred Sasha to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that Alex would struggle to organize a year or two from now
Symbol: Formal
I’m afraid they’ll wake up and be scared of us in our dog collars and safety pins and shredded T-shirts.
Mythos: Ironic Tragedy iv (irony iv)
And the hum, always that hum, which maybe wasn’t an echo after all, but the sound of time passing.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
Entangled particles are subatomic “twins”: photons created by splitting a single photon in half with a crystal, which still react identically to stimuli applied to only one of them

Where the story of A Visit from the Goon Squad takes place

  • New York and Crandale, mid-2000s (post-9/11) (2003 to 2007), the main setting
  • Kenyan safari with Lou Kline's family, 1973
  • San Francisco punk scene, 1979-1980 (1979 to 1980)
  • Naples, Ted Hollander's search for Sasha, c. 1990 (1989 to 1991)
  • NYU and the East Village, spring 1993 (Clinton inauguration year)
  • Lou Kline's Los Angeles house, twenty years on (1999 to 2000)
  • Near-future Manhattan of handsets, pointers and the Footprint concert

5 things that are true of A Visit from the Goon Squad, with the passage for each

  1. Sasha's list of lifted objects includes eighty-five pens and twenty-eight bars of soap.

    five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens

  2. Bennie spends eight thousand dollars on gold flakes for his coffee in two months.

    The truth was, he’d spent eight thousand dollars on gold in the past two months.

  3. The safari chapter openly flashes forward decades, including a character's death in 2008.

    Thirty-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire.

  4. The safari chapter tells us that Rolph, the boy on the dance floor, later shoots himself at twenty-eight.

    long after Rolph has shot himself in the head in their father’s house at twenty-eight

  5. Bosco gives the book its title phrase in the PR meeting scene.

    Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?

Scenes in A Visit from the Goon Squad that Frye would name

56 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, Safari
long after Rolph has shot himself in the head in their father’s house at twenty-eight A flash-forward gives the sacrificial death of the gentle son.
Anagnorisis, A to B
Stephanie knew whose it was as if she had already known, as if she weren’t discovering the fact but remembering it. The bobby pin reveals Bennie's affair with Kathy and ends Stephanie's plans for the evening.
Pharmakos, Selling the General
They hated her. They were dying to get rid of her. It was as if she weren’t human, but a rat or a bug. La Doll is expelled by the society she once ruled after the burning-oil party.
Hamartia, Out of Body
“She was a hooker,” you say. “A hooker and a thief—that’s how she survived in Naples.” Rob betrays Sasha's confidence, a fatal misstep that costs him his closest friendship.
Anatomy, Safari
Structural Desire: The much younger temporary female mate of a powerful male will be inexorably drawn to the single male within range who disdains her mate’s power. Mindy's catalogue of 'structural' laws is encyclopedic taxonomy.
Anagnorisis, You (Plural)
in that second, different parts of my brain find each other, and I realize that I already knew about Rolph. Jocelyn's recognition of Rolph's death turns the deathbed visit toward grief and rage.

Books that share these scenes with A Visit from the Goon Squad

About the author

Jennifer Egan