Review 15: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

From A Visit From The Goon Squad, Past Me expected light-hearted whimsy and comic plot twists. I based this on its title and the book cover. Present Me laughs in the stupid face of Past Me, for being such a clunk-headed dope, because it turns out that Jennifer Egan’s breakout hit novel is nothing of the sort.

The structural style is similar to that of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, with each chapter covering the perspective of a different character experiencing a different event in their life. Where Gyasi sought to show the depth of history and the way cultural influences trickle down a family tree, though, Egan shows breadth – all the characters covered live within a couple of generations of each other, and so the device is more used to outline the way that different people with wildly varying motivations can converge in a few chance meetings to influence each other’s lives, circling around two key characters, Sasha and Benny. It’s less a family tree than an acquaintance hedge.

Egan’s ability to inhabit such a range of different personalities and egos is truly impressive. Every character’s world feels rich in detail, and passed through a fully-formed, three-dimensional filter of that particular character’s brain. You sense that writing this must have been exhausting; not just spinning plates, but imagining the world from each plate’s dizzying perspective as it whirls.

The danger of this, of course, is that you get fully involved in one voice, and then that ends, and you have to change gear to start adapting to a new one in the next chapter. For people who are less intellectually bungled than I am, it might have been easier, but it took me a short time to adjust to each new chapter. The effort was absolutely worth it though. Each little story is compelling and carefully crafted, like chisel-cut jewels or Mini Eggs.

As a longtime fan of the word goon, my only complaint can be the lack of it. I was hoping for goons-a-plenty, but they were thin on the ground. Goon-dearth aside, though, this was a really enjoyable first foray into the work of Jennifer Egan, who is clearly a very accomplished and deservedly-lauded writer.

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This is my fifteenth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

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Review 19: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I imagine a lot of unimaginative reviews of this book say something like, Eleanor Oliphant is not Completely Fine, contrary to the title! and then they laugh at their own tiny joke for four hours. You won’t find that here, even though it is both true and apposite. Instead you’ll see me saying: this is a really great book. Even forgetting the inspired name of the protagonist, which never stops sounding like the name of an elegant elephant, it’s really good. Eleanor Oliphant lives alone and has forged an existence for herself of work, trips to the local Tesco Metro, and gentle, vodka-infused oblivion on the weekends. She doesn’t deal well with people. In fact, Oliphant displays an almost total lack of empathy. At first, you suspect that she may be autistic, since she shows all the signs: difficulty relating to others, low tolerance for leaving her routines, having to learn the outward signs of emotions by rote and experience, rather than innately understanding the differe...

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa...

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem. ...

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