Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist whose A Visit from the Goon Squad — narrated across thirteen characters spanning decades, including one chapter formatted as a PowerPoint presentation — won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Jennifer Egan published three novels before A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) — The Invisible Circus (1994), Emerald City (1996), and Look at Me (2001) — each demonstrating formal and thematic ambition that found its full expression in the fourth. Goon Squad is structured as a linked collection of stories and chapters narrated by different characters connected to a music industry executive named Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha. It moves across time non-linearly, covering periods from the 1970s to a near future, and deploys a range of narrative styles.

The chapter formatted as a PowerPoint presentation by Sasha’s daughter — using slides with bullet points, diagrams, and charts to convey emotional content — is the most discussed formal experiment in recent American fiction. It works: the limitations of the PowerPoint format reveal something about contemporary communication and intimacy that conventional prose would not. But the book’s ambition is not primarily formal; it is about time, aging, missed opportunity, and the specific vulnerability of whatever we care about most.

The Candy House (2022) returned to the same universe, examining the social and personal consequences of a technology that allows people to upload and access memories. Egan’s particular achievement is that her formal ambitions serve emotional ends rather than obscuring them — each structural innovation in her work generates a new kind of clarity rather than a new kind of difficulty. A Visit from the Goon Squad is the essential starting point and one of the outstanding American novels of the twenty-first century so far.