Wow, A Visit from the Goon Squad totally rules.
Not sure how it slipped past my radar when it came out, since I’m fairly certain I was still regularly reading good books back then, back before all my reading-for-pleasure time was usurped by new work responsibilities and my quiet breakfasts with a novel devolved into me hunching over a shitty bowl of cereal, pissed off and stressed, parsing through emails and Microsoft Teams messages to see how bad my day was going to be, eventually forgetting that words hadn’t always been just things to make you mad.
Anyway, those days have come to a much-needed end (like that run-on sentence above) and I’m able to read books again. Hell yeah. So, thank you to my friend Haley for recommending this brilliant one and for now being two out of two on her book recommendations (The Bee Sting was also awesome).
If you read the description on the back of the book cover or on Amazon or whatever, you won’t really get a good sense of what A Visit from the Goon Squad is really about or what makes it so special, and you won’t get it from my crummy little write up here either. Goon Squad is just not the kind of story that can be summarized in a handful of paragraphs, and it’s not even accurate to call it a story (or even stories, since I guess technically it is a collection of vignettes). It feels more proper to call it an “experience”, so I’ll do so, with apologies for being over-indulgent.
The chapters are told in different points of view (first person, third person, and even a PowerPoint presentation) from the perspective of numerous main, and sometimes secondary, characters across multiple time periods, weaving all these seemingly independent narratives together loosely under a common storyline, and more importantly, a common theme.
The theme, at least my interpretation of it, is that despite our best intentions, time passes. Always. Cold and relentless. And it will catch you off guard, and it will suck when it does, and then the next thing you know, you’re a whole different person in a whole different life than you would have ever imagined. Time is an asshole. Or a goon, you might say.
But it’s not necessarily a cold cruel passing of time as we often come to think of it. It’s merely indifferent, moving forward with or without us, offering no apologies and giving no shits about which of us become the collateral damage. Time can and will ravage every single one of us. But along the way, it also provides us opportunities to pull ourselves out of the maelstrom, broken but not yet destroyed, and allows us to rebuild, reconnect, and if we’re willing, rejoice.
That’s my take, anyway.
A Visit from the Good Squad explores this theme of time by narrowing in on a small slice of a character’s life in each vignette, showcasing that character’s personal trials in that very specific point in existence – the struggles, successes, the living situation, the supporting characters who all play a role in some way, good or bad. Then the chapter ends, and a new one starts, “zooming in” on one of the other folks, on a slice of that person’s life, maybe in the same time period, maybe in another. It continues to follow this loose pattern as the book moves along, forward and backward, “double-clicking” (to steal a term that was aggressively overused in corporate speak right before I left that world behind) on one life and then the next, each story related to the others in some way, ultimately forming a beautiful, interconnected tapestry of human existence.
I’ll refrain from any more awkward attempts to describe the story-telling structure because it really is more satisfying to go into this cold and just experience it for yourself. Also, it’s difficult to adequately describe and I’m getting frustrated trying to do so.
Just about every character in this book gets the full treatment from the author, portrayed in the multi-dimensional, nuanced way that we see others in our own realities – the negative qualities that make them a pain in our ass and the positives that make them worth keeping around anyway. We see how seemingly trivial events can lead people down such different paths, making them almost unrecognizable over the years, yet not so unrecognizable that we can’t at least recapture a small tidbit of the magic that brought us together in the first place.
The description on the back of the book also makes it sound like this is a story all about the music industry, jam-packed with references to obscure old punk rock bands from past decades. It’s really not. Music certainly plays a large role, and the music industry is what ties a lot of the characters’ lives and stories together, but I felt like the music was more of a narrative device to offer up far more interesting and eccentric characters than if they worked in, say, corporate IT. Music plays an important part of the book and I kind of see it as a unifying character through all the different storylines, but this book was far more of a study on human beings themselves rather than on the music they make.
Just thought I’d post that little disclaimer in case you were expecting a deep dive into the history of 70s/80s punk rock or something (Please Kill Me is a good book for that, though, by the way).
As I mentioned above, there’s even a chapter told through a Power Point presentation. Before reading it, I might have considered this to be just a clever idea, possibly even gimmicky, but it turned out to be one of the most subtle, beautiful things that I’ve read in a long time. It made me feel a lot like I did after finishing Jonathan Safran Foyer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, another amazing novel that incorporated different mediums into the story to successfully deepen the emotional impact. I actually had to put Goon Squad down for a minute to reflect on this chapter, which normally I would never do alone since there’s no one around to observe how pensive and thoughtful I am.
When I finished the book, I hopped online to get some history and a bit of extra context on it, and I was surprised to learn that it was released back in 2010, a whole dang 15 years ago. I would have guessed that it came out within the last five years, max. The chapters hop around in so many different time periods that it really doesn’t matter when it was written, but damn, it felt so relevant to today. And, going along with the spirit of the book, I got to thinking about my own timeline, and how wildly different my life now in 2025 is from my strange angry eclectic bachelor days in 2010 when the book hits the stores. Hell, my life is wildly different now in November 2025 than it was in my stressed out corporate life back in March of this year! Time flies, man.
As my wife Sabrina often likes to ask, “Did you ever imagine when you were younger that this is how you’d be living life as an older person?” Usually when me, her and the dog are doing something quiet and peaceful together as a power trio like walking along some trail in the North Georgia woods. Shit, it’s not even remotely close to what I would have expected. It turned out to be so much better, despite my best intentions.
I think that kind of fits with the theme of the book. That’s my take, anyway.
If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you move it to the top of your list. Then come back and share your thoughts!
“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”
– (Maybe) Groucho Marx
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