Jennifer Egan on Experimental Novels
I love Jennifer Egan, so of course I have already purchased her newest book A Visit from the Goon Squad. From what I read, saying that Egan plays with narrative structure in this book is a bit of an understatement. As the New York Times review puts it:
What’s actually kind of fun for once, however, is attempting to summarize the action of a narrative that feels as freely flung as a bag of trash down a country gully. That’s because to do so captures Egan’s essential challenge to herself: How wide a circumference can she achieve in “A Visit From the Goon Squad” while still maintaining any sort of coherence and momentum? How loosely can she braid the skein of connections and still have something that hangs together? There is a madness to her method. She hands off the narrative from one protagonist to another in a wild relay race that will end with the same characters with which it begins while dispensing with them for years at a time.
In this interview with NPR, Egan talks about the book, which she says she doesn’t think of as experimental because “when I hear that something is experimental, I tend to think that means the experiment will drown out the story.” She goes on to say, “If you don’t have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you’ve got nothing.”
That is why I was crazy about The Keep, Egan’s last novel. When you summarize the plot for people–a prison inmate tells a story set in a gothic castle–it sounds like it wouldn’t work, but it does.
At the last Word Pirates meeting, we were complaining that some experimental novels come off as self-indulgent or boring because storytelling and characters get lost. When a book is experimental AND has a story, I tend to find it really exciting. But when there is experiment with no purpose behind it other than to “do something new” or to show off how clever the writer is, it usually leaves me cold. The best way to experiment is to pick a structure that best serves the story you are trying to tell, not the other way around. Which, as Egan points out, is nothing new.
“If you read novels of the 19th century, they’re pretty experimental,” Egan says. “They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You’ve got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote — these are crazy books.”
