A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

 

Egan has written a novel of character studies about what it is growing up in the 1970's and 1980's.  The novel is loosely based around the lives of Sasha and Bennie who work in New York City in the music industry.  Bennie is a manager and producer of rock groups and Sasha is his assistant.  But Egan writes about many more characters all connected to these two in some way.

We first meet Bennie as part of a rock group of high schoolers in California.  They are hoping to hit the big time but only one of them, the guitar player named Scotty, is talented enough to go further.  Sasha has a more checkered life, moving out of her family as a teenager, going to Europe and doing whatever it takes to survive, then coming back to the States to college and eventually marriage and children after her New York days.

Along the way we go on safari with the man who picks up one of the girls in Bennie's rock band and who takes his children wherever he goes and whichever woman he is with at the moment.  We meet a man who Sasha shares a first date with in New York and see him again decades later when he is a young married man with a small child, now working for Bennie on the sly generating publicity.  There are other characters we meet along the way.

This novel has garnered literary praise.  It is a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, a PEN/Faulkner finalist and a New York Times Book Review Best Book.  It was also singled out by organizations such as People, Salon, the Boston Globe, Slate, Time, Publishers Weekly and others as a Best Book.  Egan asks what holds our lives together through all the changes we encounter over our time here on Earth and what happens to those we are once close with.  She finds an enduring thread of friendship and character that stays with us no matter how our circumstances change.  Each character study is masterfully done and the thin threads that tie each character to another are often surprising and give the reader a sense of connection.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.