If you're still interested.....

More Jennifer Egan, from the Guardian:

"Are you Jennifer Egan?" asks the waitress in the (very booky) part of Brooklyn where we meet for lunch. There is such a thing, says Egan, as over-exposure. "If I was a person observing it I would be, like, when will she stop?"
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The idea for Goon Squad came to her after her reading group got stuck into Proust. It took them about seven years to plough through In Search of Lost Time, during which she became obsessed with how to represent entire lifespans, non-sequentially and in the way people actually experience them, that is as a constant negotiation between reflection and anticipation.
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After Goon Squad, she is thinking around the possibility of historical fiction, a more straightforward form of storytelling, because "I'm tired of the fragmented approach, and crave a centrality."
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(The book) is saved by pace and sheer readability. Egan is so swift and funny, so light on her feet, that her reputation lingers on the borders of chick-lit, which might explain her omission from the Orange prize shortlist in favour of more earnest titles.