Last week I read Jennifer Egan’s strange book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer for fiction this year. I say Goon Squad is strange because it’s marketed as a novel, though it’s clearly more a collection of stories than a novel, but it really isn’t a collection of short stories, either. It’s an odd little book that seems to defy categorization.

Egan’s book is not the first collection of linked stories, and it’s not even the first to call itself a novel. I can’t help but compare it to Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, which I’d read just a couple of weeks before I read Goon Squad. Rachman’s book felt, to me, like a collection of linked short stories that the author (or publisher, who knows?) tried to force into the mold of  a novel by providing some (very dull and predictable) interludes between each chapter that told the overall story of the newspaper that (most of) these characters worked for. The stories themselves were incredibly good, but I thought the book would have been much better if Rachman had cut the interludes and published the book as a short story collection (but, of course, if he had done that, it never would have gotten published by a major press like it did; it never would have made the New York Times Bestseller List).

Goon Squad is different, though. While there is no overall story arc, and each chapter of the novel has a different main character and zooms in on a different part of the novel’s timeline—which, like in Rachman’s case, would normally scream story collection to me—each individual chapter doesn’t necessarily have a story arc, either. Some of them do. Some of the chapters definitely feel like self-contained short stories, with the beginning, middle, end, conflict, resolution, and character change that the term “story” usually implies. But most of the chapters feel more like snapshots of specific times in the characters’ lives (from teenage to early adulthood to middle age to old age). String them all together, the way Egan did, and you still don’t have an overall story, but look at them separately, and you don’t really seem to have individual stories, either (with some exceptions).

So how do we categorize A Visit from the Goon Squad then? Egan (or her publishers) chose to sell it as a novel, and maybe that was partially because most readers aren’t interested in short story collections and partially because something is possibly gained, some slow building of understanding of the book’s underlying themes, if you read the “stories” in the exact order they appear in the book. Call it a story collection, and people might skip around or not read certain stories at all, and ultimately, those people might miss out on the whole point of the book, which I’d guess can only really be discovered by reading every chapter and then thinking back on the connections between them.

Because that’s the thing about the book: there are very interesting themes at work here, which begin to reveal themselves the further you get into it. In the most obvious way, Goon Squad is about the passage of time, about growing up and growing older and becoming, in spite of yourself, all the things you never thought you would: a middle ager who is suddenly very concerned with her status at the country club and finds herself hanging out with republicans; an aging punk-rocker turned corporate, sell-out music producer; an eczematic failed novelist who becomes a celebrity journalist and, in the novel’s most disturbing chapter, attempts to rape (and contemplates murdering) a beautiful nineteen-year-old starlet during an interview.  

These characters are raw and, most of them, despicable, but they’re despicable in that way that all people are despicable when you really hold a microscope to them. They are, in other words, very real—vivid and well-developed, everything well-written characters should be. And ultimately the book is not meant to be a “story” or even “stories” about these characters; instead, the book shows us snippets of their lives at key moments and then pulls back and lets you see how they grew up, sold out, became fat and greedy and jaded, became bad people: thieves and would-be rapists and bad parents.

“Time,” as two different characters point out in two different chapters, “is a goon,” and it comes for us all in the end.

This book, then, is something entirely different: not a novel, not a short story collection, not exactly compelling as you’re reading it but extremely interesting once you finish and step back to ponder it all as a whole. That’s right, I found Goon Squad boring as I was slogging through it—it took me almost a full week to read this one, 275 page book—but once I read it, I was glad I did. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, and while a little more plot, a little tension, would have made the experience of reading the book more enjoyable, overall, Goon Squad was definitely an excellent work of literature, and I can understand why it won the Pulitzer.