A Visit from the Goon Squad: A Novel
Written by Jennifer Egan
Narrated by Roxana Ortega
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle 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 listener 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-30s, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale.
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 an audiobook 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.
Editor's Note
Delightful pause…
Time is a goon, and it’s gonna beat everybody up: That process is rarely captured with such simplistic elegance and gentle care as in Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work about has-been and could-be music stars that breaks many narrative conventions.
Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, Look At Me and the short-story collection Emerald City. Her short stories have been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and GQ , among others, and her nonfiction appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.
More audiobooks from Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan Manhattan Beach, and Celeste Ng Little Fires Everywhere: Thalia Book Club Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Thalia Book Club Discussion of Anna Karenina with Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt and Margot Livesay Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to A Visit from the Goon Squad
Related audiobooks
Light and Legacies: Stories of Black Girlhood and Liberation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThalia Book Club: Icon: Featuring Mary Gaitskill, Rick Moody & Jill Nelson in Conversation with Amy Scholder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Sad Young Men Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Let Love Rule Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Last Living Slut Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLast Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Soloist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Life in the Purple Kingdom Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep's Prodigy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Searching for the Sound: My Life in the Grateful Dead Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5City of Night Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eve's Hollywood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5HILL TOWNS Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Black Enough Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best New True Crime Stories: Crimes of Passion, Obsession & Revenge Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNeon Girls: A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Playing Dead: A Memoir of Terror and Survival Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unveiled: How an American Woman Found Her Way Through Politics, Love, and Obedience in the Middle East Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Falling onto Cotton Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrank Sinatra: An American Legend Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inventing Memory Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHigh On Arrival Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The John Cheever Audio Collection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Psychological Fiction For You
The Collected Regrets of Clover: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Good Lie Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Mrs. Parrish: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Notes from the Underground Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Housemaid Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stillhouse Lake Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Stillwater Girls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Magic Hour Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My Dark Vanessa: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wife Upstairs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Perfect Child Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Yellow Wallpaper Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Misery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Storyteller Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Strange Sally Diamond Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secrets of Us Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Head Full of Ghosts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Butterfly Garden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cutting Teeth: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Notes on an Execution: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Know This Much Is True Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The St. Ambrose School for Girls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rouge: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Clown Brigade Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Salem Falls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A History of Wild Places: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chestnut Man: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for A Visit from the Goon Squad
14 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Excellent novel just to my taste. I’m so pleased with the description of the inner feelings of those characters astoundingly depicted one by one. It’s about our ambitions of career and love, the tragedies of our irreversible fortune and the inevitable loneliness of us human beings.
I heard you, your sign and your hysteric laugh. I saw you, your tears and your confused eyes. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I have been cursed these past many months to reading books that start off so strongly and captivate me for hours, only to putter out about halfway through. So it was with this one. By the end, I was just waiting to be finished, hoping hard that the end would life me back up. Unfortunately it wasn't meant to be. First half: 5 stars. Second half: meh.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Strong characters that resonate emotionally, moving through a very recognizable, sharply observed external world. Egan is deft at writing characters interior lives, and at dialogue, and at putting characters into revealing and even devastating situations. She pushes her prose too, reaching for and achieving beauty at times, and always writing with economy and precision. The device of intertwined lives across time is a tad too pat in places, but that is a nitpick. I devoured this, and, for having been written 10 years ago and having the guts to predict the early 2020s, this book felt like right now (2019) and made me feel life now acutely.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I can't even review this on story. The narrator had a bad day I guess. the most monotonous telling I've heard so far. 40 minutes in and I will not be finishing this. story sounds compelling, but the narrator pretty much ruins it