A Visit from the Goon Squad

This was an astonishing book. Every single chapter from a different character's POV. Chapters written in 1st person, in 2nd person, in 3rd person. Jumping around in time, in place, in tone. Every chapter could stand alone, but they did mesh together, sometimes directly, sometimes tangentially. And despite all this high-degree-of-difficulty stuff, the writing was just FANTASTIC. Most Pulitzer Prize-winning books are big and important and boring, but this one was fun and engaging. Highly, highly recommended.

Four and a half stars.

Jennifer Egan's novel starts out in fairly typical New York City Novel fashion, which had me a little bit worried at first -- Oh my god, is this going to be yet another novel about sad New York City souls who pass in the night looking for that elusive meaningful connection? groan -- but Egan soon quells any fears that this is the 744th iteration of Slaves of New York or, even worse, Sex and the City.

Goon Squad is quasi-novel, quasi-short stories, going back and forth in time from the late 70s to a near and dystopian future. The characters recur, shown at different points in their lives, sometimes before they're even born. The backdrop to this narrative is music -- how it accompanies our lives, informs our lives, show more and brings back sharp, sometimes painful memories.

The novel will probably not be much beloved by readers to want to "care about the characters." Egan's characters are flawed, often selfish, and often do reprehensible things. (It is set in New York, after all.) Nonetheless, Egan's greatest accomplishment in this book is how thoroughly and richly she portrays each character, even the relatively minor ones. And despite the book's diffuse structure, Egan manages to keep the narrative strong and clear.

People have complained that the book is gimmicky, not only because of its unusual form, but because there's a chapter done entirely in PowerPoint. Yes, that's also potentially groan-worthy, but the PowerPoint chapter actually works, probably because of Egan's brilliance at getting the reader into her characters' heads. show less

Once you get past the fun of a “novel” whose chapters are each written from a different viewpoint and at different times in the lives of a loose collection of bridge-the-century Americans. Once you get past the clever second person narrative chapter, or the PowerPoint essay chapter, or the gonzo journalism interview chapter, or the Shteyngartesque future history chapter. Once you get past being even grudgingly impressed with the bravado. You will feel sad. Because the overriding emotion that Jennifer Egan’s impressive post-post-modern “novel” evokes is sadness. At least for me.

Most of the narrative voices in A Visit from the Good Squad are crushed by regrets for things done or things they will do, mingled with nostalgia. Or show more perhaps all nostalgia is somehow rueful. Even the child narrator of the PowerPoint chapter (it’s not so strange; there have been PowerPoint “story” templates for child educators around for years) is weighted down with fears of a planet in mass decline and parents who are barely coping. And the babyish txt-language of the final chapter does not hold out much hope for any meaningful communicative future. And yet, when you get past all that, that elegiac tone and content, there is a real quest for narrative and aesthetic purity, whether in the “music” of Cezanne’s colours or the variety of silences in a musical fermata. Definitely worth a read. show less

I seem to have read a fairly large number of books recently that are comprised of inter-locking stories. There was “Olive Kitteridge,” and “Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” and also the quirkily original “The Imperfectionists.” Enter Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” a very clever book that turns those other books on their heads. She not only creates a series of interconnected stories, weaving them back and forth in time, but includes, I believe for the first time, a chapter presented in PowerPoint mode. She’s good enough that none of it seems contrived or gimmicky. It all works beautifully.

The stories are centered on the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record producer and his show more one-time assistant Sasha and span the years 1979 through about 20 years into the future. This is much too complicated a plot to try to summarize and it is a book that I will try to reread in the next six months because I think that is how the stories will gel for me. A very interesting yet very challenging read, there were times when I couldn’t pin down the time frame and then Egan would throw out the words that would immediately solidify when the story was taking place without giving the actual date. She draws connections and parallels between her characters and the dying music industry because this is, above all, a book about rock and roll. Patterned after albums which have an A and B side she is able to draw comparisons to her struggling characters lives: an overweight, down on his luck rocker; a young girl with a stealing propensity; a has been publicist who tries to resurrect her career on the back of a Central American dictator and a washed-up actress; a young journalist who loses control of his story and himself as he tries to rape the young actress he’s interviewing; and along the way the story seamlessly turns in on itself and makes for a fascinating mosaic.

The closing chapter, which takes place in the future, reveals how society may have evolved about twenty years from now and the author chooses her words carefully:

“Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words---“friend” and “real” and “story” and “change”---words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity,” “search,” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?” (Page262)

Smooth, polished writing carries you along and Egan’s ability to draw deep, complex characters and to connect to the reader with great storytelling makes each story compelling and able to stand on its own. But it is as you start to make the connections that you find yourself smiling at the ingenuity of the narrative. Highly recommended for the reader willing to be patient for the big reward. show less

I find on here that people either love this book or hate it. While I agree with the many sentiments that the characters are fairly poor human beings, I think I enjoy the humanity of their failings. I enjoy the struggle and honesty of the sometimes insignificance of the distinction between who we think we are and who we actually become. I am also a sucker for intertwined characters in any book. I did not know this book won a pulitzer until after the fact and it is helpful to me to go in having no expectations, when others might have felt more disappointed.

I became a teenager about ten years after news of a Black Flag show could put the LAPD's riot squad on standby, but eighties-era hardcore -- that ruthlessly minimalist, explosively aggressive variant of punk rock -- rotted my brain straight through anyway. Imagine my surprise, then, when I figured out that that scene -- or rather some its San Francisco-based precursors -- had become the subject of a Real Book that had gone off and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The genre's come a long way since "Ack Ack Ack."

It also sort of surprised me that "A Visit from the Goon Squad" was, at least in part, about selling out. As a teenage music obsessive, the question of who was and who wasn't going to sign with a major took up altogether too show more much of my time. I eventually grew up, as all teenage music obsessives do, and I moved on from the issue. The world itself seemed to have moved on, too -- the guy from Of Montreal even changed one of his song's lyrics at Outback Steakhouse's request and claimed that the entire concept of "selling out" had lost its meaning. But it takes on new life here. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" isn't to be confused with an argument for punk or indie purity -- which may always have been an unattainable goal anyway. Still, many of Egan's characters find themselves no longer young or in real-deal middle age and have forgotten, or been made to forget, who they once were. While its tone is never regretful or brooding, much of Egan's concerns the manner of compromises we're forced to make as time goes by and how those past selves might be, if not exactly recovered, at least honored in some way. This is, in other words, a great book for anyone who ever wore out a copy of Fugazi's "13 Songs" album or woken up wondering how the heck they turned into the person they are.

Egan also devotes some time to her characters' search for that rarest of all things -- the real. This is, after all, a novel that touches on punk rock, which is a genre that fetishized authenticity, or at least its own conception of it. By the book's last chapter, punk rock is as distant a cultural memory for its younger characters as ragtime is for today's kids, and while the environment has, unsurprisingly, kept degrading at speed, the author also shows that the youngest generation has something to feel hopeful about. It was a pleasant surprise to come across this non-dystopian future, but it is very much of a piece with the novel's fluid, productive approach to narrative. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" could be called, I suppose, episodic, but then Egan's hardly the first writer to tell a non-linear story. We see a couple of punk girls eat a fancy restaurant, a record producer go on a safari in Africa, a disoriented young woman make her way through Europe. We meet these same characters in other contexts, when they are living other lives. The author sometimes pauses the narrative entirely to tell us exactly how a character we meet in passing ends up faring in life. In the manner of an old friend we haven't seen in ages, she tells us how things turned out for everyone. But the book's episodes don't always connect in a strictly narrative sense, and there are few events here that lock any character into any particular fate. While not everybody ends up finding what they're looking for, this lends "A Visit from the Goon Squad" a loose-limbed, generative aspect that I found profoundly satisfying. What Egan shows us feels meaningful, but real life happens, as it so often does, somewhere in the background, while we're not really watching. From a literary perspective, it's one thing to say that the world is a big and surprising place, but by relating these loosely connected, open-ended bits of narrative, Egan actually succeeds in showing that it is. This isn't a minor achievement. This airy, extended structure also has the unexpected side benefit of allowing its protagonists the time and space they need to genuinely work on themselves. In some particularly heartening cases, we see time and effort turn chaos into stability and anger into purpose. To paraphrase Freud, these characters' journeys are proof that work and love can still work wonders. Not everybody needs to listen to Flipper -- who also, shockingly enough, get mentioned here -- but maybe this is the sort of story that everybody needs to hear, in some form or another. Recommended whether you ever gave yourself a Germs burn or not. show less

I probably need to reread this to fully grasp the connections between every single character, but there's a loose thread between Sasha, Teddy, Rob, Allison, and Lincoln that strikes me the most. Sasha, a runaway kid who was pushed into sex work at an early age, is discovered by her nonchalant uncle, Teddy, who for once in his dull and uninspired life, takes incredible strides to care for his niece. He stays up with her to see the sun, despite Sasha's protests and efforts at pushing him away. Years later, Sasha does the same for Rob, a closeted and suicidal young man who thinks of Sasha as the one person who anchors him to the world and all its beauty.

Rob's tragedy and Teddy's kindness reverberates across Sasha's life, and from the show more perspective of her daughter, Alison, we see that Sasha is transformed by the pain (and beauty) of her life. She loves her children fiercely; her son, Lincoln, is autistic, and we see Sasha treat him with the same gentleness and love that she treated Rob. Her son's interest in the pauses in music "connects him to the world," she tells her husband, who is momentarily frustrated at his son's hyperfixations. She indulges Lincoln, never wanting him to feel as lonely as Rob (and she) did. Maybe because once, a long time ago, Sasha's uncle waited for her till sunrise. Rob, Lincoln, and Alison may not know that, but this is the beauty of love. Time's a goon, a character says. But love, as Egan shows, ruptures time's tyranny, even if it is for less than a day.

There are sections (Selling the General and the news article on Kitty Jones) which left me cold at first, but on a second read, is neccessary in its cruelty - an alternate view of a life of another young girl who have survived a brutal sexual assault, and perhaps - we are left to wonder - isn't as lucky as Sasha, who had Teddy to look out for her. Kitty isn't given a chapter on her own (unlike Jocelyn) and that silence is just as damning as overt revelations that take place in the novel. Another character muses, "I want to know what happens between A and B." And isn't that what life is - getting from point A to B? So much happens in-between. For others, nothing at all. show less