“Each [chapter] has its own language, its own tropes and terms, which Egan somehow manages to use and skewer at the same time, while maintaining the mystery that makes each person unique and worth knowing.”
National Post (Canada), 1/10/12
“When finally I read the first pages, I was transfixed. For the next 36 hours I found all other activities bothersome because they took me away from this marvellous book.”
The Short Review, 8/1/11
“For Egan, even tossed-off moonlight energizes and illuminates.”
Paste Magazine 5/2/11
“Again, Egan has taken a leap of faith, trusting her audience will follow her, past the old nonlinear stand-bys such as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, into even newer territory.”
London Evening Standard, 6/9/11
“A Visit From the Goon Squad is now making its own way inexorably, because almost everybody who reads it is going to recommend it to everybody they know.”
The Guardian, 4/2/11
“This is an incredibly affecting novel, sad, funny and wise, which should make Jennifer Egan’s name in the UK.”
The Telegraph, 3/26/11
“Jennifer Egan’s new novel, her fourth, is playful in a serious way, complex in a straightforward way, more culturally penetrating than a shelf of Don DeLillos and contains some of the fizziest prose of the year.”
London Review of Books, by Pankaj Mishra, 3/31/11
“Egan commemorates not only the fading of a cultural glory but also of the economic and political supremacy that underpinned it. The sense of an ending has always appeared to spur Egan’s inventiveness.”
The Irish Independent, 3/26/11
“A Visit from the Goon Squad is a tremendous novel: thoughtful, subtle, funny, wacky, energetic, profoundly authentic.”
The Independent (UK), 3/13/11
“The sparky disconnect between generations is sometimes rewired with brief but joyful connections.”
The Guardian (UK), 3/13/11
“This is a difficult book to summarise, but a delight to read, gradually distilling a medley out of its polyphonic, sometimes deliberately cacophonous voices.”
Slate.com, 12/8/11
“Goon Squad is intricately crafted, wildly imaginative, and written with verve and grace…Give it to the superannuated goth in your life.”
The New Republic, 12/1/11
“It ends in the same place as it starts, except that everything has changed, including you, the reader.”
The New York Review of Books, 11/11/11
Reviewed by Cathleen Schine
“Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a moving humanistic saga, an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche.”
Austin American Statesman, 10/13/11
“This is art at its best — as a bulwark against the goon, as it embodies everything at once.”
The Record: Music News from NPR, 8/17/11
The Novelist’s Advantage: Great Books About Music
The National (Abu Dhabi), 8/5/11
“Egan, too, has been swiftly, silently mounting an assault on the highest reaches of American fiction, beginning with early works like The Invisible Circus and Look at Me, and her remarkable 2006 novel The Keep. The Keep was a refreshing hybrid of postmodern playfulness and classical storytelling, and Goon Squad maintains its predecessor’s experimental daring while dramatically expanding its emotional reach.”
The National Post (Canada), 7/17/11
“Jennifer Egan’s stunning fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a collection of linked stories that don’t follow a conventional narrative structure but works beautifully because she takes chances that succeed.”
The Globe and Mail, 7/16/11
“In her brash beauty of a novel, Jennifer Egan understands the power of shame, simply because it makes one present in the moment as effectively as fear or desire.”
New York Times Book Review (cover review), 7/11/11
“Remarkable…Is there anything Egan can’t do?”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/27/11
“Ms. Egan’s concept is seductive, and her judicious marshalling of the right details of our contemporary life reveal a writer’s peripheral vision that sees the whole playing field.”
Bookotron, 6/28/11
“‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is first and foremost, fun and startlingly engaging to read.”
Kansas City Star, 6/27/11
“For all its sensory richness, social and psychological insights and brilliant layering of ideas and commentary, Egan’s time-bending tale is laced with suspense and punctuated by emotional ambushes of profound resonance.”