Robbed by the ‘goon squad’ of time

Book club choice Violet Hudson on a bravura novel made up of 13 interlinked short stories

368pp, Corsair, £7.99, ebook £5.99

Jennifer’s Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2011) won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet it was overshadowed by another vast, complex novel about modern American life, Jonathan Franzen’s goliath Freedom, published at around the same time. Freedom is the meatier book, a saga that takes in soccer moms, ornithology and environmental catastrophe. But Goon Squad is the more interesting, original and – in retrospect – prescient.

The book is comprised of 13 linked short stories: each can be read alone but, like James Joyce’s Dubliners or John Updike’s The Maples Stories, they inform and enrich one another while refusing to settle into a traditional narrative arch. The stories weave from the Sixties to the near future – although that future feels a lot closer than it did when the book came out six years ago. The final chapter is written in a futuristic “text speak”: “if thr r children, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?” This seemed dystopian in 2011, but now, in the days of “lol” and “OMG”, is almost reality.

The characters – guitarists and outlaws, tennis-playing country-club divorcees and art history professors – all feel robbed of their hopes for life by the thuggish “goon squad” of time. As one says: “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat f--- no one cares about?” The music-industry setting emphasises the loss of the rock and roll dream. Bennie was a punk teenager in San Francisco, playing in a band called Flaming Dildos; now he is a middleaged record-company executive in Manhattan. As another character says: “The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they’re begging on street corners.”

The stories – each an odd, amusing snapshot of life – coalesce into a tour-de-force that makes you think about intergenerational strife, the future of technology and, ultimately, how to be human.