I liked this book, but it's a difficult one to recommend. That's partly because the structure is so unique: the chapters are almost individual stories, set in different time periods, but woven together by the appearance of many of the the same characters in each. Also, these chapters use different voices: first, second, and third person.

On the surface, the book is about a specific generation of people, all of whom are involved in the popular music business in various ways. These people come and go, as children, young adults, and older adults. But the real subject is time. Time is, in fact, the "goon squad," although that's never explicitly stated.

I found it funny, touching, and engaging. ( )

A wonderful kaleidoscope of characters intersecting each others lives, from shifting times and viewpoints. As much a collection of short stories as a novel, it still had a few stunning reveals and fun "oh him!?" moments. ( )

I became a teenager about ten years after news of a Black Flag show could put the LAPD's riot squad on standby, but eighties-era hardcore -- that ruthlessly minimalist, explosively aggressive variant of punk rock -- rotted my brain straight through anyway. Imagine my surprise, then, when I figured out that that scene -- or rather some its San Francisco-based precursors -- had become the subject of a Real Book that had gone off and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The genre's come a long way since "Ack Ack Ack."

It also sort of surprised me that "A Visit from the Goon Squad" was, at least in part, about selling out. As a teenage music obsessive, the question of who was and who wasn't going to sign with a major took up altogether too much of my time. I eventually grew up, as all teenage music obsessives do, and I moved on from the issue. The world itself seemed to have moved on, too -- the guy from Of Montreal even changed one of his song's lyrics at Outback Steakhouse's request and claimed that the entire concept of "selling out" had lost its meaning. But it takes on new life here. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" isn't to be confused with an argument for punk or indie purity -- which may always have been an unattainable goal anyway. Still, many of Egan's characters find themselves no longer young or in real-deal middle age and have forgotten, or been made to forget, who they once were. While its tone is never regretful or brooding, much of Egan's concerns the manner of compromises we're forced to make as time goes by and how those past selves might be, if not exactly recovered, at least honored in some way. This is, in other words, a great book for anyone who ever wore out a copy of Fugazi's "13 Songs" album or woken up wondering how the heck they turned into the person they are.

Egan also devotes some time to her characters' search for that rarest of all things -- the real. This is, after all, a novel that touches on punk rock, which is a genre that fetishized authenticity, or at least its own conception of it. By the book's last chapter, punk rock is as distant a cultural memory for its younger characters as ragtime is for today's kids, and while the environment has, unsurprisingly, kept degrading at speed, the author also shows that the youngest generation has something to feel hopeful about. It was a pleasant surprise to come across this non-dystopian future, but it is very much of a piece with the novel's fluid, productive approach to narrative. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" could be called, I suppose, episodic, but then Egan's hardly the first writer to tell a non-linear story. We see a couple of punk girls eat a fancy restaurant, a record producer go on a safari in Africa, a disoriented young woman make her way through Europe. We meet these same characters in other contexts, when they are living other lives. The author sometimes pauses the narrative entirely to tell us exactly how a character we meet in passing ends up faring in life. In the manner of an old friend we haven't seen in ages, she tells us how things turned out for everyone. But the book's episodes don't always connect in a strictly narrative sense, and there are few events here that lock any character into any particular fate. While not everybody ends up finding what they're looking for, this lends "A Visit from the Goon Squad" a loose-limbed, generative aspect that I found profoundly satisfying. What Egan shows us feels meaningful, but real life happens, as it so often does, somewhere in the background, while we're not really watching. From a literary perspective, it's one thing to say that the world is a big and surprising place, but by relating these loosely connected, open-ended bits of narrative, Egan actually succeeds in showing that it is. This isn't a minor achievement. This airy, extended structure also has the unexpected side benefit of allowing its protagonists the time and space they need to genuinely work on themselves. In some particularly heartening cases, we see time and effort turn chaos into stability and anger into purpose. To paraphrase Freud, these characters' journeys are proof that work and love can still work wonders. Not everybody needs to listen to Flipper -- who also, shockingly enough, get mentioned here -- but maybe this is the sort of story that everybody needs to hear, in some form or another. Recommended whether you ever gave yourself a Germs burn or not. ( )

A cacophony of voices
A mix of unevenly hinged stories, tenses, people iterated and reiterated overtime, generations revisiting themselves former and later. Minor characters observing major ones. Jigsaw pieces in uneven chapters of uneven length in different tenses. Narrated in first and second persons of all ages from babies to dying men, across counties, time and developmental stages.

It most likely is brilliant in the written word, but I fear much is lost in the audio edition. Though chapters are read by different narrators, dialogue must by necessity still be performed by opposite sexes in conversations.

I “read” the book over several days with some lengthy interruptions, so it was hard to piece together the pieces, which I suspect is part of the enjoyment in the written text.

The only constants were New York City (though even this appears as text-speak for “nice”) and the music industry. And you can’t get much more unstable than these two giants.. ( )

Not my flavor. Or not what I want right now.