In Jennifer Egan's novel – if it can even be called a novel - is more like a collection of stories, or better yet a collection of  characters, is one that I find very challenging to describe, so I’m glad that you read it, and want to talk about it, too.  Bennie the former punk rocker, now a successful record executive.  Sasha a troubled young woman who works for Bennie.  Scotty, now a middle aged musician on the skids.  There are thirteen chapters in all, each told by one of the protagonists.  We first meet several of these characters as teenagers in the 1970s, and the stories span a period of about 40 years into the future 2020, and take the reader back and forth in time.   As far as setting is concerned, we wander from the therapy couch, to punk clubs of San Francisco, to a plush Park Avenue office, to New York’s polluted East River, to an African safari, to the streets of Naples, to an airfield in a Banana Republic.  Some of the characters are very sleazy, some are very vulnerable, some a little off-kilter.  The author sometimes deals with her characters harshly, and at other times, sympathetically. 

One of the characters in the book says, “Time is a goon squad, right?”  A good squad being something that bullies and punishes people.   And indeed time messes with everyone in this book – as time brings with it disappointments and loss and sorrow that haunt the past, present, and future.  And yet the book is not without humor.

So, this book sounds like it might be a mess, right?  Wrong!  It is small miracle of craftsmanship, and it has a very uplifting conclusion.