With today’s social media, savvy consumers are writing more than ever: 140-character tweets, long posts on Tumblr, and status updates on Facebook. But author Jennifer Egan prefers her legal pads and pens.
More than 100 of Egan’s fans crowded into International Affairs Building Tuesday night to hear the author of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad” speak. Her lecture was the third installment of “Rewiring the Real,” the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life’s series on the interaction among literature, technology, and religion.
Moderated by New Yorker fiction editor Willing Davidson, the discussion centered on the role of technology in both Egan’s writing process and the plot of “Goon Squad,” the most recent of the author’s four novels.
“Goon Squad” opens with a pair of quotations from Marcel Proust, whose “In Search of Lost Time” was also written during a time of innovation and technological change.
However, Egan describes herself as “a very low-tech writer,” and compared Facebook to “a huge Soviet apartment block where they move around your furniture and artwork when you’re not there.”
Nonetheless, she said she is intrigued by the impact of technology, particularly social networks, on how individuals interact.
“I’m fascinated by the fetishization of connection itself,” Egan said.
Partially influenced by the short-term connection and “lateral curiosity” that technology enables, the structure of “Goon Squad” is highly fragmented, jumping from one character to another and changing narrative style along the way. One chapter is even presented in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.
Egan likened “Goon Squad” to a concept album, “a big story told in pieces that sound very different from each other,” Egan said. “It was the farthest I could push in every direction while still having it work.”
Although the plot of “Goon Squad” loosely centers around music, Egan originally conceived of the work as a short story, and only chose to expand it after becoming intrigued by a brief description of a quirky music producer she had written in the first chapter. Egan claimed that such impromptu plot decisions are common in her writing process.
“I don’t really know what’s going to happen as I write … there are times when I sit down and think, ‘Let’s have some convergence,’ and nothing happens.”
A San Francisco native and alumna of the University of Pennsylvania, Egan spent two years studying at St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge. After graduating from college, Egan briefly went into journalism, but soon turned to writing fiction.
Egan described her experiences with the San Francisco punk scene as a teenager and a brief assignment covering a 1990s rap duo as the inspiration behind “Goon Squad.” For Egan, modern technology has put the New York music industry into “free-fall.”
Although she made it clear that modern technology has influenced her as both a consumer and an author, Egan ended the talk by expressing confidence in the resilience of her format of choice.
“The novel,” she said, “was invented as a flexible, strong, and staggering form.”
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