Courtesy: Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan will sign her book “A Visit from the Goon Squad” at 5 p.m. tonight at the Square Books Cafe. After the event, Egan will speak on campus in the Bondurant Auditorium at 7 p.m.
“The school had an interest in this event,” Egan said on her decision to visit Oxford. “And I absolutely love college towns. I love speaking with students. Students are the best readers. They’re the most open readers. We’re both fellow seekers of wisdom.”
This book isn’t a recent publication, but it is still an influential one. “A Visit from the Goon Squad” came out in 2010 in hardcover and in paperback in 2011.
It is a national bestseller winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the LA Times Book Prize.
Despite this recognition, or perhaps because of it, Egan is excited.
“I’m also excited about Square Books,” Egan said. “There aren’t a whole lot of long-lasting independent bookstores, and Square Books is known for being good to writers.”
But Jennifer Egan’s story is not a conventional one. She compares it to a concept album, citing Eminem’s “Recovery,” The Who’s “Quadrophenia” and David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust” as an inspiration for the kind of story she wanted to tell.
“It might sound strange to compare a novel to a concept album, but I remember back when they were more of a literary art,” she said. “We tend to buy tracks instead of albums these days. It’s like buying chapters out of a story.
“I do it too. But when I was growing up, there was nothing like the excitement of going through concept albums and unwrapping the plastic. You could find pages with lyrics and art inside. Those are memories from my teen years that I have always carried with me.”
It is the art of many contrasting styles and unwrapping one story to find the gift of another inside that Egan brings with her novel.
“I didn’t know if it would work as a whole, at first,” Egan said. “I didn’t refer to it as a novel at first, I didn’t want to presume that people would read it that way.”
“A Visit from the Goon Squad” is not a stream-lined lateral novel. It sweeps through many different lives, throughout years of progress, and gives the reader perspectives into many different points in these peoples’ lives. Egan refers to two main characters that the readers visit the most: Sasha and Benny. She admits that Benny might be her favorite; she connected with him through the way she wrote him.
“I like writing about things that are crazy, but true,” Egan said. “Exaggerations that read as crazy but still make sense are my favorite tools. I write in that place all the time, and Benny gets me there.”
She refers to two stories within the novel that she enjoyed writing the most: “Selling the General” and “40 Minute Lunch.”
The former is about a publicist down on her luck. She is trying to fix the reputation of a genocidal general and does so by fabricating a relationship between the general and a celebrity. “40 Minute Lunch” tells the story of a reporter who goes a little crazy while trying to interview a celebrity. Both stories achieve this sense of exaggerated, crazy truth that Egan enjoys.
Egan gives some advice for young writers too,“Remember to read what you want to write and read it a lot,” she said. “Writers have the gift of being able to look at the writing of others sentence-by-sentence and figure out what makes it good. You have to make a habit of writing regularly. You don’t want to wait for the angels to start singing. That struggle never ends, but it’s great if you can make writing a habit.”
Egan is excited to come to Oxford.
“I’m headed to Pennsylvania and Connecticut later this year, but it doesn’t feel like an adventure like Oxford does,” Egan said. “I’ve never been to Mississippi and I’m so excited to visit. My son’s a huge Ole Miss football fan, so I’m especially excited about that.
“It’s a famous place, a famously beautiful town.”
