BIG UPS: Penn alum Jennifer Egan wins Pulitzer for fiction

Last June, Dead Milkmen frontman/CP scribe Rodney Anonymous reviewed Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. And oh, how wrong he was.

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BIG UPS: Penn alum Jennifer Egan wins Pulitzer for fiction

POSTED: Tuesday, April 19, 2011, 10:10 AM

Filed Under: Big Ups

Yesterday it was announced that University of Pennsylvania Class of 1985 alumna Jennifer Egan has won a 2011 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. (For a full list of Pulitzer winners, click here.) She won $10,000, beating out Jonathan Dee (The Privileges) and Chang-rae Lee (The Surrendered).

Egan will read from her award-winning novel next month as part of the Kelly Writers House Alumni Weekend (Sat., May 14, 4 p.m., free, RSVP at whalumniweekend@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-746-POEM, 3805 Locust Walk, writing.upenn.edu/wh); till then, read what Dead Milkmen frontman/City Paper scribe Rodney Anonymous had to say about her work in our June 2010 Book Quarterly, and feel free to argue with him in the comments.

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad would have worked quite nicely as a collection of short stories (which is really what the world really needs right about now). Sure, it wouldn't have exactly been on par with Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge, but with Egan's considerable gifts for constructing interesting, quirky characters and her skill at capturing the feel of a given time and place, this could have been a tremendously satisfying read.

Instead, the author gives in to the temptation to employ the gimmick of creating fragile links between the characters and moving them about in time and space — allowing a teenager to attend a concert in San Francisco and then, a few chapters later, to be on safari in Africa with his children and new, younger wife. Someone should have told Egan that what worked for Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Slaughter House Five, is not necessarily applicable to a 35-year-old kleptomaniac living in Tribeca. And as for the entire chapter made of Power Point presentations, well, Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel hit the nail on the head when he said, "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever."

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