A book for hipsters, drifters and shoplifters

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

By Jennifer Egan

351 pages

Available at National Book Store

Sasha is a young woman with light fingers. She’s not exactly a shoplifter, but has a habit of “collecting” things from people — keys, scarves, binoculars, tools — without their knowledge. She’s driven by impulses she can’t quite understand, as are most of the characters in A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 2011.

Or is it a “novel” at all? Some have characterized Egan’s book as a series of linked short stories. Certainly the non-linear narrative structure supports this interpretation. But it’s also a book that requires a novel approach to reading: few of the dots are clearly connected until the end of the journey. There is no plot, per se: just the overlapping stories of various characters branching out from Sasha and her boss, Bennie Salazar, a music producer whose career extends from the ‘60s to the near future.

I started reading this book in Italy, on vacation. It was sitting in a hotel lobby bookshelf in Sorrento, the place where books left behind by guests end up, and I briefly considered lifting it — no one would have minded, really — but instead I hunted it up back in Manila. Coincidentally, part of the story takes place in Naples, a place we also visited, a place whose sad urban decay masks a kind of fossilized Belle Epoque glamour; Egan gets that right as well, as a family relative hunts down his niece Sasha where she is living a dangerous street life fueled by petty theft. Sasha is a kind of red-haired motif in the book: a musical phrase conveying the passage of time, or its possibility for reinvention.

Music is the constant thread. Author Egan is young enough for the ‘80s to be her touchpoint: bands with names like The Cramps and The Mutants and The Flaming Dildos matter — that and punk energy and something only the filtered lens of youth could dare call musical “truth” with a straight face. But this search for truth — or the search for what we believed in when we were young — is essential to A Visit from the Good Squad’s DNA. So many characters crisscross and intersect, you may think it all resembles a Robert Altman mosaic, or (God forbid!) one of those modern-life cinematic vistas like Crash or Babel, in which we learn that, wow, we’re all like, you know, connected.

Fortunate ly Egan has a much more nuanced hand; she allows each chapter to exist on its own terms, whether exploring an aging music producer and his 24-year-old girlfriend on safari with his two kids, or charting the unfortunate results when a once-hot PR agent takes on a political dictator as her client, and wants to set up a photo op with a gorgeous-but-troubled Hollywood starlet to “spin” her client’s likeability rating. Egan invests humor and a lived-in, exploratory pace as she unspools these stories; she wants you to feel time affecting these characters. Their fortunes jump forward and back; sometimes they’re up, sometimes down; she’ll toss in hints of where one or another will end up in 10, 20 years, and you’re surprised to feel relief that they end up okay.

At no point in the narrative does Egan use the phrase “a visit from the goon squad,” but there are clear signs as to what the book’s title is about. “Time’s a goon,” Bennie Salazer comments off-handedly, to a struggling slide guitarist who hasn’t been nearly as successful as his ‘80s heyday. “Is that even an expression?” the guitarist, Scotty Hausmann, asks. Bennie just shrugs.

Time is a goon in this narrative: it comes on strong, it roughs people up, it leaves them alone for a while, then comes banging at the door; when they’re up, it knocks them back down; when they’re down, it cruelly reminds them of better times. Time is the thing that people fear will come a-knocking. More than fear it, they know it; they feel it in their bones.

Of course, it helps to have a perch to fall from, if you’re going to rue the passage of time. For many in A Visit from the Good Squad, it was the ‘60s, or the ‘80s, or — let’s face it — whatever patch of turf you happen to call your own youth. In one amazing chapter — told entirely in computer graphics and Venn diagrams — Egan charts the family dynamic of a daughter and her half-autistic brother, who spends all his time analyzing the brief pauses in pop songs. On one occasion the father, a heart surgeon, asks his son, Lincoln, why song pauses matter so much to him, and Lincoln starts to go on forever about the specific length of silences in songs like Supervixen by Garbage and Long Train Runnin’ by the Doobie Brothers and Roxanne by The Police and Faith by George Michael, until the father can take no more and blows his stack: “Stop! Lincoln, please! Forget I asked!” This causes Lincoln to cry, until Mom comes and hugs him and says very softly, but with controlled fury, to Dad: “The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”  

And suddenly the whole “time is a goon” thing starts to make perfect sense.

HBO is now working on a mini-series of A Visit from the Good Squad, by the way. Do yourself a favor and read the book first.