Guest review by Sara Collins: A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD by Jennifer Egan

"That rare thing: a novel of breathtaking ambition that actually achieves its aims."

Sara Collins is of Jamaican descent and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years in Cayman, before admitting that what she really wanted to do was write novels. She studied Creative Writing at Cambridge University, winning the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize, and began to write a book inspired by the idea of 'writing a Gothic novel where the heroine looked like me'. This turned into her first novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton (reviewed here by guest Stephanie Butland). 

A Visit from the Goon Squad stitches together thirteen stories spanning years, places and people: from 1979 to 2021; from New York to Kenya; from Sasha, a kleptomaniac who steals from people but not from stores because “their cold, inert goods didn’t tempt her", to her boss, Bennie Salazar, a record company executive who “sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee – as an aphrodisiac she suspected – and sprayed pesticide in his armpits”. The novel opens with Sasha confessing to her therapist about bringing a date home and stealing his wallet, then we meet Bennie in the next chapter: disillusioned, dissolute, scribbling a list of his most shameful memories -- lunging to kiss a Mother Superior on the mouth, being interrupted in the toilet by a woman he’s lusting after (“Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can”) -- that Sasha mistakes for song titles.

Can we understand each other? From the opening therapy session, to the story told by Sasha’s pre-teen daughter entirely via Powerpoint, to the truncated text messaging of the final chapter (“if thr r children, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?”), this is the question the novel poses. It catalogues the impossibility of true connection, yet at the same time its real charm lies in offering us glimpses of the fleeting intersections of the people in Sasha’s and Bennie’s orbit (children, lovers, friends, bosses), shuffling these mere snapshots and assembling them into a full picture of their lives. Sasha and Bennie are compelling characters - flawed, selfish and vulnerable, they are the main subjects of this extended meditation on the effect we have on each other, even if only in passing, as well as on how we create music, and on love, family, ambition, and ageing. The book is about their lives and how they come to be in the state we find them in but each story builds an equally fleshed-out sense of the secondary characters as well. We learn as much about them by how they see and speak about Sasha or Bennie as we do about Sasha and Bennie themselves.

What really sets Goon Squad apart for me is the shape-shifting quality of its prose. From powerfully lyrical (Egan describes Sasha’s urge to pilfer an unattended wallet as feeling herself “contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite”) to character conjuring (“I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery”) to sucker punching (“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?". On her publisher’s website, Egan says she began the book by following her curiosity from one character and situation to the next, which is the way one ends up reading it too. That curiosity is rewarded by a feeling that one has moved through time with the characters, and therefore lived with them and learned with them as well. Reading it, one feels immersed in a world that is always changing, the dizzying experience of being held captive by that rare thing: a novel of breathtaking ambition that actually achieves its aims.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is published by Corsair.

Guest review by Stephanie Butland: THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON by Sara Collins

"A clever and complex book that reads simply and engagingly, and demands the reader’s whole heart and mind."

Stephanie Butland is the author of four published novels, most recently  Lost for Words and The Curious Heart Of Ailsa Rae.  The Woman In The Photograph will be published by Zaffre in July. Stephanie lives in the north-east of England, near the sea; when she’s not writing she walks, knits, bakes, and, of course, reads. She also runs writing retreats. The best place to find her is on Twitter @under_blue_sky

April is early to make the call for Favourite Book Of the Year but I’ve committed myself, with The Confessions of Frannie Langton. And this from the woman who knows herself to be the one who will finally heal the heart of Jackson Brodie. (Big Sky is going to be equal first at best. This is unheard of in my world, where Jackson reigns supreme.) 

I was lucky enough to read an early proof of this book. (By ‘lucky’, I mean: I publicly begged the editor for one, on Twitter, and she took pity on me.) It arrived: I started reading it that afternoon, then into the night, got up the next morning, made tea, went back to bed, and kept turning the pages until I was finished. There just didn’t seem to be anything more important in my day than reading on. It’s been a long time since a book took hold of me like that.

One of the disadvantages of being a novelist is that it’s difficult to get really immersed in a book; almost impossible to be transported in the way you are when you’re ‘only’ that most important of things, a reader. I read amazing books and think, ‘Wow! - I see what you did there’ or ‘How cleverly you have picked up those threads’. Sara Collins’ writing reconnected me with the sheer pleasure of being carried along by a story; she’s written a clever and complex book that reads simply and engagingly, and demands the reader’s whole heart and mind.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton is the eponymous heroine’s account of her life, from growing up on a plantation in Jamaica to working as a maid in a grand house in London. Frannie is on trial for the murder of her master and mistress, and not even she knows whether she has committed the crimes of which she is accused. We follow Frannie’s life story, from learning to read to standing in the dock, in a tale that is part Gothic mystery, part character study, and part reflection on what we need to do, or be, in the world to make ourselves heard. It’s a history which is vivid and bold, and in our heroine we have a woman with a heartbreaking awareness of exactly how free she can ever hope to be. I felt for Frannie every step of the way.

If you’ve ever stayed up late with a Sarah Waters novel, if Jane Eyre is a book that you never tire of, if you’re a Margaret Atwood fan, then this book is definitely one for you. But I’d like to see it being read more widely than that.

I could not stop thinking about this book after I’d finished it, and it took me a while to work out why. It’s because it feels, to me, like something greater than a good read. It’s also an important book in these complicated times, reminding us of both how far the world has come and how little it has changed.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton is published by Viking.