A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread

Reviews / Votes

A brilliant investigation into Jennifer Egan's modern classic, exploring how A Visit from the Goon Squad uses both the novel and the pop song as forms of elegy. Ivan Kreilkamp is a music critic as well as a literary scholar, versed in both Middlemarch and Minor Threat, so he brings revelatory insight into Egan's punk-inspired story of time lost and time regained. -- Rob Sheffield, author of <i>Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World</i> Clear-eyed and sure-footed, Kreilkamp tracks the Goon Squad down. A passionately informed reader of both American rock and British fiction, he knows how to reread Egan, knows where to find all the scars on the wrecked bodies, knows about the losses-political, existential, aesthetic-that they mark, knows about the digitally compressed arts that we once shored against our ruin. His meditation is a worthy companion to the novel itself, a testament to the surviving power of song and story. -- Jed Esty, author of <i>Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development</i> Kreilkamp writes brilliantly about Egan's fictional practice, emphasizing her revisions of nineteenth-century literary conventions for representing time and character. His homage to A Visit from the Goon Squad does double duty; this book is also an elegiac, loving account of the novel form in the late phase of its history. -- Deidre Lynch, author of <i>Loving Literature: A Cultural History</i> Kreilkamp's lucid reading offers a refreshingly unapologetic appreciation of an important recent novel. This timely and engaging book argues that Goon Squad poses fiction as uniquely capable of grasping the experience of time, and thus as necessary as ever in a contemporary moment dominated by the digital and the visual. -- Jeremy Rosen, author of <i>Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace</i> A creative and thoughtful account of Jennifer Egan's 2010 novel . . . a very timely reflection upon A Visit from the Goon Squad, bringing Egan's narrative skill and cultural commentary to our attention over a decade after the novel's first publication. * Contemporary Women's Writing *