A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread: (Rereadings)

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Intro/bonus track: When Art Dematerialized
Side A, track 1: Time’s a Goon: From A to B
Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation, Memory, Recording
Side B, track 3: Failure, Shame, Tragedy, Emptiness
Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :
Ivan Kreilkamp is professor of English at Indiana University. His books include Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (2018), and he is coeditor of Victorian Studies. He has published pop-music criticism in the Village Voice, Spin, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.

Review :
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.