“Time’s a goon, right?” asks Benny Salazar, giving the book its name. In fact, time itself is practically a character in Egan’s book, constantly reshaping characters, the music industry, and technology. “A Visit from the Goon Squad” spans fifty years, jumping back and forth in time, from the 1970s to an imagined version of the 2020s. The other stories radiate out from that central core, visiting peripheral characters in Benny and Sasha’s past and future lives. At the center of Egan’s web is a music producer named Benny Salazar and his assistant Sasha. “A Visit from the Goon Squad” consists of thirteen chapters that are very different from one another in mood and style, each with its own protagonist but unlike a short story collection, the chapters and characters are all interconnected in a structural spiderweb, coming together to tell a single story - a story about technology and the music industry. Ten years ago, Jennifer Egan published “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
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