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    A Visit from the Goon Squad: A Novel
    Unavailable
    A Visit from the Goon Squad: A Novel
    Unavailable
    A Visit from the Goon Squad: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    A Visit from the Goon Squad: A Novel

    Written by Jennifer Egan

    Narrated by Roxana Ortega

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the listener does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

    We first meet Sasha in her mid-30s, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale.

    We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life — divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house — and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang — who thrived and who faltered — and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

    A Visit from the Goon Squad is an audiobook about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both — and escape the merciless progress of time — in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

    Editor's Note

    Delightful pause…

    Time is a goon, and it’s gonna beat everybody up: That process is rarely captured with such simplistic elegance and gentle care as in Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work about has-been and could-be music stars that breaks many narrative conventions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 12, 2019
    ISBN9780593151518
    Unavailable
    A Visit from the Goon Squad: A Novel
    Author

    Jennifer Egan

    Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, Look At Me and the short-story collection Emerald City. Her short stories have been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and GQ , among others, and her nonfiction appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.

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    Reviews for A Visit from the Goon Squad

    4/5

    14 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Excellent novel just to my taste. I’m so pleased with the description of the inner feelings of those characters astoundingly depicted one by one. It’s about our ambitions of career and love, the tragedies of our irreversible fortune and the inevitable loneliness of us human beings.
      I heard you, your sign and your hysteric laugh. I saw you, your tears and your confused eyes.
    • 3/5
      I have been cursed these past many months to reading books that start off so strongly and captivate me for hours, only to putter out about halfway through. So it was with this one. By the end, I was just waiting to be finished, hoping hard that the end would life me back up. Unfortunately it wasn't meant to be. First half: 5 stars. Second half: meh.
    • 5/5
      Strong characters that resonate emotionally, moving through a very recognizable, sharply observed external world. Egan is deft at writing characters interior lives, and at dialogue, and at putting characters into revealing and even devastating situations. She pushes her prose too, reaching for and achieving beauty at times, and always writing with economy and precision. The device of intertwined lives across time is a tad too pat in places, but that is a nitpick. I devoured this, and, for having been written 10 years ago and having the guts to predict the early 2020s, this book felt like right now (2019) and made me feel life now acutely.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I can't even review this on story. The narrator had a bad day I guess. the most monotonous telling I've heard so far. 40 minutes in and I will not be finishing this. story sounds compelling, but the narrator pretty much ruins it