A Visit From The Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

I don't think I've ever been completely dissapointed by Pulitzer Winner (UPDATE: this is no longer entirely true. I am disappointed that {Angle of Repose} won a Pulitzer due to it's plagiarism). They may have their flaws but they usually have me media late into the night. (After consulting a list of past award winners, I'm realizing I did not enjoy The Road, for reasons I've since forgotten.) A Visit From The Goon Squad had a pedestrian start, recounting fairly boring chapters in folks lives. It did the all-too-common "far flung characters careening towards an encounter" trope, but the characters ended up crossing paths in ways so tenuous that it made the whole quilt of stories ingenious. There was a Barthelme-esque quality of postmodernist escalation, which I'm a sucker for.