Pulling off a multi-narrator story in a way that is both true to each character’s voice and not jarring and confusing to the reader is one of the tougher challenges an author can take on.

In “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Jennifer Egan gives us a narrator, then another, and another, and another, all while shifting time periods and taking us to a different angle of the overall tale through the eyes of another character.  These chapters could easily exist on their own, but she weaves the narratives together in a way that made me on multiple occasions go, “Oh THAT guy is back!”  It should come with a “Beautiful Mind”-style chart to keep everyone straight.

This book won a Pulitzer Prize so my endorsement is hardly going to add to the likeliness people will read it, but the interwoven story of an aging record executive, his younger self, his former band mates, his assistant, her college friends and boyfriend is, in short, delightfully written.  The people themselves are rich, complicated characters who for the most part all have problems, but in the most human of spirits, they try, even when that’s trying at being destructive to themselves and others.

The sign of a good read for me is being so into the story that I don’t flag many pages.  This is one of those.

And nothing I marked this time was to make a really substantive point.  The closest thing to that comes in a chapter narrated by Rhea, a young woman who likes the (then young) record exec named Benne, who himself likes another girl named Alice, who likes another from their group named Scotty, who likes another from their group named Jocelyn, who likes a then record exec who becomes Bennie’s mentor.  (That’s only a fraction of the kind of interplay at work here).

Rhea doesn’t think a lot of herself, especially in comparison with other girls.  Oddly enough, the main thing she dislikes about her appearance is that she has freckles.

“I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face,” she says.  “When I was little, my mom told me they were special.  Thank God I’ll be able to remove them, when I’m old enough and can pay for it myself.  Until that time I have my dog collar and green rinse, because how can anyone call me ‘the girl with freckles’ when my hair is green?”

I love that last line.  A lot of us have “freckles,” that thing we see so clearly in the mirror or hear when we open our mouths.  In most cases, nobody else notices.  It’s silly, but something in our mind makes us self-conscious.  So what can we do?  Dye our hair green or compensate in some other way that makes us care less about that supposed problem.

Speaking of what we see in the mirror, this other thing is completely random, but has been staring at me forever and certainly jumped out when I saw it on the page.  Rob narrates this chapter, and in this section talks about his close friendship with Sasha, Bennie’s later assistant.

“You know the scar on her left ankle from a break that had to be operated on when it didn’t heal right; you know the Big Dipper of reddish moles around her belly button and her mothball breath when she first wakes up.”

I’m missing one star (represented by the green), but have always thought there was something resembling a Big Dipper around my right collarbone and extending up onto my neck:

Let this be the only time I take my shirt off for a blog post.  Who would have guessed it would come in a book discussion?