One member summed it up this way... forgive me for paraphrasing...A friend came to me and said he was reading a really great book...a few days later--he said...well I am not so sure it is so great and a few days later... he came back to say that he now felt that it was a great book.
I give that anecdote because...
Book Group discussion was predominantly about whether or not A Visit From the Goon Squad was a collection of some great and some not so great short stories or a series of creative pieces that built to a connected exploration of the devastating and inexorable passage of time.
I would say that the majority agreed with the latter...the different narrating styles, the power point chapter, the non-chronological story telling may have been disconcerting at first. But they all built to a moving exploration of the terrible toll of time--the squad of goons or thugs who both steal our youth and defile the very music that reflects our youthful passions.
Sounds grim...but the book is filled with darkly funny situations and insights...kleptomania, public relations and a brutal dictator are explored--honestly it is humorous.
Even the members who felt this was not successful as a novel enjoyed some of the chapters. A favorite: The Safari Chapter. One big knock: The writer does not show how characters like Sasha the kleptomaniac evolved--instead she reappears reformed.
BTW: You can't enlarge graphics on the Kindle...just the print making the PowerPoint chapter hard to read. And if you listened to the book on tape...you heard the clicking sound of a PowerPoint advancing frame by frame. Audio vs. visual!
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