a visit from the goon squad by jennifer egan

It is seen in retrospect as a marker that carved an emptiness not only into Manhattan's skyline but also into people's ideas of how to rebuild their world's sense of self. The year 2001 falls just about at the midpoint of Egan's fractured spin of an increasingly techno-saturated epic. She proves this doubly with a deft sampling of writing styles to fit the different era or decade each chapter inhabits. The ones who save themselves-a twelve-year-old who maps her family's emotional terrain and her brother's autistic insights through Power Point, or the one-night-stand daughter of a Gotham publicity has-been-take to creative expression as their last, best hope. That these will often involve their parents is not only inevitable but also on the sadder side of the novel's tendencies. These will result in music, misunderstandings, various addictions, childish and sexual misconduct, and a next generation of children with special stories to tell.

This joins her to the proliferating number of novelists playing fast and loose with visions of the future this publishing year, but she makes that tomorrow wholly her own.įor all their punk toughness, the band cohort Egan introduces-including Scotty the genius guitarist, his rich girlfriend Alice, dark Bennie from the track's wrong side, the vulnerable beauty Jocelyn, Rhea the freckled, self-professed 'girl nobody wants' -is a classic high-school mish-mash, with attendant crushes and cruelties, misplaced yearnings and petty, lasting betrayals. When all is said and done-and there's a lot-it reaches a nearly pitch-perfect understanding of American culture and conflicts that brought us not only to the present but to ways of life, music, community and communication that Egan imaginatively foresees lying in wait. The life cycle of a band that starts out as Flaming Dildo in late-70s San Francisco gives the novel shape only in as much as its members, hangers-on, commercial enablers and products of assorted broken unions morph back and forth and far, far ahead in time, leading the reader on an achy, breaky course of fitting the pieces together. 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' seems put together eerily like a record album-even nostalgically, one might say, except that Bennie Salazar, the music producer whom the novel bears with through several decadent decades, insists that 'Nostalgia was the end-everyone knew that.' Chapter for chapter the novel has the initial feel of a series of short stories-or songs on a CD-only gradually and implicitly interlocking to express a particular sensibility and outlook. No disrespect is meant here, merely the acknowledgment that, in her last, successful novel, The Keep, she meshed Gothic mystery with techno-psychodrama, or, before that, in Look at Me, stabbed celebrity journalism nicely in the back.

A visit from the goon squad by jennifer egan