I picked up this novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan without knowing it was National Book Award Winner or a Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. As I read along I was a little bit confused at first. Each chapter seemed like a separate short story. After a while I began to see that the characters in the story were all somehow connected to two main characters-Benny Salazar (who can forget a name like that?) and Sasha, Benny's assistant for many years. Benny and Sasha work in the music industry producing recordings and dealing with musicians. The goons in the title are not the bald, giant women with big noses like I saw in the Popeye cartoons. Goons are violent bad guys, well, usually they're violent bad guys. In this story, the goon squad turns out to be time. Time steals your life, your youth and your innocence away while you are busy keeping an eye out for goons that are violent thugs. This was a good story. I was sad to see it end.
No comments:
Post a Comment