After her first novel, The Invisible Circus, a coming of age story, she wrote Look At Me, the satirical story of a model who loses her looks in an accident, and then a gothic novel, The Keep. Every time she starts a new project, she says, she is itching to relieve the exhaustion of the previous one. It breaks with the genre of her previous novel, as did the novel before that and the one before that, as is Egan's habit. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. As well as the Pulitzer, she has won the National Book Award (beating Jonathan Franzen's Freedom), a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and yet, she says, 'I've never been that confident. In person, Egan is slight, modest, at odds perhaps with the force of her prose, which is lit by a casual brilliance and so compacted as to be almost tangible. 'If I was a person observing it I would be, like, when will she stop?'

There is such a thing, says Egan, as over-exposure. 'Are you Jennifer Egan?' asks the waitress in the (very booky) part of Brooklyn where we meet for lunch. 'It felt like a potentially colossal lost opportunity.' A year later, Goon Squad is a bestseller, has been bought by HBO for TV adaptation and a few days after my interview with her, went on to win the Pulitzer prize for fiction. The publishers wondered if the title was a problem what is a 'goon squad'? It might be off-putting to women, they thought. When Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad was first published in the United States, it got great reviews and sank like a stone.

The invisible circus book review