When You're Visited By Alcoholics

 I don't really know if it's my sheltered existence, but when I was first given this book, "A Visit From The Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan, I immediately thought, "Why would you want to read a book about people being visited by cheap wine drinkers?" Where's the intrigue in that?" Although I understand that a goon is also a bad guy or a thug, my current state of association with various persons of good and bad natures lead me to believe that this would be a book that they should read, not me.




However, Egan does a brilliant job of entrancing me into the pages, despite the lack of indulgent drinkers. The novel follows the lives of a select handful of characters; record producer Bennie Salazar, his assistant Sasha, her friends, his friends, enough people to make you feel as though you're entering a community, entering that other world, which is mainly based in New York. Written in short chapters from the various character's varying perspectives, you don't even necessarily have to read the entire book. You could just read a couple of the story threads and then get sick of it. But if you do want to get a good feel for the lives of these emotionally see-sawing characters, then start at the start and go from there.

And at that point it really is a page turner. You're just starting to see the characters for who they are, you're getting introduced into their lives. However, after a while the common depressing feel that runs through all the character's lives starts to get a bit too similar and I started to lose interest in where these characters were going. In fact the last couple of chapters I just flicked through, trying to get the general feel without having to really read. Despite this very small dislike of mine, the book was overall enticing and entertaining. There was a certain amount of dry wit and humour woven throughout the various threads that did give the novel a fresh edge at times.

The main theme permeated throughout the book is time and what happens when it starts to get away from us. I think maybe one of the reasons why I started to lose interest in this novel was because of this theme. Jumping from the past to the present and back again, all the separate stories revolved around this notion that "life's a goon", that being that your life is just going where it goes and you really have no control over that. Which is a bit depressing really and not something that I particularly want to think about all the time. So, like I said previously, the small amounts of humour should have been made into large amounts of humour, just so I would have been able to laugh a little and not continually think of depressing things like death and growing old.

All in all, the novel wasn't overly horrible. In fact, I would read it again. And maybe it's one of those novels that you do have to read a second time, just to get a proper feel for it. I don't know. I give this book a 3/5.

Happy reviewing everyone!



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