Super Sad Time Visits

I read "A Visit From the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan last spring, when I should have been studying. No regrets, which is certainly not the book's message, but just my efficient style of living. This sucker won the Pulitzer, so you don't need me to tell you it's good. It is incredible. It's a book that I mentioned the first week of my summer job, friendless and dressed like a Mormon. Name-dropping that book made a wonderfully smart and better cultured girl from Montreal look me in the eyes and become my friend. Several months later we wandered around Amsterdam high on mushrooms and were mistaken for prostitutes when we stood on a corner in the red light district. Which we found hysterical. And then I dropped a plate of fries with mayo dramatically onto a centuries-old stone bridge, loudly declaring "I can't deal with the fact I have a mouth."

The power of books, is what I'm saying. You never know what will happen, but it's probably crazier than you'd guess.

That's what "Goon Squad" does. Post-post modern or whatever you want to call it-- some of these clever contemporary writers are taking it to the future. Not quite like Margaret Atwood's enviro-dystopian books "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood". Those envision a near future when people drown and starve in the shitty shell of an Earth she thinks we're likely to inherit (her own views made clear in the chilling non-fiction "Payback").

"Goon Squad" does imagine some inevitable fraying. But it goes a bit farther into what people will remember and cry over in a time where communication speeds up and seeps into everything. "Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart goes even farther than that. I didn't like "Super Sad" as much as Egan's interwoven stories, if only because her fucked up characters are much easier to love. Though while Egan's book is definitely the superior work, Shteyngart lets his future world splay out in a weirder, yet creepily believable way. He describes a fall of the American Empire, and a world where people will stop reading, with young minds enmeshed in insta-images. Kind of like how my favourite girl from "Goon Squad" asks her lunch date if they can stop talking and just text, since she finds speaking exhausting.

Going even further, the young adults in "Super Sad" stylize with public nudity and recall fond childhood memories of watching violent anal porn. As my grandmother never said, it makes you think.

(Out of the five books I mentioned above, I think they're all worthwhile reads, but if you can only pick two, read "Good Squad" and "Payback".)