![]() ![]() ![]() That’s because to do so captures Egan’s essential challenge to herself: How wide a circumference can she achieve in “A Visit From the Goon Squad” while still maintaining any sort of coherence and momentum? How loosely can she braid the skein of connections and still have something that hangs together? ![]() What’s actually kind of fun for once, however, is attempting to summarize the action of a narrative that feels as freely flung as a bag of trash down a country gully. If plot were the crucial measure, there’d be no difference between a story about the fish that got away and “Moby-Dick.” Reading such summaries (or writing them) is usually as beguiling as listening to some addled fan of “Lost” explain what happened on that botched rune of a show.Īt least this is how I felt until I read Jennifer Egan’s remarkable new fiction, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Whether it is a novel or a collection of linked stories is a matter for the literary accountants to tote up in their ledgers of the inconsequential. They’re the flyover country between a reviewer’s landing strips of judgment, revealing almost nothing about the way a book actually works, almost nothing about why it succeeds or fails. If you’re like me, you tend to regard plot summaries as a necessary boredom at best. ![]()
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