A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2011 Pulitzer for fiction. And, Aldrin was raving about it.:) Which makes it a book that I could not pass up.

In fact, I went all the way to Fully Booked, twice, just to get my reserved trade paperback copy of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. I held off on the Kindle version because of some negative feedback about the powerpoint chapter (i.e., it was hard to read). Yes, there's a powerpoint chapter, which I found utterly brilliant and charming.

Forgive me if I can't summarize A Visit from the Goon Squad. I will have to seek recourse through this Publishers Weekly review.

We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie's one-time bandmate who all but dropped out of society, and Alex, who goes on a date with Sasha and later witnesses the future of the music industry. Egan's overarching concerns are about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, and lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn.

I think all of you who've read the book will agree that it's a pretty difficult book to summarize. There are multiple characters and multiple viewpoints. The narrative goes back and forth across time. You'd think with an experimental novel like this, it would be difficult to read, which is why its readability and strong storytelling is so refreshing.

I've come to that age when postmodernist gimmickry annoys me unless it is accompanied by an actual understandable story and relatable characters. Then again, really good writers, for all their linguistic gymnastics and literary pastische, always tell good stories and create characters that we know. In this regard, Egan is most definitely an excellent writer.

"Time is a goon," or so one of the characters claim. And time is indeed the preoccupation of the novel. Time and music and the connectedness of people. The rather clever thing that Egan did--the thing I loved most--is that the apparent fragmentation of the novel belies the inherent interconnection of it all. All the seemingly discordant voices (different narrators and language styles) combine to create a harmonious tune; pretty fitting for a novel wherein music is a strong motif. The style puts me in mind of the movie Crash, another exercise in weaving together discordant stories.

Egan, unlike many other less talented writers, never loses control of her novel. So, though at one moment I was reading about Bennie's wife and the dissolution of her marriage, then the next I was dragged several years ahead to the story about La Doll, Bennie's wife's boss, and then I was dragged again, this time way back to the past, to witness the downfall of Bennie's wife's brother, it never bothered me that I was being dragged.

And I think this implicit trust I placed in Egan was a function of her story and characters. Isolate the stories, and they can probably stand on their own as beautiful short fiction, with characters that you can recognize and some you really care about. For instance, the character and the story I really took to was La Doll. Initially, you meet La Doll as one of the most powerful PR people in the biz, but when it's her turn in the book's spotlight, we meet her years into the future after her downfall born out of pride. This time, she is merely Dolly, trying to scrape a living to support her young daughter, Lulu. Dolly still has her PR skills, but as she is already blacklisted from her original PR circle, she accepts the job of working on the image of a ruthless dictator who is suspected of genocide. In the entire story, you see Dolly's struggle to merge what she used to be, what she is, and what she wants to be. Dolly's story also leaves you caring a lot about Lulu and wondering what will become of her, which (thankfully) the novel answers in another later story.

But put all of the stories in Goon Squad together, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, because in one way or another, they all touched each other's stories. And I love the idea that, no matter how we move through each of our own little worlds, there is a connection to all our lives. I find this idea very comforting.

Perhaps one day I'll reread A Visit from the Goon Squad again and pay attention to all its music references and how it portrays the individual in the midst of the 21st century technology. But for now, if all it gives me is the thought of interconnectedness and that people across time change yet remain the same, all told in lucid and tender prose, then it has more than fulfilled its promise.

Oh, and I can't wait for the HBO series.:)