F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

As promised, I recently re-read The Great Gatsby and eagerly watched the Colbert Report's discussion of the book last week. As this was proclaimed to be Bibliofilly's first official read-along, I would love to hear from any of you who also chose to re-read the book, in anticipation of the release of Baz Luhrmann's film or for any other reason, or who have recently read it for the first time - let's light up the comments section!

Like many people, I first read The Great Gatsby in high school.  For some reason, along with vague images of Gatsby’s flashy parties, the other thing that really stayed with me was that sign on the highway between Long Island and New York, Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s outdated optometrist’s sign, the two giant eyes raised across the road watching cars coming and going – “God sees everything!”. I remembered also the general feel of the book, the glamorous portrait of 1920s America, with cocktails and champagne fountains and flapper dresses (of course Fitzgerald is critical of this scene, yet the book portrays the glamour of it all so beautifully that this, ironically, is what remains indelibly fixed in the reader's imagination). And I knew that there was a car accident, and something to do with a mix-up involving two different cars.

But otherwise I had forgotten the details of the plot. And I had forgotten what a wonderful book this is – though that should really come as no surprise, given that The Great Gatsby has become such an American classic.

Nick Carraway, the narrator, is ex-military, home from the Great War, working in bonds in the city (New York), and settled in West Egg, Long Island, an unfashionable neighbourhood popular among the nouveau riche. His own unremarkable house is situated next door to a waterfront mansion owned by the mysterious Mr Gatsby, a wealthy man who throws lavish parties throughout the summer. Nobody knows very much about Gatsby, though anyone who is anyone attends his parties. Rumours about him abound, many unflattering – that he was a German spy, that he has killed a man – but this seems only to heighten his glamorous allure.

Unlike Gatsby, Nick has a foot in the door of respectable society, having friends across the water in fashionable East Egg, an equally wealthy suburb populated by established families with old money. Whilst visiting his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan at their house in East Egg, Nick meets the beautiful golf pro Jordan Baker. And when Nick is finally invited to one of Gatsby’s parties, he finds Jordan there. Together Nick and Jordan become confidantes of Gatsby, who tells them a secret he has studiously kept for five years: he is in love with Daisy Buchanan, and has set out deliberately to accumulate his wealth in order to impress her. The location of his mansion is no mistake. From the waterfront of his home he can see the glow of the green light positioned at the end of the Buchanans' dock, a symbol of Daisy's proximity to him. 

With Nick’s help, Gatsby and Daisy are reunited and a love affair begins which is complicated by Daisy’s peculiar marriage to Tom, who is also engaged in an extra-marital affair, and by Gatsby’s stubborn streak. It is not enough for Gatsby that Daisy express a willingness to leave Tom for Gatsby - he wants her also to explicitly deny that she has ever loved anyone but Gatsby himself. Daisy's reluctance to do this causes a stasis whereby she finds herself torn between the two men until tragedy strikes on an unusually hot summer’s day and Gatsby’s wealth and history is revealed for what it is – something less certain, less concrete than the stability that Tom has always offered. In spite of Gatsby’s extraordinary effort to lift himself up to the echelon of society to which Daisy has always belonged, it becomes clear that he will never truly belong there. Whereas Tom does belong, has always belonged, and will effortlessly continue to belong - and this matters to Daisy. She is portrayed as a rather flimsy character, someone to whom material things and physical comfort matter above all else. But, as Jennifer Egan pointed out on the Colbert Report (did any of you watch it?), Gatsby himself is marred by the same flaw - his admiration for Daisy is squarely founded in his desire to obtain the status she represents, he is fixated on her because she embodies a position in society that he has no hope of attaining without her, no matter how much wealth he manages to accumulate. 

Gatsby personifies the American dream, and although he is ostensibly wildly successful in achieving it, Fitzgerald shows that this success is shallow, ephemeral. Gatsby's parties are attended by hundreds of people, but none of them know Gatsby, or care about him. Gatsby's wealth is extraordinary, but beneath the marble bathrooms and beautiful shirts, beneath the extravagant veneer, lies emptiness.   

I had forgotten how sad this book is, and how poignant that last line: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Nick ultimately recognises how superficial was Gatsby's popularity, how temporary and insignificant his new money and garish lifestyle. Like Tom and Daisy, and in spite of his ultimate disregard for them, he retreats back to the safety of the solid West, where he grew up "in the Caraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name".  Although Tom and Daisy are painted as the moral villains in this tale, Fitzgerald's story asserts that it is they who will continue to garner respect. It doesn't matter what they have done - they represent the establishment of real America, and their kind will continue to exist even as countless Gatsbys come and go. And as for Gatsby himself, when the party is over - it is well and truly over.

Critics have often said that The Great Gatsby, at its heart, is a scathing critique of the American dream, of new wealth, of people who throw money around for show. But I think it's more than that. Fitzgerald critiques the American dream, yes, by showing that it doesn't work, but he is more critical of America itself - a society able to revel in the temporary wealth and new success of men like Gatsby, but equally able to turn its back on those people once the shine wears off. A society in which men like Tom Buchanan can effectively get away with murder because of the good name they were granted as a birthright. 

This is not a novel in which the characters are well developed - other than Nick they are caricatures, and they are intended to be. By playing Tom and Daisy out against Gatsby, like players on a chess board, Fitzgerald is able to show us just what he thinks of the America of his day - and it's not a positive outlook. 

The fact that this has gone on to be regarded as a 'Great American Novel' is therefore interesting. I don't think it is taught in schools as a cautionary tale. Instead the 1920s era portrayed by Fitzgerald seems to be embraced and lauded as a result of the book. This puzzles me. I would be interested to hear from any American readers of this blog about how they have been taught to regard The Great Gatsby - as a celebration of American society, or a critique of it? 

Overall assessment: 5 out of 5. What can I say? It's a classic for a reason. Luhrmann's film adaptation and the continued interest in Fitzgerald's novel over time make sense when one considers that the critique of society central to the text is as relevant today as it was during Fitzgerald's day. The America of today is a place where anyone can suddenly make it big, in so many different ways - by selling their soul to reality TV, by releasing a sex tape, by filming themselves being hurt doing stupid pranks. And the nation embraces every five minutes of fame and success the ordinary person enjoys, even as it rejoices in smashing that same celebrity in the next breath. The rise and fall of personal wealth is fodder for gossip magazines, just as Gatsby's rise and fall would be if it occurred today. 

Pros / favourite passages:  Fitzgerald's writing is almost painfully beautiful. It reminds me, in its spareness and dry humour, of John Fante's writing in Ask the Dust (although really, I suppose, it would be the other way around). There are so many passages worthy of reproduction, so here are just a couple:

Nick, the narrator, on himself: "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." 

On Gatsby's reunion with Daisy: "As I went over to say good-bye to I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart."

The Great Gatsby read-along - with Stephen Colbert!!! (and me)

Bibliohubby and I adore Stephen Colbert. We tape the Colbert Report every night and watch it religiously after Iggy has gone to bed. We complain loudly when he takes a break and the show is put on brief hiatus (we don't begrudge him his holidays, of course not, we just miss him terribly while he's away).  When we planned our last trip to New York, Bibliohubby spent months in advance of our touch-down hunting tickets to the show, and was ultimately - yay! - successful. So along we went, and came away even more impressed by his near-faultless live performance. The man is a genius.

(Also, we are convinced that if he could only meet us and get to know us a little, he would feel as strongly about us as we do about him and we would all become the best of friends and regularly invite each other over for dinner.)

We seriously considered asking him to become Iggy's godfather. Because, you know, he would definitely go for that, even though he's never met us personally and we live on the other side of the world. He just seems like such an all-round good guy, as well as sharing our political persuasions and being crack-up hilarious. Our favourite ever Colbert moment is what we like to call the Munchma Quchi moment. YouTube it, now. You'll see.

Anyway, my fandom only increased when he announced a reading challenge the other night (ostensibly as part of the inauguration of the O Colbert Book Club - a spoof on Oprah's book club). Viewers are encouraged to read The Great Gatsby before his show on 9 May, when he will be hosting Jennifer Egan (!!) and Baz Luhrmann to discuss the text, in anticipation of the launch of the movie.

Huzzah!

Anyone who started reading this blog at the beginning of the year, when it first started, and has stuck with it since (I'm not sure anyone exists who fits this description; if there is - Hello, you fool, I love you!) may remember that re-reading The Great Gatsby was one of my early goals for 2013. And now here we are; yet another reason to get to it. Also, since writing the first draft of this post I have discovered that The Great Gatsby is also The Guardian's May book club pick.

So I'm inviting all of you to join me. Or join Colbert. Or The Guardian. Whatever. Just read the book, watch the show, and then come back here* and tell me what you think / thought of Egan and Luhrmann and Colbert, and what you thought of the book. Fun!

* It occurs to me that there is a high likelihood that no one will take me up on this challenge. Unlike Colbert, I do not have an established fan base. But I will be discussing the book and the show anyway, so you may as well drop by to read that, in early May-ish. Assuming the birth of Baby hasn't thrown everything dramatically off-course by then, which it may well do seeing as today is the due date.

Jennifer Egan - Look at Me

So, I turned back to Egan as promised in order to determine whether she really does hold a place as one of my favourite female writers, whether A Visit from the Goon Squad was her literary highlight, whether her voice in more traditional story-telling mode is as magnetic.

Look at Me is a hugely ambitious book. It is beautifully written and plot-driven, but it also acts as an in-depth exploration of larger themes and philosophical questions, particularly over the nature of identity, and the modern prioritisation of image at the expense of authenticity.

Egan took six years to write this book and it shows; it is populated with a large cast of characters, each taking turns in the narrative spotlight, and each illustrating Egan's theme from a new perspective.

Really, though, this is a tale of two Charlottes.

Charlotte Swenson is a 35 year-old model whose face has been wrecked in a car accident and whose reconstructive surgery leaves her with a face so different from her old one that nobody recognises her. Charlotte is an enigma. She is consumed by the desire to succeed in the public eye, to enter what she calls "The Mirrored Room", that elite space reserved for those in our modern society who have obtained a glorified celebrity status - the rich and famous, the beautiful. Her ticket in, before the accident, was her beauty, her face. Although she never made it to the realm of true, stratospheric stardom, she was close enough to be considered 'one of the beauties' on a circuit of wealthy hotspots around the world and in the exclusive nightclubs of New York City. But there is a deeper side to Charlotte, revealed in her ability to glimpse people's 'shadow selves' - their true selves, their real identity, which most people take great pains to hide from the world in favour of what they want the world to see. After her accident Charlotte also starts seeing the 'shadow self' of Manhattan - old signs, hidden behind modern buildings, still plastered on old brick walls, representing a bygone era. Interestingly, these glimpses of the past soothe Charlotte, who otherwise seems so preoccupied by flashy facades.

After realising that her new face means she will never succeed again at modelling, Charlotte finds a new way to sell her soul - to a dot com start-up. Extra/Ordinary commoditises lives on the internet, in an attempt to capture reality and expose it for the masses to see. Inevitably, the 'life' represented online is a departure from reality rather than its essence - it is manufactured, with the manufacturing done by other people: ghost writers, film directors, 'experts'. Even as she achieves the kind of success that she has always dreamed of, Charlotte becomes deeply uncomfortable with the artifice of her manufactured life. She has sold her soul to gain entry to the mirrored room, which she ultimately recognises for what it is: an arbitrary space filled with empty, superficial people, "chimeras... the hard, beautiful seashells left behind long after the living creatures within have struggled free and swum away". She finally realises this is not what she wants, after all, and it thus becomes clear that the loss of Charlotte's face in fact marked the start of her painful journey towards authenticity.

Charlotte Swenson's life is played out against the life of another Charlotte, a high school girl who lives in model-Charlotte's hometown. Young Charlotte suffers at school because of her plain looks and her initial unwillingness to play the games that characterise some of the more shallow social interactions between teenagers. She is a strong young woman with a fierce sense of her own independence and self-worth, traits which have no doubt been developed in response to her younger brother's struggle with leukaemia and her parents' understandable preoccupation with their son's well-being. As she distances herself from her cliquey school and her popular friends, young Charlotte finds herself increasingly drawn to two men. One is her uncle, Moose, who battles against a madness caused by an epiphany he had years earlier, in which he recognised the past as ever-present behind the superficial trappings of modern day America - much as model-Charlotte sees the shadow-self of New York City behind its new facade. Moose's x-ray vision, however, has led him to believe that the modern structures of current-day society, which hide beneath them the true history of America, spell the doom of humanity. He is frustrated by his inability to relay this vital doomsday message to anybody else and hopes that young Charlotte might be his protege, teaching her obsessively about the history of their small town in the hope that her own epiphany lies around the corner.

The other man in young Charlotte's life is a mysterious maths teacher called Michael West, who is not from the West at all, but who arrived in America from somewhere far East with the intent of destroying America, or some part of it. Michael West believes, upon arriving in the States, that the intoxicating images that are exported from the USA to the world, of beautiful women in night clubs and tall buildings made of steel and glass, and the global dissemination of these artifices through ubiquitous fast food and Hollywood movies, are signs of an American conspiracy to take over the world through eroding the authenticity and cultural reality of other places. It is not until he arrives in America that he is gradually lulled into the peaceful acceptance that there is no conspiracy. Americans themselves, he realises, believe in the images they project, and they are too drugged by the artifice to recognise the danger these represent to the rest of the world.

A South African friend of mine once said that the secret to world peace was a backyard and a two car garage - that once people were relatively happy with their lot in life they were far less likely to go and fight wars. Michael West's desire to destroy America dissolves as he gradually absorbs the American life, even going so far as to adopt a layer of fat over his taut physique from ingesting McDonald's, that iconic symbol of American imperialism. He comes to realise that he can be a part of the image he had previously so despised, and that this is a much easier way to live than maintaining his struggle against the artifice and a rage so intense it has caused him to walk out on marriage after marriage, life after life.

Young Charlotte, fighting against the perceived importance of beauty that is the reality at American high schools, feels a kindred tie to both of these men, but does not consciously recognise why she is drawn to them. She is looking for something but cannot explain even to herself what that is.When her own beauty gradually emerges - through the artifice, of course, of well-applied make-up and (like Clark Kent into Superman) the removal of her glasses - she finds the complications of trying to live like her Uncle, or emulating the secrecy and just-suppressed rage of Michael West, too difficult. What she most wants, after all, is what all high school students ultimately want: to fit in, even if that is at the expense of their true selves.

In direct contrast to model-Charlotte, she moves from determinedly gripping onto reality and actively pursuing authenticity, to embracing shallow artifice.  Like Charlotte, though, the vehicle for her transformation is her face, in this case the adoption of a false one which allows her to sink easily into the contrived homogeneity of a high school crowd.

The various storylines of this book eventually collide and we are left with a scathing view of modern society, and a dire prediction for the near future, a future which has, to a large extent, already come to pass since the publication of the book in 2001. With the advent of Facebook, the rise and growth of reality TV, the obsession with sharing our lives with the world through Twitter, Instagram and so on - much of what Egan seems to be warning against in Look at Me has already happened. I wonder whether she now feels that it is too late for the world.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. I really enjoyed this book, but somehow it hasn't touched me as deeply as I think it should, given the subject matter. One reason for this may be the ending, which for me didn't quite come together with the emotional impact it could have, or should have. The project may have been overly ambitious. Many clever parallels are drawn between the two Charlottes that don't quite add up - model-Charlotte's obsession with 'Z' and young-Charlotte's obsession with Michael West, for example, mark a mid-point in both of their journeys where they were in the same place, emotionally, though moving in opposite directions on their journeys to/from authenticity. But this doesn't hit home for readers in any significant sense because the story is too big.

Pros / favourite part(s): Egan's writing is beautiful; I highlighted large sections of text simply to remind myself later how extraordinarily apt were her metaphors, how unusual her capacity to describe ordinary things in a way that made them somehow extraordinary. Her writing reminds me in some ways of Jonathan Franzen's, or perhaps it is the other way around - they certainly share some similarities. Her story-telling is for the most part gripping, and reminds me in places of Anne Patchett's. It is safe to say that Egan does now hold a position in my library as one of my favourite female writers.

There were scenes in this book that gave me chills. For example, soon after returning to New York post-accident, model-Charlotte thinks she still has a chance to succeed in the modelling industry when she is offered a photo shoot with Italian Vogue.  Paparazzo turned fashion photographer Spiro is at the helm, having become an instant sensation after a shoot replicating gang violence, which has spawned a trend in fashion photography for photographing 'real' people 'from the news', rather than mere models. All seems to be going well until the make-up artist takes out a razor blade and it becomes clear that, in this shoot, authenticity is to be won through actually cutting the models and recording their fresh blood. Charlotte, with her fragile, newly recovered face, a face put back together with 80 titanium screws, refuses to go through with it - only to be told that she 'doesn't get it', she's not real enough. She is replaced on set by a real refugee of North Korea, a girl so empty of power that she cries silently as the razor blade slides across her cheek.

As Egan writes towards the end of the book, reality, or truth, is something that burrows further inside a dark, coiled privacy when the light of publicity is shone on it - "it dies the instant it is touched by light" because "life can't be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes". Moments like these were deeply touching.

Cons: The ending is disappointing. I feel as though Egan had wanted to write a climax in which all of the strands of her story came together powerfully, in one momentous scene (like the ending of John Irving's A Prayer from Owen Meany, one of my favourite books), but it didn't quite work. For one thing, the life of model-Charlotte somewhat outshone that of young Charlotte, and so it was difficult to see them or treat them as two sides of a coin, which I think they were meant to be. Young Charlotte's transformation did not seem nearly as meaningful as the transformation of model-Charlotte, which was perhaps a result of the fact that Moose and Michael West to some extent took over as minor protagonists of their own in her story.

I still finished the book feeling it had been a very good read, and a fascinating one at that - but I was also left thinking that at the time of publication, Egan's potential as a story-teller was yet to reach its zenith. Perhaps the Pulitzer-prize winning A Visit from the Goon Squad is that zenith, or perhaps it is still to come. I hope for the latter.

Note: Egan suffered upon release of this book because it came a few short months after 9/11, though she had finished the writing of it well before that tragedy. The terrorist character of 'Z' in this book is therefore sometimes seen as outdated, and she has written a note at the end of the book to explain the reason for this. For my part, I wasn't irked by my awareness of intervening events in America, although it does date the book. American readers might feel differently.

Jennifer Egan - a visit from the goon squad

I put off reading this book for almost a year, due to a series of misconceptions I had formed about it. First, the cover of the paperback I ordered from Amazon is, in my opinion, poorly chosen - the graphic looks like a montage of photos taken at a performance of a children's entertainment group, which is neither appealing nor indicative of content (yes, yes, I know, never judge a book by its cover - but we all do, a little bit, don't we?). Second, the title - goon squad? It sounds like a book about old-time gangsters arriving at someone's door to rough them up a little - not my 'thang', as it were. Of course, having read the book I now get the title and appreciate it. Finally, I had formed an impression, somewhere along the way, that Egan's tour de force belonged alongside popular modern-day books such as Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story - books that are thematically linked by their dystopian outlook on life in the near future. I do like the occasional dystopian novel - l Iove Margaret Atwood's futuristic take, for example, in many of her books, from The Handmaid's Tale to Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. But I get a bit tired of dire futuristic outlooks when they are paired with a cynical and ostensibly humorous narrator's voice that is really a weak pastiche of John Kennedy Toole's dark wit. Often the result is a dismal portrayal of a future just ten or twenty years hence in which nobody cares any longer about things we now care deeply about - in which it is in fact fundamentally uncool to care deeply about anything (hipsterdom on steroids?), but which we are for some reason supposed to find amusing. I had understood that Egan was a Shteyngart-esque writer, and this assumption, combined with the reference to goons, put me off in spite of the fact that a number of people had recommended her to me, and in spite of the knowledge that this book has won so many prestigious book awards (notably the 2011 Pulitzer and the (US) National Book Critics Circle Award ).

In fact, there are no goons in this book, not in the original sense of the word anyway. Instead time itself is referred to by one of the characters as a goon - coming as it does to roughen us up, to steal away our youth. And only one chapter - the last - takes place in the future.

After reading just a few pages of this book, I turned to Bibliohubby and told him I might have found a new female writer I adored, who - if the book continued as it started - I might end up listing in my top ten. This is significant because I realised recently, after reading a number of blogs on the topic and having a think, that I have a slight tendency to prefer male writers to female - not because of gender, of course, or not consciously anyway. The apparent preference is disconcerting. It worries me.

But more on that some other day.

The rest of the book did not unfold quite as I had expected. Indeed, to call this a 'novel' is to reinvent the term, something which critics and readers alike appear to have done with surprising ease, welcoming Egan's story-based form as an innovative and inventive post-postmodern way of telling a bigger story. Egan herself, though admitting that the format of the book makes it hard to classify, has said that she leans towards considering it a novel. Were one to categorise the book along more traditional lines, however, one would have to conclude that it is a book of independent short stories featuring characters who are all loosely interconnected. We meet some of the characters repeatedly throughout the book, sometimes through stories focused on their lives, sometimes through stories in which they play only a peripheral part. The stories hop around in time, from the 1960s to the near future, creating a vivid portrayal of the characters' lives as they unfold over a lifetime. We see them both young and energetic and old and rough - once the goon of time has ravaged them. The result is a vaguely cohesive tale centring largely on Bennie Salazar, a music producer, and his assistant Sasha. The cast of characters making up the meat of the book are all linked to Bennie and/or Sacha at some point in their lives, and most have something to do with the music industry and its profound changes over time.

In addition to the unusual structure of the novel - if one wants to call it that - Egan plays with form and structure within the stories themselves. The story / chapter that has received the most publicity is the one which is told entirely in the form of a Powerpoint presentation - something that the young narrator-protagonist of that story calls a 'slide journal', and which is indicative of the future Egan sees unfolding - one in which technology has taken over to such an extent that Powerpoint is writing, and where words like 'friend' and 'identity' have ceased to have any real world meaning outside of technology. I knew this chapter was coming and I was as curious about it as I was resistant to it. But in fact, in the context, it works beautifully. It's surprising how much can be told about character and meaning and story in just a few words on a Powerpoint slide.

In many of the other stories, Egan will pause in her narration to suddenly take us forward 40 odd years in a character's life and tell us where they ended up, or what happened to them - all within the space of a paragraph. Similarly we are sometimes thrown backwards to learn of a character's early, formative years. In this way time is constantly interrupted and warped, disturbing the usual linear coherence we expect from storytelling. One reviewer has pointed out that the originality here - because of course many authors use flashbacks and flash-forwards - stems from the absence of a narrative present. We can't pinpoint what the 'present' is, here, so even the use of terms such as 'flashback' and 'flash-forward' seems inappropriate.

One is left, after finishing the book, with a strong attachment to some of the characters, and with a sense of sadness about the inevitable changes brought about by the ravages of time. It is a book that will stay with me, I think.

My personal preference is usually for a novel that has some continuity of story. I rarely finish books of short stories, although I know the form is difficult to master and can be even more powerful than longer form writing.  As much as I admire Egan for her obvious electrifying ability to write in a variety of ways about such a cacophony of characters, I think I would have enjoyed this more if it had been written as a more traditional novel. Call me a stick-in-the-mud. One of the complications of the structure Egan has chosen is that one never knows which character will feature in the next story, or which character we will have the pleasure of revisiting later in the book. Some of the stories focused on characters I would otherwise have thought of as 'minor', and I was disappointed, then, at the end, to find that other characters who I would have considered to be significant in the overall plot never re-occurred. For example (spoiler alert!), whatever happened to Alice, the girl Bennie so loved who Scotty ended up marrying? And they were never tipped to be major characters, but the point of time was so powerful that I really wanted to know whether those two delinquent musicians to whom Scotty handed Bennie's card on the pier ever followed up and called Bennie, whether the dude ended up being the great musician his girlfriend claimed he was, whether they made it big. And I was sad to hear Bennie, late in life, talk about Sasha as having 'sticky fingers', something for which he ended up having to fire her. I never anticipated that ending to their friendship, which at times seemed like so much more than mere friendship, and it was strange having that unlikely fact handed to me as an aside in an unrelated conversation that took place years after the event.

However, I do understand that Egan's challenge was to write about time and its effect on people and their lives. This was very successfully achieved through the structure she chose, and would have been difficult to pull off had goon squad been written in customary novel-form.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. As much as I enjoyed a visit from the goon squad, I am left with a keen desire to know whether that strong voice I loved at the beginning of the book is able to be sustained through a proper novel - goon squad didn't provide me with the answer. I want to read Egan's earlier books, three of which are actual novels, to find out whether my suspicion that she belongs in my basket of favourites is justified.

Pros: Wonderful writing, intriguing characters, thoughtful themes.

Cons: As discussed above, I simply prefer a novel to a collection of short stories, and the fact that this was written in such an unusual way meant that I felt I missed out on some material that might otherwise have been included. Also, to be truly cynical, there is a touch of self-conscious try-hardedness (not a word!) here - it's a good way to win a prize, isn't it? To sit down and show you can write successfully in many different voices, to show off one's skills  by convincingly writing from both male and female perspectives, as a youth as well as a senior, in traditional formats as well as in the form of a Powerpoint presentation. I don't like feeling played, and there is a little bit of that going on here, even though Egan pulls this all off effortlessly.