A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan justwon the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction , after beating out Jonathan Franzen ’s Freedom for the honored National Book Critics Circle plunder earlier this month .
Goon Squad is a aggregation of broadly connected story , set out out in the present day and end in the future . speak to Entertainment Weekly recently , Egan explain how she come to be set the book ’s concluding fib a couple decades from now :
I knew pretty ahead of time on that I need to revisit Alex - a minor graphic symbol in the first chapter , when he ’s in his other 20’s - as he approaches middle age . Since the first chapter takes home around 2007 , I had no choice but to launch into the future . I did n’t occupy about whether I was writing scientific discipline fabrication , or anything like that ; I just examine to postdate Alex into his future , and be as observant as potential about what the world around him had come to look like . I was most concerned with the question of how he had evolved - it was his narrative that led me to all the rest . It ’s rummy to me that multitude see that chapter as dystopic ( well , okay , I guess the estimate that global warming has altered the earth ’s axis is a short scary ) , because to me we seem closer to some of what I imagined than we even were when I write it . For example , I posited the existence of handsets for preverbal children . I was write about that pre iPhone , and honestly , I ’ve watched toddlers using their parent ’ iPhones and think , Wow , that ’s precisely what I was picturing in “ Pure Language . ”
Since I came across that interview , I ’ve been go to take this novel — I love narration which commence out in the present 24-hour interval , with a naturalistic circumstance , and then end up in the future , like Doris Lessing ’s Four - Gated City .
A sojourn from the Goon Squad join The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon on the tilt of Pulitzer Prize - winning novels with science - fictional and fantastical melodic theme . ( There ’s also The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz , which is pepper with wonk point of reference . )
Books
Daily Newsletter
Get the skillful tech , scientific discipline , and culture news in your inbox daily .
tidings from the time to come , delivered to your present .
You May Also Like
