I’m part of the minority that prefers short stories over novels. If someone were to tell me this is a character flaw, I wouldn’t argue with them. There is a fair chance that the academy, through its stranglehold over contemporary American literature, has brainwashed me. After all, I was one of the many MFA students enlisted by the truckload into graduate writers' workshops, the sites where more short fiction is produced than any country’s literary tradition can manage. There, I was instilled with an obsession over concision, an obsession that, if left unchecked, irons out the idiosyncratic breadth that has uplifted novels onto the highest literary pedestal.

If you’d asked me between 2019 and 2024 what my favorite book of fiction was, I’d pause for a few beats too long before replying. A Visit from the Goon Squad, I’d answer, feeling simultaneously trite for picking such a recent book and unoriginal, like a film buff proffering Citizen Kane or The Godfather as their all-time picks. From there, I would qualify: I don't have much in the way of a favorite anything, that I am trying to read widely, that I’d only read Goon Squad once in a fiction workshop that assigned it and seven other collections, each of which I'd read with an embarrassing lack of focus and care. If someone had asked for my reasoning, I'd have been unable to point to a character, an event, or a particular flourish of prose that captivated me over any other collection or novel. All I had was a vague sense that Goon Squad, a sequence of thirteen stories jet-setting between eras, perspectives, and styles, was an unassailable tome, indescribable, meant to be experienced; a work of genius that I could only hope to one day imitate.

The collection functions like so: the first story, “Found Objects,” features Sasha Grady (later, Sasha Blake) around 2008, who is 35 and fails to cope with her lifelong kleptomania. As a small but important aside, she mentions to her date, Alex, a freshly minted New Yorker, that she used to work for a certain Bennie Salazar as his assistant, a famous music producer who is the protagonist of the second story, “The Gold Cure,” which takes place a few days/weeks/months before the first story. The following eleven chapters carry on with this pattern: previously mentioned characters become protagonists across a fifty-year timescale, the earliest story dating back to 1973 in “Safari” and concluding with “Pure Language,” which follows a matured, New York veteran Alex in what is likely 2024.

Recently, I’ve reread A Visit from the Goon Squad and assigned it to the college kids in my first-ever literature class this past spring semester. From this otherwise positive and instructive experience, I now fear that the only books I can truly know anything about are the ones I assign students to read, putting my thoughts, once vague and misty, under pressure such that they crystalize into something tangible.

I mean, I knew on a first read that the book was about time, that much I garnered. The book’s epigraph is from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, after all, but the theme is not otherwise subtle. An early important character Lou Kline, for example, who famously slept with younger women his whole, filthy rich adult life, who was also Bennie Salazar’s mentor, dies because, in Bennie’s words, “nostalgia was the end.” But it becomes more explicit than this at the mid-point of the collection, “A to B,” when Bennie’s soon-to-be ex-wife is meeting with the once famous musician, Bosco, who says to her, “You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?” to a perplexed reaction.

Twenty-plus years later near the collection’s conclusion Bennie himself says to his old friend Scotty, who is nervous before performing music to a massive crowd for the first time in forty-something years, "Times a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?"

As the collection progresses these examples pile up: Sasha’s kleptomania, the gazes of dead loved ones in photographs, the dystopian future of massive, empty New York City skyscrapers—all of it maladaptive consequences to the metaphorical goon squad. I still believe that A Visit from the Goon Squad is an amazing book that embraces the strengths of interconnected stories, yet this structure also unveils its inescapable weaknesses, and my impression of its unassailability was due to a lack of imagination.

To give past me some credit, even before I reread the collection my superlative ranking of Goon Squad was not exactly random. There is a chance that the querier asking about my favorite book has at least heard of Goon Squad or its author, Jennifer Egan. Neither is famous per se, but it and she have some recognition outside of literary circles.

In 2011 Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize, in addition to winning the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has been ranked as one of the best recent books and novels in places like The Guardian, Literary Hub, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and most recently, The Atlantic’s list of Great American novels. It also got a sequel in 2022 that I’m hesitant to read, The Candy House. The class I taught this past spring was called Fiction and Nonfiction, a general education course and entry point for English majors, and several syllabi I studied beforehand, taught by true blue literary professors, had included A Visit from the Goon Squad in their curriculum. For better or for worse, time has been kind to this collection, and it will likely stick around in the American literary canon for years to come.

Thus far, I’ve referred to the book as a collection, however right there on its paperback cover, just below its all-lower-case title, in faded silvery print is the magic pair of words: “a novel.” Through these magic words, this book had a chance of actually selling copies, allowed it access to The Atlantic’s list, and camouflaged it among the Pulitzer's mainly novelistic recipients. If we want to be technical, Goon Squad is a short story cycle (also called a ‘novel-in-stories’ or a ‘composite novel’) where each story has a beginning, middle, and end, can be read as a self-contained work, and is often published on its own in literary journals (like, in Egan's case, The New Yorker).

This means, that stories like "Safari" can be enjoyed on their own. The characters, such as lusting Lou Kline, his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend and future wife, Mindy, his adolescent kids, Charlie and Rolph, the tour guide, and the travel agent on Safari in Kenya, with all the requisite raging jealousies, omniscient tellings of the future, the anthropological analysis of character dynamics, the implication that the story is told from the perspective of elderly female bird watchers who spend their time doing anything but bird watching, and the kids dancing under a late night open-air disco in the present action, which, through emotional but unsentimental prose, transforms into ambivalent memories from a sister, Charlie remembering a lost brother, Rolph.

It also means, that "Safari" can serve as a coda for the rest of the collection, to resonate and echo across time, characters, and settings in a way that individual stories and novels cannot. Short story cycles are not common, but of those published, many are beloved: Winesburg, Ohio, Dubliners, Olive Kitteridge (also a Pulitzer winner), The Things They Carried, and The Joy Luck Club.

Goon Squad’s style allows another story, featuring a different allocation of characters, follows Rob, a 90s seemingly bisexual NYU student who feels, as the title of the story implies, “Out of Body,” as if he’s watching himself, and therefore takes on the second-person perspective until the final sentence of the collection, where he drowns in a river, desperately and ironically trying to live. Yet, despite “Safari” and “Out of Body” being different in nearly every way, there are strange connections. Lou's kids dancing at an open-air disco, the prose developing the degree to which his daughter Charlie uses the memory as an anchor to stay connected to her long-dead brother in comparison to Rob, Drew, and Bix watching the sunrise after a drug-fueled night on the town, looking toward the future, promising to remember that moment forever, suggesting that "everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us" in a mix of spiritual and techno-optimism.

Despite formatting differences, Egan allows these disparate styles to seamlessly co-exist; Second-person “Out of Body” dovetails into “Good-bye, My Love” in some twisted but strangely logical reverse causality, which sets up "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," which, in turn, with its speculative future timeline, leads to my least favorite story, but one I still respect for knotting various threads together in a satisfying way, "Pure Language."

Other standouts include, “Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!” in which Jules Jones, brother-in-law to Bennie, writes a DFW-esque and footnote-laden editorial about his interview with starlet Kitty Jackson from his cell at the Rikers Island Correctional Facility, contrasting her banal, by-the-numbers success story with his manic, self-righteous anger that led him to attempt to sexually assault her in Central Park. The style is manicured, maximalist, and though not the point there is an implied (but insufficient) contrition in its exactitude. But even in such an overt style, there are subtleties, such as when Jules observes that the area above her knee was "flecked with hairs of finest gold," a likely allusion to "The Gold Cure" in which Bennie puts flecks of gold into his coffee as an aphrodisiac.  

Last is, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” where Sasha’s future daughter, Alison, uses Microsoft PowerPoint to tell what is actually an impressive, complicated story, through greyscale coloring and simple but readable infographics, showing the extent to the family’s disconnects, but also reuniting them through the effortless power of omission. It’s marvelous.

However, not every story is a banger. Kicking off with "Found Objects" makes sense structurally, but I can see readers being put off. It's good but as a stand-alone story, it is not Egan's finest work. It plants seeds that bloom later in the collection, but on a first read, Sasha's uneventful dinner, one-night stand, name-dropping Bennie and Rob, and the bathtub in the kitchen ("This feels like old New York," Alex says before sleeping with Sasha and later taking a bathing solo in it) feel a bit squat, the emotion and complication only appearing after finishing the book and reflecting on it in hindsight. Perhaps this was Egan’s intention.

Yet stealing the show is Sasha's kleptomania. The various pilfered objects she stores in her home, her internal justification and vigilantism, and the conflict around which she accidentally but not really steals a slip of paper from Alex's wallet (wallet, a word that appears 27 times in this first story) are what makes this story stand out. It's a great bit of complicated character psychology that has implications for future stories. However, it is as if Egan or an editor, perhaps justifiably, was afraid that Sasha would not be seen as a sympathetic character (and I love unsympathetic characters, but, again, a character flaw perhaps?) and her future conversation with her therapist, Coz, overlays moments of decision and uncertainty at every description of her stealing. The therapy scenes feel superfluous and generic and don't suit Egan's style, or the deeply complicated moral rigor the rest of the collection so excellently portrays.

Much later, in “Good-bye, My Love," Ted Hollander, Sasha's uncle, is hired to find her in Naples when she is 21. Ted is a character who is interesting but comes in so late in the sequence that he feels underused and almost cynically created. While so many men in the collection exude selfish male sexuality, with music producer and Bennie’s mentor, Lou Kline, getting a blow job from a 16-year-old at a punk concert and Bennie hitting on Sasha in “The Gold Cure” and Jules Jones attempting to sexually assault Kitty Jackson (aspects that are well portrayed), Ted Hollander’s inner-conflict, an attraction to his wife that he “folded” until it was so small it was non-existent in favor of appreciating classical art, feels like it was included as a shrewd counterbalance where one was not needed. The story feels like it ends abruptly, with a flash-forward to Sasha’s future happiness and his future divorce, a contrast that is fascinating but is left behind in Italy.

Another character, La Doll (or, Dolly) in “Selling the General,” feels similarly underappreciated. A publicist who was on the New York outs after holding a luxurious celebrity ball in which hot oil melted through gaudy custom-made chandeliers and burned onto the rich and famous in a move that I suppose is to be absurdly hilarious but just comes across a bizarre and silly. This event serves to emphasize the complicated and toxic celebrity culture and La Doll’s desperation for work underlies her desire to work for the general to maintain her expensive lifestyle, in part for her already image-obsessed daughter. So, it is not bad but feels out-of-place in what is otherwise a realist collection.

Further, when La Doll travels to a non-descript third-world country to improve the image of its dictator, a genocidal and unemotive general, with aforementioned and now former starlet Kitty Jackson because no one else will hire her, the climax is similarly absurd with Kitty mouthing off to the dictator, angering him, getting herself arrested, all while La Doll takes photos from a hidden camera in her purse, which brings down the general’s reputation such that this unnamed country can reform. I believe this climax is supposed to be surprising and cathartic when Jackson, chewed up and spit out by the movie industry, who was so meek that she served on the defense of her attempted rapist, can bring down a mass murderer. Yet, here too, it feels like half the story is missing.

On top of the fact that some stories don't live up to their full potential, other aspects of some stories feel almost utilitarian. “A to B” is about Stephanie and Bennie moving into a lily-white suburb and Stephanie trying to adapt to the SUV and country club culture of bleach-blonde wives. However, the story also serves a purpose in the book structurally. It is the first story of the second (of two) sections. Section one was "A," and this story kicks off “B.” In the previous chapter, Scotty asked Bennie cryptically "What happened A to B?" The translation is, how did we get here? The story does not spend much time answering this question and instead spends a good deal of time introducing new characters.

This is where Jules first appears post-release from Rikers, then Bosco, who was mentioned multiple times as the reason for Bennie’s success (and whose newest album is called, drum-roll please, A to B), and there is an abbreviated scene introducing La Doll before her fall from grace that seems like an afterthought. All this before the brunt of Stephanie’s actual conflict concludes, revealing the reason for Stephanie and Bennie’s already-revealed divorce. It is jampacked, and I can only believe that this is a consequence of structure; a collection of stories is not meant to be so intertwined, and to make it work, certain efforts had to be made at the mercy of my beloved concision.  

At the same time, nearly every story ends well and ambivalently, even the ones I’ve critiqued. For example, “Selling the General” ends like so:

“Now and then Dolly would get a shipment of star fruit, and she always made sure to put a few aside to eat with Lulu [her daughter]. She would bring them back to the small house they shared at the end of a quiet street. After supper, the radio on, windows open to the yawning night, she and Lulu would feast on the sweet, strange flesh.”

There is such mystery here—as if the whole story and journey were not the point and that some aspects of La Doll and Lulu's flaws were worsened and not bettered. Even the stories with happy endings imply an unease that is difficult to articulate.

They also imply connections that are felt immensely. Such as how in "Found Objects" we are introduced to Rob many pages before we see him drown, and in "Ask Me If I Care," which features teenage Rhea (who has a crush on one Bennie Salazar) seeing a picture of Rolph, Lou Kline's son, who we later learn commits suicide. This use of image and theme—two suicidal men in their twenties, dying years apart, disconnected from one another—serves as an echo in an unobservable, organic tether that bridges these stories together in a way that chapters in a mere novel could not so easily achieve.

And I don’t think this is a coincidence either, as theme and format are deeply intertwined in this book. I think Lincoln Blake, Sasha and Drew's autistic son, sums it up best. In the penultimate, PowerPoint story, "Famous Rock and Roll Pauses," he describes the reason for his titular obsession:

“The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”

 This sums up the collection in a way I could never express; these characters live in the past, are stuck in the present, and are paralyzed by the future. They experience setbacks and reversals. But these are also just pauses in their lifespans, and there is space for them to collect themselves and keep going, knowing that they will one day perish, and even the characters whose pauses are most striking still have their moments of joy before the end.

Yet even in Goon Squad’s brilliance, there is an aching realization: more could have been done to make these connections. The collection is like a pointillist painting; if you stand too close, you don’t realize the gaps between dots are filled automatically by your brain. And this isn't the workshop maxim in which every contributor asks the writer for more, more, more! talking, but an acknowledgment that gaps remain. What did Bennie precisely learn from Lou, and how are we to understand him? Part of the readers’ job is to analyze and form their own conclusions, but there is precious little about their connection to go off of. For example: Did Bennie escape Lou's fate of nostalgia, or did he simply repeat the cycle anew? Not only is there no answer, but there is no hint of an answer. This single example illustrates the general point; these stories are stronger together, but this strict adherence to narrative continuity also serves to weaken them. As stories, certain connections are left untold, and as a novel, certain structural contrivances diminish their abilities to stand alone.

What makes A Visit from the Goon Squad brilliant is not that it overcomes either of its weaknesses, but that it does such amazing work within its limitations. It does not excel past novels or collections; it simply unveils itself a tricky third thing that I still cannot fully communicate. I will never be able to imitate A Visit from the Goon Squad because more than any other books I’ve read, there is no point to. It’s been done, the show is over. I doubt its sequel is capable of measuring up, and I doubt the A24 show is either. I can’t promise that this book is for everyone or that everyone will think it deserves its hype. But there will be some things you love and some things you don’t, and those competing feelings will bubble over, intermingle, and then finally simmer into a bloggable ambivalence.