Review of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan's latest novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is not your typical novel. And that was fine with me. In many ways, the novel reminded me of movies like Babel and Crash. Various people become interconnected and their lives collide, creating a complicated tapestry.

The book follows the lives of two main characters-- Bennie, a musician turned music executive, and his former assistant Sasha. We get glimpses of their lives as children, as teenagers, and as full-fledged adults. We often get these glimpses into their lives from the viewpoints of others who come into contact with them. We read about Alex, who dated Sasha, and later ends up connected to Bennie. We read about Ted, Sasha's uncle, who hunts her down in Italy. We read about Stephanie, Bennie's wife (for awhile) and a PR executive. These stories cover the past, present, and the future. The stories happen in California, New York, Italy, an unnamed foreign country. One chapter of the novel is done in Powerpoint by Sasha's 12-year-old daughter.

What Egan does well is capture the sadness and sometimes the desperation of people's lives. Identity, a theme in her writing, shows up again here. Who we are, she seems to say, is an amalgam of what people think we are.

Egan is one of my favorite contemporary writers. I highly recommend A Visit from the Goon Squad. For another excellent book by Egan, check out Look at Me, which is also about image and identity.

Just One Pink gives A Visit from the Goon Squad a 9.

Review of Alone With You by Marisa Silver

Alone With You, the latest book of short stories by Marisa Silver, was a quick read. The book is made up of 10 stories. Isolation, illness and parental issues, sometimes all at once, pervade Alone With You. Overall, I thought the stories were uneven. Some of them were sparkling, and others fell flat. I did find that the further I got in to the book, the more I liked it.

"Temporary," the first story, is about a small-town girl who goes to Los Angeles and moves in with a dramatic young woman. This story really didn't work for me-- it didn't seem to go anywhere. I didn't like "Three Girls," either. It's the story of three sisters with problematic parents and an unexpected knock at the door on a cold night.

But there were stories I did like. In the title story, a woman goes to the Sahara to ride camels with her husband, her son, and the son's girlfriend while on a quest to figure out who and where she should be. In "Night Train to Frankfurt," a 30-something woman with career and relationship problems travels to Germany with her cancer-stricken mother to visit a clinic. In "In the New World," a Polish immigrant to California grapples with an Americanized teenage son.

As for the writing style, sometimes I was in awe, and other times, I thought the language didn't work at all.

Just One Pink gives Alone With You a 7.5.