Jennifer Egan’s inventive novel about the passage of time, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, honoured for its “big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.”
Egan, 48, has been highly praised for her searching and unconventional narratives about modern angst and identity. Her other novels include The Invisible Circus, Look at Me and The Keep. Critics were especially taken with A Visit From the Goon Squad, with its leaps across time and its experiments with format, notably a long section structured like a PowerPoint presentation. Earlier this year, she won the National Book Critics Circle prize.
“The book is so much about how change is unexpected and always kind of shocking,” she said by phone. Egan said she was inspired by Marcel Proust’s sprawling novel Remembrance of Things Past, which explored the passage of time. “His book of time is all about how the work of time is unpredictable and in some sense unfathomable,” she said. “So there’s no question that winning a prize like this feel unpredictable and unfathomable.”
The play Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, which examines race relations and the effects of modern gentrification, won the drama prize. The work imagines what might have happened to the family that moved out of the house in the fictitious Chicago neighbourhood of Clybourne Park, which is where Lorraine Hansberry’s Younger clan is headed by the end of her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.