Next in my series of "books about middle-class people who are either sad or dissatisfied with their lives or had tragedies in them" is Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I found after I fruitlessly tried to check out a Murakami novel from the local public library. Instead of the book I was looking for, I found a sign that said "IF YOU LIKE HARUKI MURAKAMI, CHECK OUT THESE AUTHORS." I did, and found this work, which I was drawn to because the title had an Elvis Costello song in it and the cover was pleasing in two ways. One, it was a very attractive shade of teal, and two, it had a guitar on it. 
 This is a book with a large cast of characters, almost all of whom are, as mentioned above, unhappy and middle-class. Its most noteworthy characteristic is that it is not really a novel. Instead, it is a collection of short stories about these characters, which when taken as a whole take us through their lives, often from their teenage years all the way to middle age. Each story is only loosely connected to the one before, and Egan does not adhere to any chronological order. Hence, this book has the reader jumping from character to character, an effect that is magnified by the presence of many characters in others' stories, at different parts of their lives. 
 Instead of the meticulous, sometimes plodding style of books that focus on these kinds of people, the short story structure of this one allows Egan to write briskly, as each story moves along with just the right amount of detail to allow the reader to quickly hop into a character's head, process the type of sadness (or, sometimes, happiness) that character is experiencing, and then get transferred just as quickly to a different character. This treatment is generally effective, though there were some times when I wanted to explore some particular characters in more depth and felt a sense of regret that they were not the focus of more stories. 
 The characters themselves are well-constructed, and their transitions from rebellious teen to nostalgic, tired adult are unique, yet all very believable. It's hard to single out any particular characters because there really are so many that no one really steals the show, except maybe for Sasha, the office assistant to a punk rock record label executive, whose life bookends the collection. Personally, however, the fact that basically all of the main characters led such rebellious childhoods made it somewhat hard to relate to. 
 Many of the stories detail one particular incident or phase in a character's life, allowing the reader to experience the character's thoughts and emotions, and doing so effectively, though sometimes in a slightly shallow way. However, there are a few chapters in which Egan messes with this form and attempts a completely new style. There are two in particular that stand out, which I would like to write about in a bit more detail. 
 (view spoiler)[There's a chapter near the middle of the book that takes the form of a magazine interview with a young movie star. By this point, we know that the writer of this "article" assaulted this actress during this interview. The article is written in a style clearly meant to evoke David Foster Wallace, with a pretentious vocabulary, a high degree of self-consciousness, and a hyper-literary style, as well as the requisite footnotes and acknowledgements that the writer is making the piece about his own reaction to the subject, rather than the subject herself. While it has all of these surface characteristics, it is a very poor imitation, and gives the impression of DFW as a self-obsessed, socially inept human being with no regard for others, even though DFW's writing in actuality contains a great deal of empathy and humility. The chapter is incredibly forced, and Egan's attempt to satirize (and really, mock) DFW's detached-yet-personal style is painful to read. I found this chapter disrespectful and somewhat offensive, and its presence in the book was jarring, given that the rest of the book shows Egan to be rather empathetic and perceptive. It was a really strange detour for the book, and one that actually made me like the book a fair amount less. 
 On the other hand, the second-to-last story is told purely through Powerpoint slides, created by a twelve-year old girl sometime in the 2020s. Putting aside the fact that this presentation looks instead like it was made in the 1990s and really has no air of "the future" about it, this was probably my favorite chapter, and one that stands in stark contrast to the DFW chapter. The story told in these slides is a moving one, and finishes the Sasha saga fittingly, showing us glimpses of her later life as a housewife. Egan uses the unique medium not to mock or show a lack of understanding, but instead as a way to convey some very unique perspectives, including that of Sasha's "mildly autistic" son and her creative, sarcastic preteen daughter, who uses flowcharts and diagrams in a naive yet realistic and surprisingly thoughtful way to depict her trains of thought. It gives these characters voices of their own, which are somehow separate from the anger and frustration exhibited by most young people in the book in that they gravitate toward order and use it as a way to structure their thoughts. I thought it was a very successful chapter, and in contrast to the above section, made me like the book a lot more. (hide spoiler)] 
 All of the other stories fall somewhere in between the grossness of the worst story in the collection and the inventiveness and pathos of the second, with more in the latter half of that spectrum. 
 This book had a lot of great moments and made me more than once reflect heavily upon finishing a story, and it's the kind of novel that made me examine my whole life, as well as my future, not just its current state. Due to its focus on many different characters, you don't get the opportunity to fixate on any given point in time. Instead, it encourages you to constantly look at the bigger picture. It may be that a given moment will haunt you throughout your existence, but Egan attempts to argue that such moments, in general, won't wholly define you. However, it works the other way as well, as the truly happy moments also don't stick around forever. They, too, will fade, and any number of good memories won't necessarily protect you from the bad times. 
 And yet, Egan also subverts these lessons through the book's form. Because the engagement the reader has with any given character is so brief, the times when a character's final thoughts or actions (as far as the story goes) are truly happy or truly tragic tend to linger. This aspect of the book was also very interesting, and gives the book an edge that other books about growing up don't necessarily have. 
 But A Visit from the Goon Squad doesn't really have any life-changing lessons. None of these kinds of books do, I guess. They just let me live in some other peoples' heads for a while and experience some new situations in vaguely realistic settings, complete with the full range of emotions that comes with doing so. In that sense, this was a successful work. Except for that one awful, awful chapter.