A Visit from the Goon Squad
Thirteen linked chapters, each in a different style (including one written entirely in PowerPoint slides), following a web of characters connected to the music industry across several decades. Egan published it in 2010 and won the Pulitzer. The goon squad of the title is time. The formal restlessness is the point; each chapter proves the novel can do something it was not supposed to be able to do.
Chapter four drops a new setting and a new crowd with no transition and “bombards the reader with a million new characters at once,” which is where readers say they nearly quit for good. The PowerPoint chapter is the same coin flipped: form for its own sake to anyone who reads it as a stunt. The men, the record executive above all, come off “downright repulsive, especially in the way they treat women.” Across thirteen chapters of addiction and midlife failure, readers describe “sitting in on a therapy session rather than reading a novel,” and the jumping timeline makes it hard to hold who is who.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
