Reading this book is like going into the future and eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends who haven't seen each other in years: 
 "Remember Bennie Salazar?" 
 "Sure. He was that record producer who used to put the gold flakes in his coffee. Didn't he used to be in a band?" 
 "Yeah, he was a wannabe punk rocker in the '80s. He was friends with Scotty back then." 
 "Was Scotty normal then? Because I heard he's completely shithouse-rat-crazy these days." 
 "Oh, he's totally insane. Hey, what was Bennie's assistant's name?" 
 "Sasha?" 
 "That's it. Whatever happened to her?" 
 "I'm not sure. I heard she was a total kleptomaniac." 
 "Really? I heard some wild stories about her running around Europe back in the day." 
 "Someone told me that a friend of hers drowned and really messed her up." 
 "Huh. It had to be something. Oh, did you know Bennie's ex-wife used to work for that PR woman Dolly?" 
 "The one who is trying to resurrect her business by helping that dictator rehab his image?" 
 "That's her. Like she'll ever get steady work again after that disaster she put together." 
 "Wasn't it Bennie's ex-wife's brother who attacked that actress that's been hanging around that dictator, too?" 
 "That's right! Small freaking world." 
 See what I mean? You don't really know these people, but after a while, you get to know their stories and get a feeling for the connections between them. That's what Jennifer Egan has done in this creative little novel. By telling a series of stories loosely based around Bennie and Sasha's past, present and future, she builds a web of relationships that becomes large but always feels intimate. 
 One of her cuter tricks is an entire section told via a PowerPoint presentation written by a child in the future. It sounds like a gimmick that might be good for a few laughs, but Egan actually uses it to give us a pretty detailed portrait of the future family of one of the characters we've read about earlier in the book. 
 It's a well-written and clever book, but the tone's a bit sad and depressing because it deals a lot with the loss and regrets that all adults have over what gets left behind as you move through life. I might have liked it more if I hadn't just read Super Sad True Love Story, which also dealt a lot with the down side of aging. The two books also share a similarity in depicting a future state where smart phones and constant communication have changed society. (This one is mostly set in the past and present with only a couple of sections in the futue.) So while I liked this, I got a bit of a been-there/done that flavor when reading it, and I think I hit depression overload somewhere in the middle of this.