Writing. Differently.

The first thing I and, as I suspect, many of my peers did when I began to read Jennifer Egan's award winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad was flip through the pages to see how many pages our new book had in it. On our way to page 340 my peers and I noticed a startling anomaly beginning at page 234, seemingly titled "Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake" and ending at page 309 (234). This chapter, or story, comes as a PowerPoint presentation from Sasha's daughter, Alison, about her brother Lincoln's obsession with pauses in rock music, her father's effect on his family, and the abnormalities in their day to day life. The anomaly certainly served as a blessing to me, and others if I may infer so much about my fellow classmates, due to, not only the lack of writing, but also exactly how Egan wrote it. While most people, including myself, enjoyed the former due to the lack of reading required, I personally enjoyed the typography used by Egan to evoke her character's emotions. The pathos that heavy typography can evoke can not compare to any other type of writing, no matter how proficient the author. I have a deep seeded love for this kind of intense typography after experiencing it in the entirety of another book (actually the best example of typography I have ever seen or heard of) Mark Z.Danielewski's House of Leaves. The book's writing evokes so much emotion and creates much more immersion than if Danielewski had merely wrote the novel like any other (an example of his text below). In the picture, he breaks the text into five different sections, gives the reader no indication of which to read first, and worst of all they all relate to entirely different subjects; The farthest left simply is a list of houses, the two squares are a list of supplies for some unknown project (the left one is the list on the previous page mirrored, as if it had bled through the page), the middle text comes as a argument between two friends over their current situation inside the titular house, the footnote is an anecdote about explorers trapped in a cave in Borneo, and the extreme right column is a list of unknown names upside down. This text style occurs for about twenty pages, adding columns, taking some away, until a final statement at the end of the section states "Picture that. In your dreams"(House of Leaves, 141). This section parallels the characters fright and confusion at their situation and genuinely leaves the reader feeling the exact same way. While Danielewski's book operates this way the entire time, Egan's only happens for one chapter, but I still enjoyed that chapter very, very much. The section about what Alison hears when falling asleep made itself my favorite in the chapter, the simple diction between her and her brother expressed through fragmented, monosyllabic (what an ironic word), sentences creates a sort of empathetic bond and parallel between the narrator and the reader. I personally have had some midnight discussions about nothing, just tossing one word out at a time, to waste time before falling asleep, it evokes a sense of nostalgia. This bright feeling, Egan then juxtaposes with the eerie "' Okay. I know'" (302). These statements have multiple interpretations, one coming as the last thing said before Alison fell asleep, the other coming as some kind of omission from Alison herself. The former just creates more nostalgic pathos, while the later, when paired with the logos given prior about her families problems, most notably her father's drinking, implies something much darker. The alteration of both delivery, as plain text, not speech bubbles, and font support the later, shifting the tone to care-free to tense, in my opinion, and made me very sympathetic toward both Lincoln and Alison. This use of typography by Egan certainly improved my relation to the book, and gave her some significant merit in my further adventures in book reading; I greatly admire her typography due to the pure emotion and immersion it brings while reading A Visit from the Goon Squad.