Description
Book SynopsisJennifer 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 today with an elegiac meditation on how we experience the passage of time.
Trade ReviewA 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
Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole WorldClear-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
Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of DevelopmentKreilkamp 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
Loving Literature: A Cultural HistoryKreilkamp’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
Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary MarketplaceA 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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
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
