Can you hear that, folks? That’s the sound of a shoehorn. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is usually considered a novel but there has been just enough discussion around whether these are in fact linked stories to license my inclusion of one here. Very few writers produce prose that has the impact-per-word, for me, that Egan’s does.
‘You (Plural)’ is a tale of lost time from a place not at all relatable to me—the LA of poolside parties, music business moguls and their girls (the Plural of the story’s title?). But Egan gives this short piece—eight pages—a Proustian sweep, and in her invocation of clueless youth giving way to clueless something else, of the guttering flame of diminished possibilities, of the past as another country that we can neither return to nor ever really leave, creates something very relatable indeed. To me, at least.
From A Visit from the Goon Squad, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010
A Personal Anthology 