Thirteen Ways of Looking: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad

TLDR: Egan as discussed by the authors reframes the insights of Proust and Eliot at a century's remove; from the epistemic vantage of her second-generation postmodernism, she reconceptualizes their themes of time lost and problematically recaptured.

Abstract: Far from viewing the aesthetic crafted by earlier postmodernists as outmoded, Jennifer Egan joins them and augments their formal and ideational deconstructions of such vestigial metanarratives (of language, of history, of the unconscious) as continued to shelter in the shadow of that great rock, modernism. Because of her later situation in literary history, however, she can treat the moderns as ancestral figures—as much to be venerated as rebelled against. Like the author of To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, she grapples with the strange imbrication of time and consciousness (the one striving endlessly to integrate the other). Like the Don DeLillo of Cosmopolis or The Body Artist, she perceives temporality and sentience as features of language. But chiefly she reframes the insights of Proust and Eliot at a century's remove; from the epistemic vantage of her second-generation postmodernism, she reconceptualizes their themes of time lost and problematically recaptured.