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A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad - I make it a point to try and read all the books that win the Pulitzer prize. If this book deserved it then I am a purple duck-billed platypus.It's not that this book is terrible. In fact, I must say this book is unique. The story is told out of chronological order and there is an entire chapter of charts and graphs. Some chapters of this book are captivating and well written, others made me wonder why they were there in the first place. The novel revolves around a record company executive. He's not a very likeable guy either at the beginning nor at what passes for the end. The chapters are tied in some way to him but sometimes on a very far removed tangent. The book reads less like a novel than a series of short stories as we hear the disjointed tale of the characters. So essentially the book has no real plot.This book also is populated by nutty people who don't have both oars in the water. At times it seems the oddballs outnumber those who pass for normal by a wide margin. Not necessarily a bad literary tactic, but it gets repetitious by the end of the novel.If the story had been written with more cohesion, we would care more about the minor characters but with the story line seemingly run through a blender, we wind up with little snippets for the most part.For all that it was, and all that it could have been, to me it was nothing special.