Ivan Kreilkamp

A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread by Ivan Kreilkamp is a wonderful critical reading of Egan's book and will make any future rereads you do much more interesting.

If you have read A Visit from the Goon Squad and have not yet reread it, this book should help make it more appealing for you. To whatever degree your first reading, or first few readings, was spent consciously making connections across and/or between the chapters (or stories if you're one of those who thought of it as a collection of related stories) Kreilkamp adds not just some clarity to that endeavor but also adds quite a bit about Egan's other work, her career, and things that have transpired culturally since publication.

I do have one aspect of the work, specifically as a part of the Rereadings series, that I don't fully understand. Let me preface my confusion by mentioning I have read the other upcoming book in the series, Vineland Reread, and that book likely established what I expected as much as any description of the series on the CUP website. It seems to me that any critical book about a work of fiction is based, in large part, on a recent rereading as well as research and previous readings. I expected something much more focused on why this book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is such a compelling reread right now. That isn't what I felt Kreilkamp does. Though I have been compelled to reread it, so to some respect it does accomplish that, but it isn't specifically because of where we are as a society or what I think it says about right here and right now, but simply because I want to reread the book again with these new connections. This is not a knock on the book itself, I found it to be a very good critical assessment of Egan's book. I am just unsure how it fits in a series emphasizing rereading works in the here and now.

All that confusion of my own aside, I highly recommend this for readers who like to reread books. Whether you liked it the first time (as I did) or whether you were one of the readers who found it to be just a collection of stories, I think Kreilkamp makes a strong case for reading it as a novel and, most importantly, as one with more than just a couple of characters as threads running through the book.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (meer)