Thursday, April 12, 2012

Indigo Lakeshore Book Club Reads: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Visit_from_the_goon_squad

I am about to do this book a great disservice.  I read this book some several weeks ago, but never got around to writing up my review, and now the book club meeting is upon me, and with many books read inbetween, I will do my best to give you my impressions of the book.

 

A Visit From the Goon Squad is described as a novel on its cover, however, despite the interweaving of characters and events, it read far more, for me anyway, as a short story collection.  Each chapter was told from the perspective of a different character, and detailed events solely connected to their life, but while they intersected with other characters in other chapters, the book itself fails to read as a cohesive novel, with a solid beginning, middle and end.  I started off reading this book in one solid chunk, but due to class reading obligations, had to put it down for about a week somewhere around two-thirds into it.  This was unfortunate.  Because when I picked it up again, and started the next chapter, I couldn’t remember who all the characters were or how they interconnected.  This is not a good thing for a “novel”.  For a collection of short stories, however, it wouldn’t much matter….

 

The “novel” traverses several decades of the music industry, with characters who are producers, performers, and others working in the industry.  The music references were at times very obscure, so I had difficulty relating to the fervent love of music displayed by the people populating the novel.  The stereotypical “sex, drugs and rock n’roll” aspect of the industry was played out in the book, but rather than it being titillating, or even interesting to read, it all just fell so flat.  There characters were sad, washed up has-beens, and not one garnered enough sympathy from me to want to keep reading.  I think the only reason I did keep reading was because one of the very last chapters was done entirely in PowerPoint.  This was very cool.  The chapter was all about a kid who tracked the pauses in music, and how his family tried to understand why this was so fascinating to him.  The PowerPoint was a very cool touch in a novel that wasn’t otherwise so great.

 

What my fellow book clubbers had to say:

 

Well for once the cheese doesn’t stand alone. Yay!  To a one, the group did not much like this book.  There was some quirkiness in it that kept people reading, and which we could laugh at and about, but overall, the book failed to have any truly redeeming quality where we came away with a positive review or willingness to recommend it to others.

 

One of our members found a flowchart online of the overly numerous characters in the book, and we all agreed, had we had that chart at hand while reading the novel, it would have been more enjoyable, because it was very hard to remember who was who from one chapter to the next.  Too bad somebody didn’t think to publish that in the book, say for its frontispiece perhaps?

 

We did agree that had the author narrowed down her focus to one or two characters, the particularly memorable ones like Bennie, the aging record exec, or his assistant Sasha, we would have enjoyed reading it more.  There was just too little character development and no real movement to the story for our liking.

 

It should be noted that this book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011.  One member queried what was it about the book that made it win?  From Wikipedia, it says that “the Pulitzer Prize Board noted that the novel was an ‘inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.’”  Umm, okay then.

 

Pretty safe to say, give this one a pass.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L Smile

 

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