A Visit From The Goon Squad

Next up in my backed up book reviews is Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize winning A Visit From The Goon Squad, which was one of my favorite reads of 2011.

The novel is really a collection of stories tied together by various characters, so there’s no real way to summarize the plot. The “main” characters are Bennie, a middle-aged record executive when we’re introduced to him, and Sasha, who we first meet as Bennie’s thirty-something assistant. Each chapter has a central character that is linked to Bennie and/or Sasha in some way, but each does read as an independent story. We see the characters at various points in their lives. The novel opens with Sasha as Bennie’s assistant, but Egan also shows Sasha as a rebellious teenager who runs away to Italy, later as an older college student who loses a close friend, and then finally as a married mother of two decades in the future. Bennie goes from that aging record executive with marital problems, back to a mohawked teenager playing in a punk band, and ends up at the tail end of his career hoping to put on one last big concert.

It’s a creative book, with the chapters written in different narrative modes and styles. There’s a chapter written in the form of a newspaper article from a jailed reporter (complete with footnotes), a chapter entirely in PowerPoint (yep), and a chapter set in a near future where the younger generation prefers to communicate with handheld devices (basically texting), even when they're sitting next to each other. Not all of the stories are hits (I didn’t particularly like or understand the point of the story of the P.R. woman and the third world dictator, and the last chapter seemed a bit preachy for my taste), but most are (my favorite was probably the PowerPoint put together by Sasha’s twelve year old daughter), and so I definitely recommend checking this out.

“The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and That. Time. The. End. Is. For. Real.”

That quote is from the PowerPoint chapter I mentioned above, and it’s Sasha trying to explain to her frustrated husband why their son is so obsessed with pauses in songs (you know, where the music stops briefly and then starts back up). And this leads to the main theme of the book, which is that you can’t escape time. Time is the “goon” that visits all the characters. You never know where the world will take you and often it’s completely different than what you planned. The characters in these stories experience success, loss, pain, and joy. They have their ups and their downs, but time keeps on moving. One way the theme of time is illustrated is in the first and last chapters. The book opens with a story involving Sasha on a date (and as it turns out, a one night stand) with Alex, a new- to-New York professional, and it closes with Alex working for Bennie twenty years or so in the future. After a concert, Bennie and Alex (who is now married with a kid) try to track down Sasha’s old apartment in hope of finding her. But of course we know she isn’t there, she’s in California with her family. And that’s the point. That one night stand, that assistant, those are in the past. And what they're searching for is a time that is long gone.

Next Up: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer