The Interview - From The Book Review: Jennifer Egan on 'A Visit from the Goon Squad'

Episode Date: August 31, 2024

We’re off for Labor Day weekend, but are excited to bring you a great episode of The Book Review podcast. As part of The New York Times Book Review’s recent 100 Best Books of the 21st Century project, podcast host and Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz has been interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. In this episode, he talks to Jennifer Egan about her Pulitzer-winning novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” They discuss the early challenges the book faced in finding an audience, the meaning of its title and Egan’s initial reluctance to decide whether the book was a novel or a story collection.

Hey, it's Lulu. Summer is sadly coming to a close, and our show is taking this weekend off, but we'll be back next Saturday with a new episode. David will be talking to Will Ferrell and his friend Harper Steele about a new documentary they've made together. In the meantime, I wanted to share a great conversation from our friends at the Book Review podcast. It's part of a project that the Times Book Review launched at the very start of the summer, compiling a fascinating and debate-worthy list of the best 100 books of this century so far.

To go along with that project, book review editor Gilbert Cruz has been interviewing some of the authors whose work made it onto the list. And I loved this recent conversation he had with Jennifer Egan, whose 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, came in at number 39. In this episode, they talk about that book's success after a slow start, Egan's last-minute edition of a PowerPoint presentation to the novel, and some of her work since. Enjoy. books made our list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Today, I'm joined by Jennifer Egan,

who released A Visit from the Goon Squad in summer 2010, 14 years ago. In 2022, she put out a follow-up to that book, The Candy House. Both share the same structure, a series of stories whose protagonists are interconnected, rising and falling in importance as the book hops back and forth in time. Jennifer Egan, Jenny, welcome back to the Book Review Podcast. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. What are your memories from when you actually released the book as you think back to summer 2010? Well, you know, it had a sort of slow start and actually pretty low expectations around it, I would say, including my own. We released it. I went on a book tour, but it was not selling well

at all. It was tanking, actually. And there was a lot of hand-wringing about what was going wrong. And I think one of the biggest problems in retrospect was because I felt like it might not satisfy people's expectations of what a novel should be, and then they might not like it. And the publisher didn't want to call it a story collection because apparently they tend not to sell as well. So we called it nothing. That was the marketing error. Road to success. It just said, A Visit from the Goon Squad, a kind of idiosyncratic title, which also came under scrutiny when things started to go wrong, with no designation in terms of genre, and then my name and a picture of a guitar, part of a guitar. And people didn't know what to make of it. And because I also am a journalist and write nonfiction,

some people thought it might be actually a nonfiction book about music. It was really hard to know what it was. So that was obviously not a good move. And I do blame myself for that. Anyway, so it had a kind of slow start, although very good reviews. And honestly, I think the turning point came when it made the

Times 10 Best of the Year. It felt like at that point, it was the holidays, people were buying books, it began to sell somewhat. And that ended up being the beginning of a real string of good luck for that book that I'm still the beneficiary of. So it was a gradual increase in heat on the book, I would say. I'm curious as to what book tours were like in 2010 and then what your book tour for this book, which wasn't necessarily popping at the beginning, was like. I have gone on book tours from the very beginning. I tend to be of the school that if I don't sell this book, individual copies to every single person, it won't sell. So I'm a huge believer in them. And I do everything I can to kind of mobilize my friends around the country. And I come from both

the West Coast and the Midwest. The tour itself was, I don't go to a place unless I'm pretty sure I can even just on my own generate a certain amount of excitement. So the tour itself, I think, was going fine. But there was, look, you can only reach so many people in a bookstore reading and only sell so many copies. So what I felt, and it was a very frustrating feeling, was that I was doing everything I could. And people seemed to be liking the book, the people who were reading it, but it was just not selling at all. So it was very frustrating. Let's talk a little bit about that sort of distinction that you were hesitant to make. Short story collection, a novel.

It's a novel. Arguably, it's a novel composed of a bunch of short stories. These are categories and the artist doesn't necessarily need to worry about categories. Writer doesn't need to worry about categories, but in order for readers to understand what deal they're making with the author, perhaps they need to know what the category is. Talk to me a little bit about your hesitation and how you've thought about it in the years since, particularly since you did a follow-up to the book that sort of had the same structure. What you say about the deal with the reader is really everything.

I think we all tend to think of novels as being more centrally oriented. I stumbled into writing A Visit from the Goon Squad. I didn't really realize it was a book at first. I thought I was just writing individual short stories. And I wrote three of them that were connected to each other, but they were very different formally and in terms of their craft approaches because that's the fun of writing stories, that they can be very specific and sometimes riskier

than something I would try in a very long book or frankly that I could sustain through a long book. So by the time I realized having three of these in hand that it felt like it really was a book, I thought, okay, so what is fun about this? What makes it feel like it would be a book worth writing? And one of those elements was the fact that each piece was very different from the others, but also related to them. So there was always this idea that it would be one thing, but composed of smaller pieces that stood on their own. And again, back to that bargain with the reader, which is something I think about a lot, I felt like if I'm asking people to start over with every chapter in a certain sense, I need to provide complete satisfaction with every chapter. So one of the standards that I held myself to was that every chapter had to stand

completely on its own and not need any context at all to take the burden off of the reader of having to make all these connections. They should be there for fun if the reader wants to make them, but not required in any way. So is that a novel? I leave it to the experts. The only way, obviously, on the paperback, we call it- You're an expert. You not only have written novels, but you probably have read more novels than most people. I mean, I think it is in that it, I think, does the job of cohering into something bigger than all of the individual parts. But it is also stories. And in fact, in the case of Goon Squad, I didn't do this with Candy House, all but two were published as individual stories along the way.

And a lot of people had no idea that it was part of something larger. So its labels are great for selling, but I try not to get too caught up in them as a creator because who cares? It's fiction. But I do want it to sell. So you can bet that when that paperback came out, it said novel. So talk to me about the paperback release. The book came out in the summer 2010. It was well-reviewed. It ended up on some best-of lists, including our own. And then the paperback came out in fairly short order, I think, compared to

the lag you would usually have between hardcover and paperback release. Yeah, that's true. And I wonder why. So the hardcover came out in June and I think the paperback came out in March, I think. And I think the idea was, look, OK, this kind of didn't work, as they say in the publishing industry. But we have a lot of ingredients here to make it work. So we have now a category. We're calling it a novel. They changed the cover, which I think was really a good idea. I actually loved the original cover, but it just it didn't feel as human as the cover they ended up with, which is just I adore the cover of the paperback. And then the good luck just kept rolling in.

This book got extremely lucky. And I won a big couple of big prizes. You can't, there's nothing that matches that in terms of a marketing boon. I just rode that good luck as long as I could. I had published several books before that and I understood very well that the forces don't align in this way very often. And I wanted to make sure I didn't let any of that opportunity slip away. One of the big prizes, I will say what the big prize is so you don't have to say it. You won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year, which is not a small prize.

And I'm wondering if you recall where you were when you heard that news and what were your immediate thoughts about what this meant, not only for the book, but for you as a writer? I remember that I was actually at lunch with a writer, with a reporter, but someone writing for kind of a small magazine. I can't even remember what we were talking about. And I spoke to my publicist. I had a kind of denial reaction, like it actually seemed impossible. I just really thought there might be a mistake because, again, I was in my late 40s by then, and I just felt like I was not one of those people that kind of thing happened to. You know, you get this idea along the way that certain people are anointed and certain ones aren't.

And it really felt to me like I was on the not list. So I just I couldn't believe it. And I think the implications weren't immediately clear to me, but maybe I sensed them in that I just couldn't believe that they would actually be mine. And I remember my publicist said at a certain point when I kept saying, are you sure? Are you sure? She said, we have to stop having this conversation because you're meeting a reporter at your house in 10 minutes. So go.

We'll be right back welcome back this is the book review podcast and i'm I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined this week by Jenny Egan, and we're talking about her wonderful book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Jenny, I had assumed that the Goon Squad of the title referred to the David Bowie song, Fashion. I was reading an interview that you did at the time with Vulture. That writer assumed it was a reference to the Elvis Costello song, Goon Squad. It is neither. What is the Goon Squad that is visiting? This is a kind of strange story. I decided I would write a book with that title about 10 years before I started working on A Visit from the Goon Squad.

I came upon this title and I thought, this is a great title. It's pretty hilarious given that when the book came out and wasn't selling, everyone agreed. It was a terrible title and why did you use it? But as I worked on books after that, I would think, hmm, you know, I wrote a Gothic novel, a Gothic thriller called The Keep. But as I was working it, I thought,

could this be called A Visit from the Goon Squad? Gothic? Nah, that's not going to work. But when I stumbled into this kind of accidental book composed of shorter stories, I thought, ah, okay, this is A Visit from the Goon Squad. What does it mean? And it took a while for me to know the answer, but it became clear in, as I was, I write very improvisationally. And as I worked on this book, suddenly the word goon appeared in the context of time. So the goon squad is really the passage of time, it turns out. And there's an expression that is invoked. It's not, it doesn't exist in real life, but it exists in the book, which is time's a goon.

And so that's the reference. When I realized that as I was quickly rereading the book, which is Time's a Goon. And so that's the reference. When I realized that as I was quickly rereading the book, it reminded me, I have to think it's from a movie or somewhere. I can't curse on this podcast, unfortunately, but it's Time is a MF-er. It feels like that is what this particular character is saying about time, which is that it is just the thing that maybe when you're young, you don't really think about, but then at a certain point you realize ruins you in ways that you could have never imagined when you were in your 20s or your early 30s. And maybe most of all, it's just unbeatable. No one's going to defeat it. We keep trying, but it can't be done. So why time? Why was time the thing that made you realize that would be an appropriate title for this book and made you realize that it was one of the themes that was undergirding all of the stories in this novel? walking around with and turning over and wondering if I can somehow, whether they will bubble up in

a work of fiction, because writing a novel that's quote unquote about time sounds pretty boring to me. And I think the reason I was thinking about time was really because I had finally read In Search of Lost Time, all of it, by Proust. Was that seven volumes? I think it's six, I think. Six, a lot, several volumes. Yes. I read it in a book group, if you can believe it. It took us six years. So we really spent a lot of time. You stayed in one book group with the same people for that long? That's a miracle. We had five children among us in the time that we read In Search of Lost Time. What I loved about reading that book was that it, well, it unfolds in a kind of real time, clearly for the reader.

Time, life happens as one reads that book. But the other thing is, in a way, fiction is always about the passage of time. Time is the essential ingredient for any work of fiction, even if it's just a minute. I would argue that in some sense, time is required for fiction to happen as opposed to, say, poetry. I have found it interesting to then look at works of fiction in which time is the subject. And that's certainly the case in Proust's In Search of Less Time and also James Salter's Light Years, which is a beautiful book about time passing. And I thought, I want to write a book about time passing,

but I don't want to do it the way Proust did in this sort of real-time way. How could I suggest the magnitude and the sweep of time passing in a more contemporary way? And at the same time, I was watching The Sopranos. One sees a huge swath of time pass in the course of that series, including the aging of the characters. The kids grow up, Tony gets older. And somehow, I think those two curiosities fused, and I felt like the way to suggest the sweep of time is to take an episodic, a kind of serialized approach to storytelling. And so all of that combined in, as I, and in a way that was already suggested as I was working on these shorter pieces that were happening at different periods of time, but

involved some of the same characters. So a lot of ideas cohered without much effort. And that's what I'm always looking for. Because really, the point is to have fun. The point is for it to be fun and ideally funny, because I find that if I'm really doing my job as it should be done, it usually gets funny. And so it just that it felt like all of these interests came home to roost in that project. You talk about passage of time being an essential part of fiction. I think change over time is like the scientific definition of evolution or something like that. So ideally, you're seeing characters evolve maybe in some way. And I think of something like the movie 2001 in which a bone is thrown up into the air,

and then there's a cut and it's three million years later, and that bone is now a spaceship in space. That's one way to present the passage of time. Structurally, you do it a little bit differently in this book while trying to achieve somewhat of the same end. How did you realize that all these parts working in this particular way was the right thing for Goon Squad? Was it a lot of moving stuff around? Were you keeping track of this story following this story? No, it needs to go before. I'm actually really happy you asked that question because that was the structure of the book.

So the order of the pieces was the thing I had the most wrong as I was working on the book. As I wrote those three initial stories, I was always moving backward. And I found that really fun. I thought, oh, yeah. So instead of asking, what's going to happen? The reader's asking, hey, what was that like? And then finding out. So I thought that the book would just be there. What I thought there would be chronology, it would be backwards chronology. And I knew that was not would just be there. What I thought there would be chronology. It would be backwards chronology. And I knew that was not a new invention of mine.

Charles Baxter did it beautifully. And Martin Amis has done it, but it's not done often. And I thought, great, it'll be backwards. So and then I worked on the pieces individually over a few years, but I didn't put them in order and read them together because it was very important for me to hold on to the very different forms and vibes that each piece would have. When I thought I was done, I put them in the backwards order and I, with a kind of mental drum roll, I read them and I was incredibly disappointed. It just gained no power. It was really flat.

And I thought, wow, maybe this is just a bad book, it turns out. Or maybe it's a story collection, but I feel like I'm promising the reader more with all of these connections. Why isn't this gaining strength instead of losing strength? And I realized that hewing to my backwards chronology was actually costing the reader all kinds of fun surprises and payoffs. And to give you one example, in chapter two, we learned that a music producer named Benny Salazar was in a punk band as a teenager. That just comes along in passing. And the reader might think, huh, okay, that's interesting. But in my backwards chronology, we had to wait eight chapters to get to 1979 when Benny was in his punk rock band. By that time, no one's wondering anymore about what

that was like. So I realized, no, we need to see him in the punk band in the next chapter. So what I gave up on chronology and I replaced it with curiosity and satisfaction as organizing principles. And it was a little scary to do that because we rely a lot on chronology to orient us as readers. It can be very chaotic to feel like we don't know where we are in time, but I felt it was a choice worth making. I felt that the rewards outweighed the risks and that this was the only way I could really get these pieces to fuse into something that had more power than the individual pieces. You said at the time of the book's release that the whole axis of this book was, as I said,

change over time, and it was something you didn't necessarily believe in when you were a young person, when you were a younger writer. What have you learned about that as you've gotten older, as you've gotten to be more of a, as you've written more books, you know, the value of change over time and how it actually has effects on characters. Watching people over time is the great show. I am always so curious to know what happens to everyone, not just in fiction, but in life. So I think at the beginning,

it doesn't seem like anyone's changing that much. But then people make decisions and really big things start to happen and sometimes tragic things. People I loved have died too early and people have had hardships and also incredible luck. It's just it's the big story. And I think I appreciate the drama of that story more and more as I get older. People complain a lot about getting older, but I see huge advantages. Another one, interestingly, is that I understand more viscerally how short human history really has been. And what I mean by that is I'm 61. So I've been alive for the better part of a century. All you have to do is put a few centuries together and we're back at Shakespeare. So I feel somehow that I can grasp time more knowledgeably. And that's exciting,

actually. It's exciting from a writing point of view because other periods of history feel more accessible. They don't feel necessarily like another planet or another world. They just feel like a few of my lifetimes strung together going backward. And I think also I feel the kind of strange dichotomy or paradox, maybe, that so many things have changed so radically in the course of human history, and yet people seem to be relatively the same. And that's the thing that fiction shows us more than anything else. You read a 19th century novel, mid-19th century, no lights, no phones, no cars, no combustion engine, and people were like us.

It's amazing. Yeah, I hope to tell that to my child one day when he inevitably, which he already has, starts to move away from books, which is that if you want to understand yourself, if you want to understand your parents, if you want to understand your friends, read a book because it doesn't matter what time period it takes place in. Like human motivations and human actions and human behaviors are all pretty much the same, whether it's now or the 1950s or the 1850s. Absolutely. And also, because we can deeply connect to these people who were like us, it also becomes possible to imagine what it felt like to live in such a different technological era through fiction. The struggle to keep kids reading is profound. And the thing that I think has made fiction hold on all this time, as my younger son keeps saying, reading is back,

which is absolutely hilarious. But I'm glad he's saying it. But we spend a lot of time looking at pictures of all kinds of things. But if we're looking at an image, we are by definition on the outside. And fiction remains, I think, the most interior narrative art form that exists. And it is doing something nothing else can do. Because even, say, Twitch streaming, which feels very

interior, we're looking at the game through the eyes of the gamer, we're hearing a kind of narrative of the experience. It's performative. That's the opposite. So I think fiction is it still has something it can do that nothing else can do for now. Reading is back and we'll be right back. Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm here with Jenny Egan, and we're talking about A Visit from the Goon Squad, which recently appeared on The New York Times' list of the best books of the 21st century. Jenny, at what point in the book tour or over the years did you just get so tired talking about PowerPoint? I do not want to talk about this anymore. It's funny.

I actually, I think I didn't, I never got tired of it. But when I was struggling so much with my next book, which is very different, a historical novel, crime, noir crime novel. And I felt like it was not going to work out and that maybe my career was ending with Goon Squad. I felt like I couldn't talk about Goon Squad at all for a while because I felt such a sense of crisis and almost, I felt fraudulent because I felt like, look, I can't keep dining out on this book forever. So I stopped then. But I actually still enjoy talking about PowerPoint and the role of non-traditional structures in fiction, because it actually is really interesting to me. And I keep trying to find new structures that I

can bend to my purposes. So that conversation still feels actually really relevant to me, even as a writer. If you've made it this far, a listener, and you don't know what we're talking about, for some reason, there's a chapter in A Visit from the Goon Squad that is presented essentially as a series of PowerPoint slides. I read that you slipped that in at the last minute before you sent the manuscript off to your people at your publishing house. Is that true? It's actually even funnier. I slipped it in after I had sent it to them and I was doing quote unquote, light revisions. I had been trying to make PowerPoint work for well over a year.

I just wasn't able to do it. And the reason I wanted to do that is that, you know, I mentioned that one of the axiomatic things about A Visit from the Goon Squad is that each chapter has a different technical approach, a different narrative approach. So we've got first person, third person, multiple points of view, omniscient leaps into the future. There's a chapter in second person. But at a certain point, there were a lot of things I couldn't make work, I should add. I tried epic poetry. Oh, my God. So there were a lot of failures, and there always are in these kinds of things. Same with The Candy House. When I'm trying to do radical things structurally, of course, a lot of them aren't going to work. But I had my eye on PowerPoint,

and I just couldn't find a way to make fiction live in PowerPoint because there are a lot of reasons that PowerPoint is actually antithetical to successful fiction. One is that it has a cold corporate vibe, and two is that it's almost impossible to portray action. So those are real negatives from a fiction writing point of view. But there was another problem I was trying to solve when I turned in that book. And that was that there are two main characters

in the book, Sasha and the music producer I mentioned earlier, and his assistant Sasha. And I had found a way to see Benny, the music producer, in his future, but I hadn't found a way to see Sasha in hers. And that was really nagging at me. And somehow this notion of having her child be the PowerPoint maker came to me after I had turned in the book while I was doing these light revisions. And I had this feeling that I could portray some sort of interesting atmosphere in PowerPoint using Alison, this daughter of Sasha. So I gave it a crack. And then I sent back my manuscript with my light revisions and instructions about how to view the new chapter I had inserted as a slideshow. Everyone thought I, I think they just thought I'd lost my mind. And of course, we're so print oriented in the publishing world.

Everyone just printed it out. No one looked, no one viewed it as a slideshow, but, but they were really kind to indulge me and put it in. Did you think they wouldn't? I thought it was possible. We added like 70 pages to the book with that. I knew it would be in black and white and I created a color version on my website. But even as a black and white, it was a technical headache that had big implications.

And actually, some of those are good for me. For example, the quality of the paper in the paperback is very high because that PowerPoint really doesn't look good unless it's on really nice paper. That's how you snuck it in. You will only print my book on the best paper. And this is how I'm going to ensure that. I did not. I thought we might have just put in a URL address for that chapter. I was ready for that, but they embraced it.

And I was so grateful. I'm curious about how you navigated the idea of, and I say this as someone that has to make PowerPoint presentations still for work, a 12-year-old sort of using PowerPoint as opposed to like Microsoft Paint or some other computer application. I don't know how old your child is, but kids work on PowerPoint all the time in school. However, I didn't know that. My kids were still pretty young at that point. And I'll be honest with you, not only had I never used PowerPoint when I decided to use PowerPoint in this book, I wasn't entirely sure what PowerPoint was. But I knew it was a way you could present information and that was enough for me. So it was a long process of educating myself on how to use PowerPoint. But what I found, as I say, the cold corporate vibe was proving to be problematic. And I guess what the answer is that I began to hear a kid's voice narrating the information in the PowerPoint. And that changed everything. And so that was really,

again, I am pretty instinctive improvisational writer, at least in my initial impulses. I subject everything to a lot of scrutiny ultimately, but the impulse, the thing that gets me in is usually just a sense of atmosphere, time, place, and voice. And I could feel this kid in the desert. We know they live in the desert, narrating in slides. And it felt exciting. It felt fresh. And so I went with it.

I'm going to adjust what I said because I feel like I'm just remembering right now a friend of mine telling me that she asked her kids to put together a PowerPoint presentation on why the family should get a dog. So maybe, maybe there's something that happened. I didn't know that kids use PowerPoint. I thought that was my hilarious innovation. But I was taking way too much credit there because when it came out, my friends with older kids said, oh, yeah, our kids use PowerPoint all the time.

I was actually disappointed. You know, it turns out that actually it's a good way to make presentations. This whole thing is not a story that ends with the Goon Squad. Of course, two years ago, you released The Candy House, which picks up with some of the minor characters in Goon Squad and makes them into major characters. And I'm curious, given your stated predilection for wanting every book to be different, why was the pull of this world so strong that you needed to return to it? A few reasons. I mean, one is that it's the nature of books like this that they leave a huge amount of loose ends. I mean, if every chapter is about a different person, as is the case in

Goon Squad, then there are all these potential constellations of people and drama that go unexplored. There's no way I can do that and also move on to a new chapter about a new person told in a new way. So there's a kind of open-endedness that's really inviting. The other thing is that, as I mentioned, there's a high failure ratio on my part with these books. So there are a lot of things I try that don't work. So for example, there are three brothers mentioned in A Visit from the Goon Squad. They're children of a guy that one of the chapters is about. Their dad is Ted and they are Miles Ames and Alfred Hollander. And in one of my failed PowerPoint attempts, I actually wrote about these three specifically as adults. We met them, we learned sort of what their personalities were like, but that effort failed. So I was left with

all kinds of knowledge about these three that the reader has none of. That added to the sense of open-endedness. And then the other thing is, as you said, there are minor characters that I follow up with, but no one is really a minor character in their own story. So the very fact that someone is a minor character is really inviting to me. There's a part of me that wants to plunge into their sensibility, see the world through their eyes. All of that is to say that on my book tour for A Visit from the Goon Squad, I was already writing the chapter of Candy House that's called Lulu the Spy. I was already imagining a minor character from Goon Squad

in a kind of genre spy story and writing that. So there was never a question of whether I would pursue some of these characters. What I didn't know and what was very unclear was whether I would actually create another book out of that material. And my standards were I would do it only if, one, it was about different things. So not about time, not about music, the two kind of fixations of Goon Squad. And the other thing is that I would, I needed to feel that it was actually better, that it was more ambitious, that it actually did more. Because with all the good luck the Goon Squad had, I knew that if it wasn't, if this book wasn't pretty strong, it was going to be perceived as a kind of weak follow-up

or a failure. And that would be terrible. I didn't want that. So I wasn't sure. In the age of sequels, here's this author who's just doing the easy thing and writing a sequel. Yeah, like writing fan fiction to myself. Like, why would I do that? I left it. I felt no pressure to create another book in this world. But I thought if it happens, if it feels like it's really doing something new and interesting and not just echoing, sure. And in the end, the material seemed to align in that way.

So I went for it. I imagine over the course of, say, the first year of this book being out, you having to go on book tour and on media appearances and say the same things over and over again on the book. And even in the time since the book has been released, that that stuff can crystallize in your mind. But I wonder if there's anything, since we're talking about time, anything that you're able to see about this book now that you didn't realize when you first put it out. The big thing I didn't realize, I actually discovered fairly quickly

because it was pointed out to me, which really was that it is to some degree, that what made this lateral structure, this episodic structure in which we glimpse something out of the corner of our eye and then we're plunged into the middle of it in the next chapter. What made that feel exciting, I think, is that it mimicked online activity. It felt analogous to that. So even though Goon Squad is not really per se about technology, Candy House is much more. There's a kind of technological awareness in it that I had thought, okay, I don't really have a clear genre, as we were talking about. Is it stories?

Is it novel? What is it? That troubled me a little bit. And what I realized later was there was a clear genre. It's just that it was a musical genre. And that is the concept album, which is a genre that I grew up on passionately as a kid in the 70s. These were albums that, and still are, tell one big story in small pieces that sound very different from each other. And it's the kind of abrasion of those different sounds that makes an album exciting. I hadn't fully understood that. And actual vinyl albums are kind of like books. You know, they have pages, there are lyrics. They were a literary genre in a way that

may be a little harder to quite know now because we tend to listen to music more digitally. So I learned many things about Goon Squad after it came out. And that's when I, because I write so unconsciously and intuitively, in a way that's no surprise. I keep learning about what I've done after I've finished it. Jenny Egan, one of the things I love to do is ask authors about the book that they have read the most over the course of their life. And I'm wondering what yours is. Mine is, I think, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. I have here an old version that you can see is much dog-eared and post-itted. And actually, I got, my mother gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago, an edition from 1905, which is the year it was published, which has

these beautiful Gilded Age illustrations. And The House of Mirth is a flawed book. I'm just going to say that. There is anti-Semitism in it, and that is bad. There's no way around it. It would be a better book without those tropes. But I think what I admire about the book is that it succeeds on so many. It's a social novel. It's a tragedy in the Greek sense. It's a straight-up tragedy that adheres to the very same rules that Sophocles or Aeschylus were using when they wrote tragedies. And tell us, for those who have not been lucky enough to read it yet, very briefly what it's about. It's about a woman named Lily Bart who is living in Gilded Age New York. She's very beautiful. And she's been programmed

by her very materialistic mother to use her beauty to catch a wealthy husband and live in great wealth. But there's something in her constitutionally, and this is sort of where the tragic element comes in, that will not do that. She simply won't marry any of these rich men. And instead, she's in love with a guy who doesn't have money, but they can't really marry because she's also addicted to this very wealthy lifestyle. And her feelings about wealth are described in ways that are really, that feel very much like addiction. She has a physical reaction to being in affluent environments that's very powerful and seductive. And so she begins a kind of, the book really describes a slow motion free fall. And it's also, it's an indictment of a world in which women

had very few avenues to power. Beauty was one, but it didn't work for everyone. And it's just, it's on the level of the sentence, it's funny and very sharp. And yet it also has a total structure and reach that feels quite profound. When I taught it at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, it became a really interesting occasion to talk about how and whether to metabolize offensive material that read very differently in another era as a way of trying to engage with material that one may or may not find worth it in the end, but it's probably better than just throwing it out the window because the material is offensive. That's a really important question

for all of us because our sensibilities are changing, I think, way for the better and pretty quickly, let's say, in the last 20, 25 years. So it's really helpful to think about how can we still engage with work that might offend us? And is it worth doing so? And so the House of Mirth continues to evolve for me as a reading experience. And that's what I've ended up focusing on when I teach it in a literature course. I should read the House of Mirth. You really should. It's, I think, quite spectacular. I'm opening myself up here, Jenny. I've not read The House of Birth.

It's embarrassing, but that was a wonderful recommendation. Gilded Age New York, the textures, the details. It's so rich. Jenny Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House. Thank you so much for being on the Book Review Podcast. Thank you. It for being on the Book Review Podcast. Thank you. It was a total pleasure. That was my conversation

with Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, one of the New York Times' 100 best books of the 21st century. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thank you for listening.