So, sometimes it’s only later that I can really parse out what actually influenced me. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly. It’s not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. I’m waiting to be surprised myself because I find that surprises are always the best ideas. Can you explain this unique combination of influences?įirst of all, influence is always a difficult thing to pinpoint when you write as instinctively as I do because I don’t really know exactly what I’m going to end up doing when I sit down to do it. You have cited both Marcel Proust and the TV show The Sopranos as sources of inspiration for A Visit from the Goon Squad. It is, however, one of the most entertaining and engaging works of literary fiction in recent memory, and it has earned Egan the highest of honors and accolades including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.Įgan recently took some time out of her busy schedule to discuss her work with PopMatters in a conversation that touches on her eclectic combination of influences, the role of genre and satire in her work, and the importance of distance in her creative process. Told in short narrative passages, the characters and concerns of which overlap through a series of often fleeting and seemingly random connections, A Visit from the Goon Squad is neither a novel nor a short story collection. Her most recent book, 2010’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, is ostensibly based on the twilight of the modern music industry, but really, it’s a book about the passage of time itself, a contemporary iteration of Proust’s grand and indomitable undertaking in In Search of Lost Time. And in The Keep, the realm of gothic literature somehow melds seamlessly with modern-day internet culture in a tale of both page-turning suspense and penetrating insight. In Look at Me, the image-driven world of high fashion and an eerily prescient satirical vision of American culture form the contours of her narrative. In The Invisible Circus, it’s the personal aftermath of a violent call to revolution experienced in the Europe of the ’60s.

In terms of both subject and approach, Egan brings a seemingly insatiable appetite for experimentation and inquiry to her work, and with each book that she writes, she invites her readers to join her in an excavation of strange and uncharted new worlds. There are many writers who describe their writing as a process of discovery, but there are few who have followed this exploratory impulse across such a vast and ranging literary terrain as Jennifer Egan.

A visit from the goon squad