The Correlation Between Love and Time in Jennifer Egan’s a Visit from the Goon Squad
A Visit from the Goon Squad: A Realist Novel with a Romance Plot
Published in 2010, Jennifer Egan’s novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, impresses fans and literary critics all over the country. For example, in a 2010 summer article in BOMB magazine, author and journalist Heidi Julavits describe Jennifer Egan as:
“one of the most significant living practitioners of the art we call fiction (Julavits 83).”
A realist novel, its characters undergo life’s everyday mundane circumstances and engage in intriguing internal and external dialogue allowing the reader to form his or her own opinions about the characters, sympathizing with some while disagreeing with others. Perhaps some of Egan’s characters remind us of ourselves or someone we know.
Though a fun and engaging story, Egan’s contemporary novel additionally incorporates heavier topics as well, including aging and lost time, sex and romance, mental illness and addiction, death, and the issue of identity and digitization in a postmodern world.
Everyone knows the novel is about time, but there is an additional theme of equal importance, and that theme is love.
All the novel’s characters experience love at some point. Whereas some characters find meaning…
