Networking in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad

The idiosyncratic structure of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) provoked many critics to discuss it with reference to both established and new literary forms. Conversely, this essay shows that the notion of the (narrative) network is best suited to encompass its varying themes and sprawling shape. Egan utilizes the network’s apparent formlessness to probe numerous surprising convergences among characters, times and places. Crucially, Goon Squad’s appropriation of the network exceeds the digital context and stimulates reflections about a posthumanist sociality of relationality and interdependence. Engaging the age of “network culture,” the text both calls attention to the readers’ own posthumanist networked condition in an increasingly connective world and performatively deliberates a nostalgia for  the analog era. Goon Squad does not merely express a longing for the past, however, but ultimately inspires an imagination of a future beyond the double binds of network culture.