From her 2011 interview with Yuka Igarashi for Granta:
[A Visit From the Goon Squad] is narrated by a wide array of interrelated characters over several decades. I’m curious about how you conceived of and created this structure. Did you see the whole novel at once? Did you write the chapters in order?Visit Jennifer Egan's website.
Well, I didn’t even see it as a novel, exactly, but more as a series of lateral ‘moves’ in which a peripheral character that has hopefully provoked curiosity at an earlier point is revealed to have a complex, even tumultuous inner life. It evolved pretty organically, and I didn't have a clear sense of the whole until close to the end. For a long time I imagined that the bookwould simply move backwards, because the early chapters were unfolding that way, but the plan was complicated, first, by the emergence of chapters that took place in the future, and, second, by my horrified discovery, when I read the book through in a backwards order, that the result was lumbering and flat. It was at that point that I realized I needed to let go of linear chronology entirely, and that backwards was still linear. The order of the chapters was one of the last things to fall into place, and really hinged on my asking myself, ‘Having just read X, what will the reader be most surprised – yet satisfied – to encounter next?’
The ‘goon’ in your title is time. One character says to another: ‘Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?’ In your book at least, the answer is yes – time beats all of your characters to a pulp. Do you think time ever makes people wiser or better?
I think it makes people...[read on]
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