A visit from the goon squad book6/8/2023 We are left with a narrative that is elegant, revealing, and urgent. With great openness of spirit, fluency, and a comic vision that balances her sharp eye for the tragic, Egan has employed every playful device of the postmodern novel with such warmth and sensitivity that the genre is transcended completely. But there is a new buoyancy to this novel as well-a buoyancy of tone, of technique. Like her earlier work, it is dark and often cruel. Instead, Egan gives us a great, gasping, sighing, breathing whole. All of this might be expected to depict the broken, alienated angst of modern life as viewed through the postmodern lens of broken, alienated irony. It has thirteen chapters, each an accomplished short story in its own right characters who meander in and out of these chapters, brushing up against one another’s lives in unexpected ways a time frame that runs from 1979 to the near, but still sci-fi, future jolting shifts in time and points of view-first person, second person, third person, Powerpoint person and a social background of careless and brutal sex, careless and brutal drugs, and carefully brutal punk rock. Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a moving humanistic saga, an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche.
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