‘You (Plural)’ by Jennifer Egan

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

‘To Do’ by Jennifer Egan

On the odd occasion I’ve given writing workshops, ‘To Do’ by Jennifer Egan has been one of my favourite stories to respond to. Even someone who has never written a creative word will have written a list at some point. It is as you might expect in the form of a “to do” list.

Egan’s list starts relatively benignly:

1. Mow lawn
2. Get rid of that fucking hose
3. Wash windows

though the expletive highlights the writer of the list is somewhat exasperated. By “9. Buy Wig” we are paying more attention. The whole story is a joy of small details, and the list writer’s motives become darker. And what a writer can do, of course, is cheat, for at the end we learn that this is a list that isn’t written down – that can’t be written down.

First published in The Guardian, Summer Fiction Special, 2011 and available to read here

‘Black Box’ by Jennifer Egan

Originally published in bits via 140-character Twitter, this is an 8,500-word super-story of a technologically-enhanced spy whose mission is to bring down the powerful head of a crime syndicate. But it’s really about the cost to her (and her undercover colleagues) of acting as a honeytrap, and the fragmented form is perfect for expressing the internal conflict, as well as cranking up the suspense and the pace. Hopefully we’ve realised by now that Twitter isn’t a decent fiction publishing medium (even with 280 characters), but at least the experiment produced this wonderful, gripping, Egan story.

First published on Twitter.com, Spring 2012, then in The New Yorker and available online here