The Nature of Things

Jennifer Egan has given us something completely different this time. After A Visit from the Goon Squad , her multi-award winning book of 2011, we who loved that book might have expected some sort of futuristic science fiction opus as her next work. Instead, she has chosen to go back in time. She has written a historical fiction work, one set during the World War II period. Such a traditional novel may seem a great departure from Goon Squad and it is. But it still features the same inventive attention to language and a setting that is so fully imagined and described that the reader feels as though she's walking along that beach, working in that wartime shipyard, diving alongside the ships being built in that shipyard. The main protagonist here is Anna Kerrigan whom we meet as an eleven-year-old girl in 1934. She is with her father, Eddie, as he meets with a gentleman gangster named Dexter Styles on Manhattan Beach. Eddie is seeking a way to make more money to support his wife and t...

Is  A Visit from the Goon Squad  really a novel or is it a collection of linked stories? It is extremely hard to classify or to summarize this convoluted exercise in story-telling. In the end though, I think the category hardly matters. Whatever you call it, it's a great read. These are stories about the passage of time and how our lives never seem to work out the way we thought they would. "Goon," in Jennifer Egan's lexicon, means time. We all receive visits from the "Goon Squad" every day, every year, even if we are oblivious to those visits. One of the many quirky things about this book is its portrayal of time. The action takes place over a period of forty years or so, but the narrative jumps forward and backward with ease and without warning. When you start reading a chapter, it isn't always clear at first just what time period you are in, but just keep reading. Eventually you'll get it. A second quirkiness is the long list of protagonists who g...