How long does it take to read A Visit from the Goon Squad?
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan takes about 6 hours 40 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 40 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2010. 364 pages, about 100,100 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours 7 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 40 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 10 minutes |
The page count is the median across 26 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city's demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life--divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house--and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang--who thrived and who faltered--and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a…
Subjects: Fiction, Punk rock musicians, Sound recording executives and producers, Older men, Young women, Short Stories
