A Visit from the Goon Squad

I really thought I was going to love this book early on.

The first chapter is told from the perspective of a kleptomaniac, who lies to her boyfriend about the actions of a woman whom she stole something from. Her boyfriend goes on a rant about the (false) actions of the woman, and the narrator becomes “irked by his obliviousness even as she strove to preserve it”. That line to me was just a brilliant representation of a weird internal conflict that I was hoping would continue.

Unfortunately, while the first few chapters delve into these sort of human weaknesses, as I got further into the book I found it dipping farther into more of human depravity that I did not find enjoyable. And by the end, the “future” premises are entirely ridiculous (even if that is supposed to be the point), where society has become so commercial that babies just a few months old have their own advanced cell phones and are directly marketed to, I was just completely checked out.

I think there are some neat things here and there. Each chapter jumps around in time and to different characters that were usually tangential characters in a previous chapter, which is something I haven't really seen before and is often effective, but almost as often is very unsubtle (“Hey, remember that time that thing happened 30 pages ago?”).

I listened to this via audiobook from the library on the Libby app. The narrator Roxana Ortega was good. It felt like she chose a single main tick of each character to base her voices of them around (in control, frantic energy, sultry, etc), which can be a bit on the nose, but does a good job of differentiating a big cast and allowing you to understand the character quickly.