A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread

Jennifer Egan described her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad as a combination of Proust and The Sopranos. In rereading the book, Ivan Kreilkamp takes Egan up on her comparison, showing how it blends a concern with the status of the novel in the twenty-first century with an elegiac meditation on how we experience the passage of time.

Kreilkamp, a former music critic, examines how Egan’s characters turn to rock and especially punk in search of community and meaning. He considers what the novel’s portrayal of music says about the role of art in contemporary culture as digitization makes older technologies obsolete. Combining personal and critical reflection, he reveals how A Visit from the Goon Squad articulates and responds to the sense of loss many feel as cherished physical objects are replaced with immaterial data. For Kreilkamp, Egan’s novel compellingly combines the psychological realism of the nineteenth-century novel with more recent and transient forms such as the celebrity magazine profile or a PowerPoint presentation to provide a self-reflective diagnosis of the decay and endurance of literature.

Arranged like Egan’s novel into A and B sides, this book highlights not only how A Visit from the Goon Squad speaks to our mass-media and digital present but also its page-turning pleasure.

Ivan Kreilkamp is associate professor in the department of English at Indiana University. He is the author of Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2018). In addition to his work in such scholarly journals as ELH and Novel, he has also published in such publications as The New Yorker (online), Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Millions, and Senses of Cinema. Less recently he was a pop music critic writing for Spin, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere.