Something New

She won the Pulitzer.  Enough said.  Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ has been hailed as ‘wildly ambitious’, ‘audacious’, ‘dazzling’.  Far be it from me to disagree.  Sure enough, Egan seems intent on breaking new ground in this book. 

There’s nothing new about a novel which consists of a serious of interlocking stories.  Think of Colum McCann’s ‘Let the World Spin’.  By comparison with Egan, McCann’s book is strikingly traditional.  Even though the stories (chapters) are somewhat independent, the common threads are in plain sight, the plot clear, and the emotional tone is generous and full of deep feeling.

How different is Egan’s approach.  The writing is downright virtuosic.  Many distinct voices and tones.  Very snappy writing that pleased me over and over again.  But here the discontinuities rule, and the emotional tone is detached.  She seems so intent on perfect execution of the difficult technical tasks she set out for herself that there is little energy left for emotion.  Chronology is intentionally and cleverly jumbled.  Voices change with time and character.  The conscious effort required to bring that off seems evident to the reader, and it gets in the way of a more straightforward emotional experience.

I love the opening chapter and the chapter about an African safari.  Also, the chapter culminating with an attempted rape was funny, brilliant, and disturbing.  Wonderful writing here.

But for me it was a book that spoke more to my head than to my heart, and in that sense I was disappointed.  Perhaps in order to find a truly new way of writing a novel it’s necessary to destroy much of the old ways first.  Do we really have to explode the old ways in order to forge something new?  Maybe, but I do hope that the emotional detachment is not something that endures.  Call me old-fashioned (many have).  I’m willing to do some conscious intellectual work in reading fiction, but I prefer to do it in the service of a rich and rewarding emotional experience.