Written for English 364: The Contemporary Novel at the University of Michigan in 2021
A Visit From The Goon Squad shouldn’t work. A novel with over a dozen major characters and no sense of a linear timeline, made up of interview snippets and a Powerpoint among other perspectives, seems likely to be a jumbled, confusing mess to read. Against these odds, Jennifer Egan transforms these elements into a cohesive story that chronicles the inevitable passage of time and the universal regrets that plague us all. Goon Squad has been the most enjoyable novel for me to read so far this year, and its ability to successfully stretch the boundaries of the novel as a category by manipulating time and human connection allows readers to deepen their understanding of the world and of their place within it.
Egan’s novel mainly follows the lives of Bennie Salazar, a retired punk rocker-turned-record executive, and Sasha Blake, his assistant with a mysterious past and a penchant for pickpocketing. These two characters’ lives are intertwined with many others through numerous complex connections: Bennie is married to and then divorced from Stephanie, who works for La Doll (or Dolly), who goes on to become professionally involved with movie star Kitty Jackson, who is interviewed by Stephanie’s brother Jules. Sasha goes on a date with a man named Alex who later works with Bennie and Scotty, Bennie’s former bandmate. Bennie’s mentor Lou goes on a safari in Africa with a local warrior whose grandson will go on to move to America and marry Lulu, La Doll’s daughter. You get the gist.
I found Good Squad to be one of those “hard to put down” books. This was mainly due to the “relay race” quality of the chapters. Each of the chapters contained one or several callbacks and connections to other characters and other stories, whether that was through an ex bandmate’s former assistant’s husband or a dictator’s fake girlfriend’s daughter. These small snippets of information kept me interested and invested in each of the characters, even when they were introduced at random. These threads of connection do get confusing the longer you read, so I recommend referencing a character map to help contextualize the characters within the lives of others, as well as making a note of the year or general time period that a chapter takes place in. Although it does require some referencing back, Egan’s writing style is one of the main reasons that this novel succeeds where any other novel might fail.
The parent-child relationships in Goon Squad were another major reason for why I think I felt so connected to the novel. I have spent a lot of time examining my own relationships with my parents and the powerful emotions that arise from these relationships, which are often messy and misunderstood. My parents went through a tempestuous divorce when I was in middle school that I found myself stuck in the middle of, and this led to me becoming bitter and resentful towards them. Experiencing the visceral protectiveness and love that Dolly feels towards Lulu despite her daughter’s embarrassment of her past failures parallels certain aspects of my relationship with my parents and reminds me of the guilt I feel when I purposefully hurt them. Bennie’s divorce from Stephanie also impacts his relationship with his son, Christopher; he feels distant from him and cannot resist “the exquisite connection that came of defying his ex wife in unison. Betrayal bonding,” in order to forge a connection with his son (Egan 24). As someone who held the perspective of the child in situations like these with divorced parents, it was poignant for me to experience it from the perspective of a parent struggling to relate to their child after the trauma of divorce.
Goon Squad is, at its core, a novel about time. The passage of time, the inevitability of time, and every thing, good or bad, that time brings. Even simply the fact that the chapters aren’t arranged in chronological order calls back to the idea of time. The random, jumbled order of the stories reminded me as I was reading of how we recall memories–not in a linear fashion but rather through threads that weave all of these memories together. All of the characters are worried about time–Bennie drinks gold flakes in his coffee to try to rediscover his sex drive, Sasha lies about her age on her dating profiles, Lou stays entrenched in his reckless rockstar ways long into old age. The characters feel, as most of us do at a certain point, that the best days of their lives are behind them and they are left to pick up the pieces of broken relationships and failed dreams. As Bennie muses, “nostalgia was the end–everyone knew that.” (Egan 37). The characters find defeat in the passage of time, but they also find hope. Lou’s bandmate Scotty performs a wildly successful concert after decades of being a hardworking fisherman, La Doll escapes her failed career in the spotlight and moves to upstate New York to open a gourmet shop, and retired rockstar Bosco successfully completes one last tour before settling down to become a dairy farmer. The ups and downs of Goon Squad’s characters serve to remind us that life is nebulous, and there is always the chance to start again and to be better.
Interrelated with time, the novel is also interested in human connection. All of the characters are connected in some way, whether they know it or not. These unnoticed connections, threading one person to another to another, are the essence of what makes humanity and determines how we live. Egan’s ability to make her characters flawed and sometimes unlikeable, the way we all are, allows readers to connect with them as well. Usually when I enjoy a novel, it has a lot to do with the fact that I enjoyed the characters. In Goon Squad, however, I actually found many of the characters to be rather unlikeable. Because the chapters are told from their perspectives and the reader gets a look inside their minds, the flaws of the characters are on full display. Rather than turning me off of the novel, this vulnerability made me more invested in the characters’ lives. No, they weren’t perfect, but I could understand why they were the way that they were, and I appreciated that. Egan makes sure that readers finish Goon Squad feeling almost as connected to each of the characters as they are to each other.
The narrative style that Egan chose also subtly reveals aspects of the characters’ personalities and motivations. “Great Rock and Roll Pauses”, the chapter executed entirely by Powerpoint slides, is told from the point of view of Alison, Sasha’s 12-year-old daughter. Alison uses these slides to make sense of the world around her, from her mother’s mysterious past to her father Drew’s fractured relationship with her autistic older brother Lincoln. Oftentimes when author’s attempt to write from the perspectives of children, it ends up feeling fake. Egan’s use of Powerpoint makes this chapter believable, as well as one of the most powerful chapters in the novel–what twelve year old in this day and age hasn’t messed around making Powerpoints or other types of technological presentations? I especially appreciated this chapter’s placement within the novel. Its title references Lincoln’s fascination with early pauses in songs, when you think the song is over but it starts up again. As Sasha explains to Drew, “‘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.’” (Egan 281). The chapter is the second-to-last chapter in the book, a literal early pause in the novel–you think it will end with this extremely unique writing style, Alison’s innocence and simplistic worldview acting as a tidy ribbon tying up an otherwise sophisticated, mature novel. But then comes a final chapter back in regular prose discussing a futuristic New York City. Although Egan asserts that the chapters of the novel can be read in any order, this chapter’s placement feels meaningful. The fact that the chapter is centered around a father’s distant relationship with his son who he struggles to connect with also points back to that central idea of the power of parental and familial relationships.
Egan’s personal life also seems to have influenced the novel. There are many references both positive and negative to the impact of technology on our modern society, and it seems likely that this is partly due to the fact that Egan was in a relationship with Steve Jobs during her college years when he had already found fame and success as the founder and CEO of Apple and was in the process of inventing the Mac computer. Egan describes feeling in awe of the societal change that Jobs was creating, and this is what eventually ended their relationship. She says of the relationship, “there were moments when I felt overshadowed by him […] I felt really dwarfed by that. Like, I felt, Oh, my God, I’m nothing.” (Schwartz). Egan seemed to recognize that Jobs was in the process of changing the world, and she examines the effects of this in the novel. Egan’s intimate experience with the dawn of a new technology informed her views when writing Goon Squad; she discusses everything from the digitization of music to the dangers of children growing up with and becoming addicted to technology. Egan seems lightly critical of technology’s impact on society while also acknowledging how important it has been for innovation and communication, and in the final chapter, “Pure Language”, Egan gives technology the center stage, albeit somewhat unsuccessfully.
As a whole, I felt that this novel flowed well despite being made up of disjointed stories. The characters, settings, and events all seemed plausible and realistic, and there were callbacks to other characters and times in new chapters that reminded me of what I’d read previously. The final chapter, however, was my least favorite to read and felt the most disconnected from the rest of the novel. “Pure Language” follows Alex, the seemingly random man that Sasha goes on an unsuccessful first date with in the first chapter of the novel, as he works with Bennie to promote the comeback concert of Scotty, one of Bennie’s former punk bandmates. The chapter is set in New York City sometime during the 2020s. It is Egan’s futuristic prediction of the world, one in which the gravitational pull of the Earth to the sun is off balance, water is threatening to engulf the city, and people communicate over iPhone-reminiscent “handsets” and “T” each other using abbreviated texting slang that seems dreadfully out of date today. To be fair, it is unreasonable to expect Egan to perfectly explain futuristic culture in a believable way. As Roth reminds us in his essay “Writing American Fiction”, “And what is the moral of the story? Simply this: that the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality.” (167). It is even harder to try to make the future credible in fiction. However the chapter’s plot of creating “parrots” to hype up the comeback concert of Scotty, a former punk bandmate of Bennie’s-turned fisherman, seemed unnecessary and contrived. The concert, an all-ages event that many of the novel’s characters attend, seems like the end of an era, although it doesn’t carry the same weight because there is no prior hinting towards its occurrence. I give credit to Egan for attempting to imagine this future culture, but because of the fatalistic tendencies of the chapter to predict technology’s hold on society and the rather rushed comeback story of Scotty, Bennie’s former bandmate, I felt as though the chapter was disconnected from the rest of the narrative.
Although Egan stumbles in the final chapter when trying to explain society through the technological lens of “handsets” and “T’s”, it is clear throughout Goon Squad that culture is interwoven in every story that each character experiences. The modern novel is often thought to be an explanation or criticism of the culture that we live in. Egan seems to criticize certain aspects of journalism and celebrity culture in “Forty-Minute Lunch”, a chapter revolving around an interview that Stephanie’s (Bennie’s ex wife) brother Jules Jones has with up-and-coming but doomed movie star Kitty Jackson. Jules realizes the banality of his career and tries to write a piece that would catch readers’ attention again, but ends up in prison after the interview goes awry and he attempts to rape Kitty. Like many other writer’s Jules is preoccupied with the need to create something new in an oversaturated literary and journalistic world. Bennie, meanwhile, struggles in his role as a record executive as he realizes his disdain for the new age of music which was “too clear, too clean.” In Bennie’s words, “the problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.” (Egan 23). This critique of technology’s impact on art is even more powerful today, as traditional art forms are quickly being replaced by newer, faster, more efficient methods. Both Egan and the Goon Squad characters hold opinions about their societies, and these opinions are important to the novel’s overall message.
Although the novel examines and criticizes culture and society in equal measure, it isn’t pretentious about it. The characters experience life through their own points of view, and any cultural dialogue is authentic to who they are as regular people just trying to get through life. The best thing, in my opinion, about Goon Squad is its self-confident assertion that it doesn’t necessarily need to have a point or a “why does it matter?” moment. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and because of this we as readers are able to simply become immersed in these characters’ lives and take what we can from their experiences. In literary society there is such an emphasis on novels that provide social commentary for the time, but I think novels that are of a more personal nature are just as important. Jonathan Franzen addresses this conundrum in his essay “Why Bother”, stating, “at the heart of my despair about the novel had been a conflict between a feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream, and my desire to write about the things closest to me, to lose myself in the characters and locales that I loved.” (95). Egan, who won the Pulitzer Prize over Franzen in 2011, doesn’t succumb to this pressure.
I am partial to character-centered narratives, so I may be a bit biased in my appreciation of Egan’s style and the world of Goon Squad. But it is undeniable that her skillful ability to weave together different narratives and create impactful stories is impressive, and her willingness to bend and break the rules of traditional novels has allowed Egan to create something totally unique. Goon Squad showcases humanity in all its glory and destruction, and reminds us that no matter how different we are, some feelings, emotions, and experiences truly are universal.
Citations
Egan, Jennifer. A Visit From the Goon Squad. Alfred Knopf, 2010.
Franzen, Jonathan. “Why Bother?” How to Be Alone: Essays, HarperCollins, New York, 2002, pp. 55–97.
Roth, Philip. “Writing American Fiction.” Reading Myself and Others, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1975.
Schwartz, Alexandra, and Jennifer Egan. “Jennifer Egan’s Travels through Time.” The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/jennifer-egans-travels-through-time.