During a couple of international flights last month, I read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011.
It’s one of those books that has an ensemble cast of characters. There’s thirteen chapters, each one in some way related to a rock music executive in New York City. It’s hard to really summarize the plot since there’s not really an overarching one, it’s more like thirteen separate short stories that are somewhat linked together without a continuous narrative, just common characters.
The writing is really great, it’s funny while at the same time having its touching moments. The characters are interesting and so different, from the kleptomaniac assistant to even a genocidal dictator. Each chapter has a different narrative style, switching tenses and perspectives.
But even though it was entertaining, I personally don’t find that these novels stick with you after you’ve read them. Maybe it’s because there’s so many characters, and so there’s less time devoted to each one, as compared to a novel with a central character or two. Or maybe it’s that there’s no overarching plot that takes you on an emotional ride through the whole book. For entertainment, I thought it was great. It just didn’t have characters or plot that haunted me afterwards.
Oh and the PowerPoint presentation in Chapter 12 is really great. It’s from a teenager’s perspective, and its unusual structure somehow fits into the novel, which also has a chapter that’s structured as a newspaper article.