Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco in the 1970s. She arrived after the ’60s had run their course, and only haunting leftovers caught her observant adolescent eye. In an article written for the magazine This Old House, Egan wrote, “Addled hippies in rainbow-knit caps playing bongos in Golden Gate Park, smells of pot and incense wafting in the air, and a deep stillness to the city, as if it were slowly coming to after a sharp conk on the head. I could almost hear the echoes of the wild parade I’d missed.” San Francisco’s legacy of acid rock and teenage runaways provides provenance for several characters in Egan’s remarkable new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, a finely braided meditation on time, memory, pop culture, and the perils of growing up in America.
