TIME'S a goon
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning new novel by Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad, boasts many interesting elements, but it is the character of Sasha, a troubled young kleptomaniac and assistant to a record executive, that stands out among these. The depiction of her compulsion—she even lifts things from her former boss’ lawyer during a contract meeting—is vivid, and Egan uses that particular problem as a starting point to navigate into Sasha’s past, and thereby find a way into the rest of the book.
Much of the stories in Goon Squad revolve around the music industry, and characters—as expected of the rock scene—can range from the eccentric to the almost insane. Sasha, aged about 35, works for Bennie Salazar, a former punk rocker turned record executive. Bennie is starkly aware of the passage of time and his own ageing body (not to mention a diminished sex drive that he tries to cure by placing gold flakes in his coffee), a theme that weaves itself throughout the chapters. Perhaps out of defense then, Bennie is exceedingly condemning of digitisation, calling it an “aesthetic holocaust” that has “sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.”
Another key character is Lou Kline, who had been Bennie’s mentor since his stint in a band as a young teen. Although he is proclaimed three-months dead in the second chapter Gold Cure, descriptions of Lou’s life-story prop up frequently to give us a picture of his personality. He turns out to be a smooth-talking flirt, who at once seduces Jocelyn and Rhea, both friends of Bennie’s who played in the same band. A man who believes “he will never grow old”, he is something of a caustic presence in the plot, a charismatic two-faced plotter who exhibits very little respect for the women in his life.
Egan’s book comprises of 13 chapters, all to do with individual perspectives—one of the reasons it is hard to decide whether to call the book a novel or an anthology of short stories. Among the 13, many chapters like Safari have been run in the New Yorker or Harper’s as short stories, and these work just as well separately as they do together. While mostly focusing on Bennie and Sasha’s past and present circumstances, the novel does interlock cohesively the stories of the other characters whose paths become entangled with theirs.
What makes for particularly intriguing reading in A Visit From the Goon Squad is the play with structure; Egan has employed a shifting-narrative, where the plot moves back and forth consistently between different points-of-view, and is written alternatively in first, second and third persons. The shifts occur chronologically as well, allowing for multiple levels of depth in the story. One of the most jarring parts of the book is a chapter that has been done entirely in a PowerPoint-style presentation. This willingness to experiment with conventional structures is one of the book’s many highlights.
Egan also demonstrates a keen understanding of the divergences of contemporary culture, especially the obsession with gadgets and social networks, incorporating these subtly into the text. For instance, in the last chapter, she captures the sort of punctuation-devoid language that has become popular in the SMS age, like with the lines: th blu nyt/ th stRs u cant c/th hum tht nevr gOs awy (The blue night/the stars you can’t see/The hum that never goes away).
Goon Squad is thus a fascinating, inventive novel built around a powerful metaphor. What Egan’s prose does is invoke the idea of aging and mortality, and the impact of that loss of innocence and youth on each of the characters. Time, in fact, emerges as the biggest goon of all. This is perhaps what the entire novel boils down to—that sense of inevitable change that comes with the passing of time, and the fact that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, any of us can do about it. At one point, Bennie asks his former band-mate Scotty, ‘“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” and Scotty shakes his head, saying, “The goon won.”
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