WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2010 Jennifer
Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar an aging former punk rocker and
record executive and Sasha the passionate troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie
and Sasha never discover each other's pasts the reader does in intimate detail along with
the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs over many
years in locales as varied as New York San Francisco Naples and Africa. We first meet
Sasha in her mid-thirties on her therapist's couch in New York City confronting her
longstanding compulsion to steal. Later we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as
the child of a violent marriage then a runaway living in Naples then as a college student
trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We meet Bennie Salazar at the
melancholy nadir of his adult life-divorced struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son
listening to a washed up band in the basement of a suburban house-and then revisit him in 1979
at the height of his youth shy and tender reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he
discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of
his high school gang-who thrived and who faltered-and we encounter Lou Kline Bennie's
catastrophically careless mentor along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of
Lou's far flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a
book about the interplay of time and music about survival about the stirrings and
transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In
a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to Powerpoint Egan
captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to the
basic human hunger for redemption and the universal tendency to reach for both-and escape the
merciless progress of time-in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly startling
exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.
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***Jennifer Egan's latest novel THE CANDY HOUSE is coming April 2022 the long-awaited sibling
novel to A Visit from the Goon Squad ***
