A Visit from the Goon Squad

On further reflection.... and after a conversation with Rich - I've remembered that I really didn't like the end of Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad.' I found the flow charts - and that whole section - quite tiresome. Some were a bit funny and a bit clever - but most would have worked better as prose. And the last part of the book shoots into the future and tries to conjure a technology-obsessed era (even more so than we are now) - parodying the iPhone, or the smart phone in general, and the social networking phenomenon. We are too close to that future for it to be worth predicting. When George Orwell wrote 1984; a clever, imaginative and - in parts - apt prediction of what 1984 would be like (in 1949) - it was distant enough to be impressive if it was correct and not embarrassing if it didn't work. But maybe that's also because he's dead. Egan should have aimed for 2050 or just finished her stories in the present. Because the past and the present are what she writes about SO well. And because of that - the slightly disappointing ending doesn't detract from the rest of the novel - that's why I forgot to mention it earlier.