Cruel and Benevolent

Cathleen Schine

A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egans new novel is the relocating humanistic saga, an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly sheltered as ironic postmodern pastiche. It has thirteen chapters, each an achieved short story in the own right; characters who meander in as well as out of these chapters, brushing up opposite one anothers lives in unexpected ways; the time frame which runs from 1979 to the near, though still sci-fi, future; jolting shifts in time ...


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