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Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for Monday, August 29th.

I'm Emily Bazelon. I am in our DC studio. Joining me in New York, I am

very pleased to say, are Slate's Julia Turner and Michael Agar. Hey, guys. Hello. Hello. Hello.

And we are going to talk today about Jennifer Egan's novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad,

which is just festooned in prizes. It won both the

Pulitzer and the National Book Critic Circle Award. I decided that we are not going to try and

summarize the plot of this novel because it is several interlocking chapters that all connect

to each other eventually, but it's not really clear as they go.

And the characters, some of them reappear, some of them appear once.

The chapters, at least in my mind, both work as set pieces on their own and then kind of

add up to something more when you move them all together.

Egan has said that she was inspired both by The Sopranos and by

Marcel Proust novel in search of lost time when she wrote this book. And critics have talked

about it also in terms of the movie Crash, which also had these different interlocking stories

in it. Those are three very disparate influences that way. Right. I know. Well, it's like the structural

and the thematic influences. I kind of mixed it all together. So what I was wondering,

just to kick things off, Julia, you said that you felt like you could kind of conceptually summarize

the book. So I thought perhaps we would start there. And I'm also wondering whether you feel like

the structure is burdensome to the reader in a good way or whether it's just sort of too much to keep track of.

So a visit from the Goon Squad, the Goon is Time in one of the chapters. She notes, The Goon is Time. Time comes to get you. Time ends all your plans. Time will kill you eventually. So all of the characters in the book are in some way facing their mortality and we visit them at various points in their life and their lives intersect in many, perhaps too many interlocking ways, I think. and we sort of see them grow and change and become

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