"A Visit from the Goon Squad"

[fiefoe]

My 2nd book club read and I'm not enjoying this much. And it was me who suggested the book in the first place. Jennifer Egan is an accomplished writer, but I just find very little there to make me want to root for her characters.

• Sasha no longer took anything from stores—their cold, inert goods didn’t tempt her. Only from people.
• ... for Sasha to assert her toughness, her individuality. What they needed to do was switch things around in her head so that the challenge became not taking the wallet but leaving it.
• Postwallet, however, the scene tingled with mirthful possibility.
• She and Coz were collaborators, writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well.
• It had a beautiful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle gleaming like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted, sparkling. Sasha felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite;
• It was the sort of frank need that New Yorkers quickly learn how to hide, and Sasha recoiled.
• She feared that the wallet would blurt into view.
• He came from someplace smaller. He had a thing or two to prove about how people should treat one another.
• “You’ve got a tub in the kitchen! I’ve heard of that—I mean I’ve read about it, but I wasn’t sure there were any left."
• It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Sasha’s eye, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration.

• A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn’t that a fairly accurate description of lust?
• The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.
• As he sipped, a sensation of pleasure filled his whole torso the way a snowfall fills up a sky.
• She turned to him, somber now. “There’s no way, Bennie,” she said. “We need each other.”