A few petty complaints

So I was attempting to take this last blog seriously. Go out with a bang. Write a blog with some real and impressive insights. I was going to write a blog about the double lives all the characters were leading their search for something genuine and real in the world. Instead, I found myself thinking about all the other things I’d rather be doing with my time. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is that as time passes you can never get it back. Consequently, I’m just going to discuss all my petty complaints.

First – Why did this win the Pulitzer Prize??? Let me backtrack. I know why it won the Pulitzer Prize. It won because it was avant garde and told a story in new and different way. It was nonlinear, a collection of short stories, didn’t focus exclusively on one character, and had a 70 page power point for a chapter. That said, it felt like Egan was trying too hard. It was if when she was writing this, she was purposefully trying to get an award. She wrote all her characters to be super edgy, which critics seem to love for some reason. (I’m looking at you Song of Solomon with your weird ass characters.) None of them are normal. You don’t have a normal disillusioned music producer; no you have a producer who eats gOLd fLaKeS to increase his sex drive. A 13-year-old boy is obsessed with the pauses in songs of all things. And ALL of the characters (except maybe Alex and Sasha) did drugs. Idk, I know I’m being petty, but the forced quirkiness of all the characters really annoyed me, especially when they felt excessively so just so that the critics would like.

Two – the references to all the old rock songs. Okay I know that this just means I’m not the intended audience for this and the songs weren’t super important, but it was really frustrating to read the titles of all these songs as they were referenced and not have a single idea what they were about. Yes, I probably could have looked them up, but there were a lot of them, and I’m all about doing the least amount of work possible.

Three – So this is absurdly petty of me, but it made me mad every time I closed the book so it needs to be addressed. Can we just talk about the author picture on the back cover? Why is she smirking? Who is she smirking at? Why is she giving us a weird side eye? Why is that the angle she chose to give the camera? Is she wearing a trench coat??? (Also, sidenote, she kind of looks like Meredith Grey from Grey’s Anatomy.) Her author picture gives the same “oh I’m so edgy and different” vibes as her book did.

So now that I’ve got these petty complaints out of my system, let’s talk about the things I enjoyed about the book because I did like some parts. Dolly’s story about the dictator was really cool and kinda wild. Rob’s story made me lowkey cry and was super moving. And it was super satisfying see all the different connections between the different stories. This wasn’t a bad book by any means, and if Kurt finally read and enjoyed this one, you should definitely keep it in your curriculum. I just found myself really frustrated with it, but that probably reflects more on me being stuck at home and wanting to do anything else than reading this book.