Praised for its formal experimentation and the affecting sweep of its narrative, A Visit from the Goon Squad won the National Book Critics Circle Award and then the Pulitzer Prize. The PowerPoint is the weird interlude three quarters of the way through that is actually kind of groovy. Like all the characters in this novel, they’re both incredibly sympathetic in the album analogy, their stories are probably the singles. The book begins with a story about a kleptomaniac who looks like Claire Danes in My So-Called Life, and a story about the A&R executive she works for, who is, in the fleeting present of his chapter, recently divorced, randomly beset by “shame memories,” and trying to reinvigorate his lost sex drive by taking his coffee with gold flakes. These are divided into parts A and B, which may refer to the A-side and B-side of a record but also to an album in the text, A to B. The book is structured like an album, sort of, for people who were starting to really miss albums: thirteen chapters or closely linked stories skipping around in time from the 1970s until the then future of 2020. To this end, A Visit from the Goon Squad is full of gold things, including the long blond hair of several covetable girls and women. A Visit from the Goon Squad is about rock and roll! A Visit from the Goon Squad is about America, which has been in decline for a while now. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a nineteenth-century novel, a modernist novel, a postmodern novel, and actually really enjoyable.

You can’t not mention it, but there are other things to talk about. It wasn’t just about the PowerPoint, though in retrospect the PowerPoint seems to have been given the right amount of attention, which is to say a moderate amount. It was 2010, and PowerPoint had been around for twenty-three years, but that didn’t matter, because no one had put one in a novel before, or at least no one who had already written four relatively successful works of fiction. She put a PowerPoint presentation in a novel, and the world said: OMG.

The candy house jennifer egan