A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?”

Very recently, this novel won the National Book Critic's Circle Award. The LATimes article announcing the win, was accompanied by a large photo of Jonathan Franzen and the headline read "Egan beats Franzen in National Book Critic's fiction prize". It didn't surprise me, the cult of Jonathan Franzen is as pervasive as it is confounding to me, and despite the fact that Jennifer Egan has been producing enjoyable and thought provoking fiction for years (The Keep was one of my favorite novels in the early 2000s), her name is not recognizable on an Oprah feud kind of level. Nonetheless it was an upsetting moment, reading that article, realizing that Egan's win could so easily be reframed as Franzen's loss. A lot has been said and written as of late about the dire straits of women in the literary world. Fiction by women is less published, marketed bizarrely and ghettoized to genre fiction sections of most book stores, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist - and for some reason I feel as if many readers are complicit in the same way people that complain about the music industry but never actively seek out alternative musicians are complicit. Seek it out, read it, not just because its written by a woman but because its good. Readers and writers are precious commodities, let's support each other - ok, descent from soap box.

So, A Visit from the Goon Squad is he kind of novel you read in one day but spend weeks absorbing. It is disarmingly readable, catapulting you through different time periods, personalities and points of view all relating back into the two concentric social circles of Benny Salazar and his assistant Sasha, and all swirling around the chaos that is the music industry of the past thirty years. The opening section of the novel concerns Sasha and her kleptomania, she ends up stealing the wallet of her awkward date and adding it to her collection of artifacts that form a kind of silent but visible archive of her pathology.

Egan is somewhat brutal, her characters are put through the ringer time and time again and sometimes they deserve it. I like this kind of brutality though (I mean, I LOVE Flannery O'Connor), and these particular emotional experiences ring true. There is only one false step in the novel - the last section attempted to get into a kind of predictive mode, imitating texting styles and giving a vision of a future youth (this seems to be a bit of a trend, next post will be about Super Sad True Love Story so more on this later). This aspect of the novel seems overstated and tacked on, especially in contrast with some of the more jarring and affecting moments.

A woman confronts the man whose sexual manipulations led her to addition and fantasizes about drowning him in his own pool even though he is attached to an oxygen tank and in a wheelchair - confronting the fragility of a person whose power once had grave consequences for you is both a devastating and liberating moment. Two men interact after their lives have diverged greatly, their musical connection forged in dingy clubs has led one to the top of a record company and one to a park bench in central park where every jogging woman who passes sends him into an emotional spiral about his ex wife. When Scott visits Benny on the top floor of his office building, he greets him with a raw fish - slamming it on his desk proudly, both indignantly and as a genuine offering. A former starlet whose career has nosedived takes a job to post as the girlfriend of a world leader whose reputation needs improvement due to his recent association with a certain genocide. Time is the goon here, challenging the importance of each individual character, wreaking havoc on their bodies and minds, daring them to confront their mortality but also their youth.

At times, the story can feel like a bit of a logic problem I used to love doing in elementary school - people connected by attributes and experiences, but you have to take a few steps back to see the fabric of connectivity. In juxtaposing their perspectives, Egan highlights the relative importance of a moment in time - something that represents a blip on the radar of one character becomes the formative experience of another, relationships occur internally more than externally, widening the gap between people and places that may be interlocking. Egan also forcefully uses flash forwards throughout the narrative - propelling minor characters rapidly into their future, giving us a glimpse of how that moment in time might gain significance or alternately fade into the backdrop.

With moments of shocking violence both imagined and real, Egan punctuates her characters' lives and the gradually expanding view of this ensemble cast casually sloughs off the familiarly myopic tendencies of many novels. Even in her more experimental moments that come off a bit silly - there is a now infamous "power point" chapter in which an obsessive child journals using power point - are still imbued with an emotional clarity and narrative purpose that holds it all together.