So I finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad tonight, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Literature winner. I am still processing it, and I can’t help but read it against two other much feted 2011 books, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffery Eugenides The Marriage Plot. Like the latter two, Egan’s book charts the last thirty odd years of American life. Where Franzen uses the environmental movement and Eugenides employs university life, Egan couches here narrative in the music industry, specifically punk rock. It is billed as a story about two people, Sasha and Bennie, but really, it is about the ‘Goon’- Father Time. The book, to me, is about the passage of time and how generations understand that passage. Each chapter could be a short story in it’s own, and a good one. This is both a strength and a weakness of Egan’s novel. At it’s best, the picaresque narrative that shifts rapidly between time, place, and perspective facilitates a cyclical view of the same basic event: Bennie/Sasha growing up. And yet the very independence of each unit militates against their wholistic function. If Egan’s basic conceit is that everything is connected, then the separability of each chapter suggests an autonomy opposed to her basic premise. Egan’s debt to other novelists, specifically DFW- on whose journalism the Jules Jones chapter may be predicated- is apparent, but her own status as a short story writer par excellance prevents her from tying the book up in the way I want a novel to tie-up. I don’t expect every novel to resolve every issue it raises, but I do hope they bring the characters to some conclusion. I felt like Goon Squad just ended, and perhaps a little tritely with Alex and Bennie ‘growing up.’ Let’s face it, a lot of sh*t goes down to the characters, the type of sh*t one does not just grow out of by walking past the apartment of an old flame. The cyclical narrative structure does begin to close, to link lives, but it halts too abruptly for me and, I think, a bit unrealistically. That said, it was a good book, I was glad I read it, and I may- after further consideration- revise my view on it. As it’s merits with regard to the Pulitzer, who knows. Did I think it was better than Freedom or The Marriage Plot? I don’t know. It had a bit of Eugenides fun mixed with Franzen’s technical force and was probably a more significant novel than either, what ever that means (and neither were even finalists FYI), but really, only time tells on the prizes. Like the Oscars, the list of not-Pulitzer prize winners is pretty impressive in hindsight.