Scan barcode
A review by theogb451
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
3.0
Good writing but not really for me.
I swung between 2 and 3 stars, sometimes within one story! But overall I'll give it 3.
I enjoyed the prose here, it's nice and direct and used in many different styles over the course of the book. Sadly the stories mostly failed to really charm me.
Many are about characters who are simply fairly unpleasant or else the piece is steeped in sadness.
There are a lot of literary conventions I'm not a huge fan of also. These include characters minutely overthinking the world around them and an older, jaded writer diving into speculative fiction.
E.g. In the final chapter you can feel the author's belief that technology has ruined the world. Between the lines it's clear that life was better before mobile phones, before journalists' stranglehold on the media (and I'm absolutely not one of those 'do my own research' dweebs but let's not kid ourselves that the Internet hasn't given huge voices to people outside the white, middle-class sphere)... This infects the whole 'future' with ultra doom Black Mirror stuff that just feels a bit misinformed and unsubtle for me.
The best bit was the penultimate chapter's dive into pauses in songs.
I swung between 2 and 3 stars, sometimes within one story! But overall I'll give it 3.
I enjoyed the prose here, it's nice and direct and used in many different styles over the course of the book. Sadly the stories mostly failed to really charm me.
Many are about characters who are simply fairly unpleasant or else the piece is steeped in sadness.
There are a lot of literary conventions I'm not a huge fan of also. These include characters minutely overthinking the world around them and an older, jaded writer diving into speculative fiction.
E.g. In the final chapter you can feel the author's belief that technology has ruined the world. Between the lines it's clear that life was better before mobile phones, before journalists' stranglehold on the media (and I'm absolutely not one of those 'do my own research' dweebs but let's not kid ourselves that the Internet hasn't given huge voices to people outside the white, middle-class sphere)... This infects the whole 'future' with ultra doom Black Mirror stuff that just feels a bit misinformed and unsubtle for me.
The best bit was the penultimate chapter's dive into pauses in songs.