It might have been better if I had re-read "A Visit from the Goon Squad" before I tackled Jennifer Egan's "The Candy House". There are characters who appear in both novels. I did read "Goon Squad" twice, once in 2011 and then a year later for book club. There are also similarities in their construction. The earlier book goes backwards and forwards in time, told in the first, third and even second person, one as a magazine article and one as a diary in Power Point. The latest book adopts some of these and creates new ones. Some work better than others.
The interconnecting stories start with Bix Bouton. He has a problem in that his highly successful tech business Mandala is almost wholly complete, has made him rich and famous, and at forty, where does he go from here. It's at a gathering of a few like minded intellectuals where he hears of a brand new experiment that might be the answer to his developer's prayers. (For those who are local, he lives in a three storey town house on New York's 7th Avenue and visits his old apartment on East 7th Street).
Next is Alfred Hollander, living with his weird brother Miles and their mother on West 28th Street. Another chapter is dedicated to Miles who has an embarrassing condition. We hear about it's history and repercussions. "A white male who'd managed to blow through countless opportunities and and fail catastrophically". There is then a link from Miles to Drew (both first person narratives) that actually made me gasp. Some alternating short chapters where their already fraught relationship is destroyed by a selfish stunt in a hot air balloon.
Is it Lincoln who is then talking about "M". This is all a bit too clever for me. He is obsessed with numbers: "the eluder-counters will seem to be benign neutral entities". Much, much better is the next story about two daughters, Lana and Melora (the narrator) living with their mother. Their absent father is a famous record producer and they only get to know him when their mother disappears to South America and they move into his mansion.
Then the son of Lou Kline describes a trip with his father. Followed by a chapter about Roxy Kline. Heroin is her great love, "her life's work". Another too clever part involves Chris Salazer (see "Goon Squad" ??) And then comes the strangest chapter of all ("Lulu the Spy, 2032") written in instructive text. Thirty plus pages of instructions turns out to be a story of sorts. I need to read it again. Then the Salazars are here again when their neighbour's daughter Hannah narrates a story with a superb ending ending at a party next door.
The next chapter called "See Below" is the strangest of all. Fifty pages of emails, some very short, some boringly long. Lots of different characters writing. Didn't work for me. After a piece about Gregory (we met his father earlier) the final chapter is about Ames Hollander. It's 1991 and here he is in "a cloudy dusk in late spring in an Upstate New York suburb. An eleven year old boy ..... he's the one at bat, bases loaded, his parents and two brothers in the stands, it's agony watching him hit (or try to hit, he never hits) (they need them all to score to win) and ....... We follow Ames' story at a fast pace and the last few pages are the best in the book.
(The author did include in this last part "his mother knitting the brown V-neck sweater he will never wear". (My mother knitted me a maroon jumper when I was selected as the goalkeeper (out of sixty boys!) for my junior school's football team. Until they realised I was a mistake).
These are the two posts from 2011 and 2012 about A Visit from the Goon Squad.
It is the best book I have read for a long time. I wasn't put off by the title. A Visit from the Goon Squad must be a reference to time (as in "time is a gooner") and it is time that plays a big part in the book. Each chapter tells a story from the point of view of a different character. They all connect in some way, and at times it is at first hard to know how. But the author does not keep you guessing for long, and the smallest clue will give you all the information you need. The main thread of the book is the music industry (which was what interested me in the first place), so we have Bennie, a producer, Sasha his assistant, someone in PR, a journalist and other family or friends. And each chapter can take place at a different time, even in the future. It sounds like a highly complex novel but somehow it works really well. The writing is excellent and no wonder it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize For Fiction. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
It is quite a complex book so I it was with some trepidation that I waited last night for the verdict from book club. It was a 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.
Early nineteen fifties Bristol and Evelyn is in her first year at University. But this novella of just over a hundred pages has nothing to do with her studies. Not just one party but two. The first in a pub where Evelyn finds her slightly older sister Moira with two older men. Already there is a sense of trepidation that haunts the whole book. For on the one hand, Evelyn finds them distasteful, especially the uncouth Sinden, but on the other she has that feeling of wanting some experience. When the men want to take them for a drive, it was a feeling of relief as the girls find an original way to disappear.
The second part is like an interlude visiting an old lady in a nursing home, before Paul, the richer of those two earlier men invites them to the old mansion he has inherited from a distant relative. A second party with other friends of Paul including Sinden. What happens that night is certainly original. But what makes this book so good, apart from the high class story telling, is the relationship between the sisters. Sometimes fractious (Moira quite bossy, Evelyn the bright student) but always close. At the end their happiness together is what counts.
The books I have read by Louise Doughty veer between thrillers like Apple Tree Yard (not a fan) and dramas such as the brilliant Whatever You Love, Stone Cradle and Black Water. A Bird in Winter is a cross between the two. The central character is Heather, known to nearly everyone as Bird. We hear about her early family life but soon we know she has a job with "the service". So something in intelligence. But from the very start she is trying to escape, a kind of paranoia sets in as she travels north from her office in Birmingham, from what we have to wait to find out. The early pace is relentless.
Bird has a series of adventures before arriving in Mallaig for the ferry to Skye. It was pouring with rain, so different to the sunshine when we made that same crossing. We then have to wait to see what happens next as the story backtracks to her time in the Army and a friendship with Flavia. A transfer to MI6, she is actually running agents in the field. A rush through the years finds her in her fifties in a new branch of intelligence and enjoying her new role in Birmingham. Until ....... she's on the run and that can be difficult. Bird is not a nice person. Interesting but not nice. With a habit of biting off more than she can chew, and that goes for men. The writing is quite polished as I have come to expect from this author and she does keep up that decent pace.
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