Jennifer Egan's fifth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a brilliantly constructed and masterfully written series of intersecting short stories, populated with characters that are both tenuously and obviously linked. Traversing time and location, Egan's writing flows easily with a marked personality reflective of each character as we are taken through moments of profound intimacy and insight into the lives of friends, family and lovers.
Complex but never complicated, heartbreaking, darkly funny and optimistic, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a meditation on the ebb and flow of lives connecting with other lives and the joy and damage that results. A truly wonderful book!
- William