A Visit from the Goon Squad

The questions, discussion topics, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group's discussion of Jennifer Egan’s stunning new work, A Visit from the Goon Squad. In a satirical and oddly touching book, Egan brings to life the recent past, captures the confusions and ambiguities of the present, and speculates about the future of America.

A Note from Jennifer Egan
When I talk to audiences about how I came to write A Visit from the Goon Squad in the form it takes, someone invariably says, “I really wish I’d heard what you just said before reading the book; I would have enjoyed it more.” So it seems worth summarizing my remarks for the benefit of book clubs—or individual readers—who haven’t yet read the book, or might have read it and felt confused.
 
I began A Visit from the Goon Squad without a clear plan, following my own curiosity from one character and situation to the next. My guiding rules were only these: 1) Each chapter had to be about a different person. 2) Each chapter had to have a different mood and tone and approach. 3) Each chapter had to stand completely on its own. This last was especially important; since I ask readers to start over repeatedly in A Visit from the Goon Squad, it seemed the least I could do was provide a total experience each time.
 
In other words, you can read this book without making a single connection between any two chapters. They were written—and published—as individual pieces, apart from the book as a whole.
 
I didn’t think of A Visit from the Goon Squad as a novel while I was working on it; nor did I think of it as a collection of short stories. I honestly wasn’t sure what it was. Only when I found myself wanting to call its halves “A” and “B,” did I suddenly realize which genre I’d been working in all along: the concept album. By which I mean the great storytelling albums I grew up with in the 1970s: The Who’s Tommy, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. A concept album is a story told in parts that sound completely different from each other (that’s the fun of an album, right?), yet also work together.
 
So, as you read A Visit from the Goon Squad, don’t worry about whether you’re “getting it” or whether it’s really a novel, or what connections you might have missed. None of that matters. The point is to have fun reading a tangle of stories in a lot of contrasting styles. If you’ll do that, then you’re exactly the reader I’d hoped for.