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Showing posts from December, 2013

Life Would Be a Goon, Sweetheart

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A Visit from the Goon Squad recalls the intricately interconnected sprawl of Cloud Atlas and Infinite Jest , but presented in miniature, as if those literary metropoles were reconfigured in order to be contained in a single city block. In fact, the Jules Jones interview/nervous breakdown chapter feels like a direct parody of or homage to David Foster Wallace's writing style, and the way characters and situations are nested recurrently throughout the distinctly different narratives and styles of each chapter owes a lot to Cloud Atlas . Yet I don't mean to belabor the point regarding its influences - this is very much its own book and in its finest moments it achieves the sort of lyrical transcendence one associates with masterpieces. It's also a breeze to read, which I think belies its real complexities to a significant degree. One could quibble with the neatness of the interconnections of Egan's characters, settings and stories. Many writers suggest that coinci