In 2011, Jennifer Egan won a Pulitzer Prize for writing a novel titled A Visit from the Goon Squad. If you are someone who is a passionate and an honest-to-God reader, then this or any other award, of course, should not mean anything to you, and neither did it mean anything to me when I picked it up during my search for a new book to read. What actually made me buy it from an overpriced bookstore in an overpriced shopping mall was the unquestionable quality of writing on all three randomly opened pages.

It does not take more than reading half a paragraph to realize that you are dealing with the work of someone with a profound, intricate understanding of the economics of words and attention spans. Someone who clearly spent a lot of time hammering their ideas and thoughts so they could fit into a regular-sized novel, someone who put real effort into finding a way to squeeze their inner cosmos into as few words as possible – without drowning the reader with how much they actually have to say. In an era of publishing that prioritizes volume and deadlines, it is far too common to open a book by someone who had the opposite challenge, one of finding a way to fill up as many pages as possible before they have to use up another one of the very few interesting concepts, thoughts, or images they managed to come up with. After twenty minutes of picking up books and browsing various pages that clearly only exist to set up some cheap (or not, does not matter) twist at the end, the bombardment of substance in every line of A Visit from the Goon Squad felt like receiving communication from outer space.

The first chapter opens with an avalanche of emotion and experience so vivid and detailed that I could not resist concluding that the character who was lying on the couch, explaining her last episode of kleptomania, could not be anything else but a self-insert character for the author. The depth and nuance with which these memories, and more importantly, thoughts and sensations tied to them, were communicated to the reader, along with how unique and different they felt from anything I had read before, made me conclude that the author must have experienced the words on the page in her own actual life. Fortunately, I was so, so wrong. This level of detail, authenticity, and idiosyncratic beauty that makes the first chapter so impactful is part of the depiction of every single character’s testimony from cover to cover. With chapters that change locations, time periods, and protagonists, the book reads almost as a collection of case studies of people dealing with problems so fundamentally human and so easily relatable, yet at the same time so creatively unique – case studies all tied together only by occasional interactions, family connections, and, most importantly, music.

While there are so many things that could be said about the characters of the book, one of them seems the most important. They are straight up not having a good time – not one of them. The depth of the characters lies in the way they approach their issues, how they manage and, more importantly, fail to solve them, and all the so many consequences these problems leave behind. This inevitably means that the reader might be left with some negative emotion upon closing the book, something that many people are not looking for in books they read for pleasure, entertainment, or to broaden their understanding of the world. Be that as it may, people and their problems seem to be an inexhaustible source of fascination for writers and readers. Perhaps we can understand why if we remember the iconic opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has gone on to be accepted as a classic in nearly all parts of the world. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Indeed, it does seem like happiness is always the same, at least in its most basic features, easy to understand and easy to describe for those lucky or capable enough to experience it. On the other hand, evils such as addiction, loss of a loved one, or existential dread, always manifest in unique ways in every unique instance, their interaction with their unfortunate host always forming an irreplicable symbiosis with never-before-seen shapes and colors. In many ways, this book reads as the 21st-century update to the giants of Russian realism, with less focus on outdated themes of family values, social expectations, and societal hierarchies, which are replaced with uniquely modern themes of suffocating freedom, the emptiness of consumerism, and the heaviness of nihilism. After the introduction of a 7th different character that reminds you of so many people you know but whose life’s details are unlike anything you have ever heard of, after the 20th paragraph that ends with a devastating five-or-less-words cynical remark, you cannot escape the feeling that you are holding a real masterpiece in your hands.