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Jennifer Egan A Visit From The Goon Squad

First published in 2010 and covering a period of around 50 years, from the 1980s to the early 2020s, Egan's novel is famous for breaking literary conventions. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, propelling Egan into the higher echelons of the literary world.

                                                                     

  
A Visit From The Goon Squad is not an easy read, though each component is a joy in itself.  Consisting of thirteen chapters, each a self-contained short story (Chapter 4, 'Safari', was originally published as a short story in The New Yorker), it concerns a large group of characters, loosely focused around music producer Bennie Salazar.  The chapters are not arranged chronologically, however, so it is difficult on a first reading to follow the story.

[If you wish to read the chapters chronologically, by the way, read them in the following order: four (1973), three (1979), eleven (1990), ten (1993), nine (1997), six (around 2000), seven (around 2002), five (2005), eight (2006), one (2005), two (2006), twelve (early 2020s), thirteen (Winter 2021-2).]

The novel draws on several other works of fiction, including Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past, T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and classical mythology.  However, Egan often playfully undermines such works as well as using them to support her central exploration of the effects of time.  For example, in one chapter, an uncle searches Naples for his missing niece and sees a picture of Orpheus and Eurydice, failing to recognise that he is himself enacting the story.  Many chapters consider the sterility of modern life, echoing Eliot's conclusions.

The novel's title is explained  in a conversation in chapter seven (“You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right?’).  This is a novel that plays with time, stretching from the known 1980s to the unknown 2020s (the book was first published in 2010), drawing parallels and contrasts between characters and eras, held together by the central trope/motif of the music industry. It juxtaposes different periods in the history of the ensemble cast of characters so that they can resonate in unexpected ways. For example, Sasha, one of the most frequently recurring characters, is first presented in the novel in Chapter One ‘Found Objects’, at which point in her personal timeline she has a good job as a PA to a highly successful record producer, but she is in therapy due to her kleptomania. The following chapter, ‘The Gold Cure’, features Sasha in her role as a highly competent PA, but moves the focus to her boss, Bennie. Straight away, in the first two chapters, Sasha’s vulnerabilities and capabilities are aligned and connected, the chapter where we see the world from her viewpoint revealing her weakness much more than when we see her from the ‘outside’.  Later, in one of the most inventive of the chapters, Sasha's daughter writes the entire chapter in the form of a Powerpoint display, and we see an older Sasha from a new viewpoint.

This is all very imaginative and inventive, but ideas alone don't make a novel readable.  I would argue that Egan's writing style is itself the thing that is most compelling.  The opening chapter, focusing on Sasha and her kleptomania, is fast-paced, darkly funny, poignant, verging on satirical in places, and full of life and energy.  The change in focus and often in style in each chapter is skilful and enjoyable, once you have decided to open your mind to it.  I was reluctant to read the novel at first, but in the end it drew me in and drew me on, right to the final page. And, though the individual components are each worthy in their own ways of accolades, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jennifer-egan

RATING:
A Visit From The Goon Squad    

**** 

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way