Jennifer Egan Wins the Pulitzer

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on April 20th, 2011 at 04:03 AM | | Tweet

What's so exciting about Goon Squad having won, is that the book is risky and somewhat disjointed in that David Foster Wallace way.

The results are in! The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Winners were announced Monday.

It was a year of firsts. The Wall Street Journal won for the first time, (editorial writing on health care reform); Washington Post photographer, Carol Guzy, was the first photographer to win four Pulitzers; for the first time, the Pulitzer board did not award a prize for local reporting of breaking news. And, for the first time, a prize was awarded to reporting that did not appear in print: ProPublica’s online series “The Wall Street Money Machine,” which won for national reporting.

But, as a fiction writer, I always quickly scan through reportage and bee-line to fiction, where, this year, I was super excited to see this book in the esteemed winner’s circle.

Though I have yet to read “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” I adore Jennifer Egan. (“Look at Me” is one of my favorites.) What’s so exciting about Goon Squad having won, is that the book is risky and somewhat disjointed in that David Foster Wallace way. A reviewer claims that, “There is a madness to her method. She hands off the narrative from one protagonist to another in a wild relay race that will end with the same characters with which it begins while dispensing with them for years at a time.”

Seems that my reading list has been growing by leaps and bounds this year, a year which, ironically, has been deemed “an era of book death.” I’m enjoying the glut and the in-your-face proliferation of fabulous literary output. Luckily, one of the firsts in this Prize year was not the absence of quality fiction.