Tring Book Club - A Visit from the Goon Squad and Snowdrops

When I recommended "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan to the last meeting of my Book Club, I did not imagine for a moment that it would be chosen as one of the next books for the club to read. It is quite a complex book so I it was with some trepidation that I waited last night for the verdict. It was hung jury, split down the middle. Some, like me, thought it to be a challenging, original but satisfying read. The others were mightily unimpressed or gave up early on. I just think that it is an amazing piece of very modern fiction and, as I said in a previous posting, one of the best books I have read for a long time. When I revisited it last week, I realised that not only does it switch between the first and third person, but we also get one chapter in the second person, one as a magazine article and one as a diary in PowerPoint. Although in one way a collection of short stories (each has it's own title), there is always a link with overlapping characters (there were so many of them), albeit at different times in their lives. And the final chapter whizzes off to the future. Fantastic.

"Snowdrops" by A.D. Miller is very different. Told in the first person as letter to his wife to be, Nicholas comes clean about his time as a lawyer in Moscow, and his involvement with not one but two pieces of corruption. The first is bearable. It's about his firm acting for their banking client in a new oil terminal in Siberia. The other is not. Nick becomes entangled with two girls ("cousins"), particularly the seductive Masha, who are persuading their ancient "aunt" Tatiana to move from her apartment in Moscow to a brand new one on the edge of the countryside. He should have known better. The second half of the book I found almost too painful to read, I actually wanted to rush through it to get it over. I guess from that aspect it was well written. It did reach the Man Booker shortlist. Miller had spent some considerable time in Russia as a journalist and it shows. His descriptions of the city are detailed but enjoyable. It was just when Nick's mother comes to visit that it becomes too much of an obvious device to show off his knowledge of St Petersburg. In the end I found the plot a little too fanciful. The banks relying on a single surveyor's report, and Nick not taking the many opportunities to untangle himself from Masha. But the promise of the week in Odessa was always too much.