A Visit from the Goon Squad

The winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the contents of the book elude any sort of plot description. And the book jacket doesn't do the novel justice. So I'll just talk about my perceptions of the book instead.

Egan's book is a stunning piece of literary fiction. Each chapter is from a different perspective of another character, each individual loosely connected in a social network that extends across three generations and a variety of professions. Egan switches narrative styles with each chapter as well, my personal favourite being the chapter done entirely in PowerPoint slides.

In amongst the display of Egan's impressive technical skills, is an intriguing narrative and an artistic and moving examination of her themes. Egan show more explores the idea of the transition of an individual's character from one point in time to another beautifully and raises questions in the reader's own mind about identity. She also manages to include a wealth of musical references in such a wide variety of genres any reader should be able to identify at least a couple. Most impressive is her metaphor of the "goon" that permeates the narrative and makes it a wonderfully poignant read. While I may not re-read this book, the rating reflects my tremendous respect for Egan's skills and beautiful handling of her themes. show less

I really didn't want to like this book. I wanted to write it off as another depressing trip from starry eyed post-college highs to grounded and defeated middle age, wrapped too neatly in 21st century realism. Instead, her tender approach to failed 20-something delusions of grandeur and the long trek back to self respect and redemption was delicately woven between the time-hopping narrative. My only objection is the presence that 21st century realism that the Iowa workshop has worked hard to cement into the status quo. This isn't the right place to begin explaining my qualms with that, so I'll just say that A Visit from the Goon Squad is lovely, warm, and a little sad.

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

81. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
2010, 340 page trade paperback
read Dec 12-19
Rating: 4.5 stars

I know I can’t do justice to this. Egan’s writing here has a hyper current feel - she maximizes the details, breaks up the narrative into chronologically out of order pieces with different narrators, she works to keep something of a hip edge in the writing, keeping it vibrant, there is an emphasis on technology and even a futuristic element as the 2010 publication seems to extend through about maybe 2018 or 2020. Most notably she does all his stuff, messing with the reader, keeping the book interesting and yet still manages to create a very moving work. Parts of this book are really beautiful. (There are elements of show more Infinite Jest in all those descriptions, but you would never confuse the two books.)

I really like how she makes fun of characters as she attaches you to them, and how she adds human touches in such unexpected moments. How she centers the story, arguably and at best loosely, around a character she picks up, makes fun of, and then drops, who never once becomes important in this play on the music industry and yet who grounds the book wonderfully. Anyway, fun, intelligent, creative, moving, recommended.

2015
https://www.librarything.com/topic/197329#5388059 show less

More mopey middle-aged ex-punk rockers... I guess they're all coming out of the woodwork now as good novel subjects. And I have to say it's alluring, if only to stack up my own mopiness (or lack thereof) against theirs. This one was linked shorts, very philosophical about the passing of time underneath all the rock'n'roll trappings. I liked it, and I'm still mulling it over.

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

Unlike some readers, I quite enjoyed the shifts in time and perspective, especially those that articulated characters' future outcomes as asides. Much of the novel might be characterized thematically as "rust never sleeps," though the other pole of that theme emerges as well: Some people move on, whatever form that may take and whatever pleasures or regrets this inspires. American rock is the symbolic ground, but it could as easily be sports, or beauty pageants, or politics. Are you stuck in your childhood/teen years/early adulthood, do you change, are you happy about the changes? These are the novel's big, underlying questions.

There is much reviewer discussion of the chapter written in PowerPoint. I understood it as a use of that show more medium to show how cultures shift and change with the generations. What are the great pauses or breaks in each person's life? What makes it good? The questions are still the same. show less