‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan
After reading her 2001 novel Look at Me I was quick to add Jennifer Egan to my, admittedly hallucinatory, list of favourite writers. Of all time. Ever. And last May my admiration only deepened when I stumbled upon The Invisible Circus, her confident 1995 debut which was reissued just last year owing to the enormous success of this, her fourth and most recent work - A Visit from the Goon Squad. I note that a drum roll would not be at all inappropriate in this instant…
Published in 2010, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a virtuosic work quite fittingly set amid the music business, hence why I allowed the drum roll, with a strong focus on the mysterious and often misunderstood business of rock music. Goon Squad, as I will henceforth refer to it on account of the full title being something of a mouthful, is perhaps best known for winning its author the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. And if that alone were insufficient, Goon Squad also earned Egan the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and it was a finalist for the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award. And rumour has it that a Goon Squad TV series is currently in development at HBO. Now that accolades and adaptations have been thoroughly dealt with, let me shed a little light on what the work is actually all about.
Most of the stories in Goon Squad (more on the work’s unusual narrative structure later) concern Bennie Salazar, a washed-up rock music exec who sprinkles gold flakes in his coffee in a bid to boost potency, and his sometime assistant Sasha, a charismatic kleptomaniac whose compulsive purse-pinching opens the work and thus sets the tone for the tales of self-destruction that are to follow. The other ‘stories’ in Goon Squad involve various friends and associates of theirs - think ex-lovers, estranged siblings, former bandmates and old gig-going buddies - and though the majority are set in New York City some stretch as far as Africa and Italy, with one particularly memorable sequence taking place in Egan’s own hometown of San Francisco. (Sidebar: I love San Francisco!) And while the notion of place is of course important in Goon Squad, it nevertheless takes a proverbial back seat to a far more pressing issue: time.
Regarding her intentions for Goon Squad Egan has said, 'I wanted to avoid centrality. I wanted polyphony. I wanted a lateral feeling, not a forward feeling. My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different, from a different point of view. I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you should also break it!' Indeed, Goon Squad is unusual in that whether it is a novel or a short story collection is not immediately clear. While Egan herself leans towards calling Goon Squad a novel as opposed to a short story collection, some critics suggest otherwise as its thirteen chapters can be read as individual stories and there is no clear focus on any one character or story arc. Furthermore, several chapters of what would later become A Visit from the Goon Squad were first published in magazines such as The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar, adding credibility to these claims. I however am inclined to agree with the author herself, for although Goon Squad slides through decades like the control panel of a DeLorean it does so rather seamlessly, without the neat stop-start quality characteristic of a short story collection.
Circling back to the issue of time, one may wonder what possessed Egan to perform the unenviable task of writing from multiple different perspectives, in multiple narrative voices, across multiple time periods. In a word, or a name, Proust. Along with HBO’s The Sopranos, Egan credits Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as a key source of inspiration for Goon Squad. The book’s title relates to one story in which a minor character named Bosco declares, 'time’s a goon, right?’, referring to the way in which time and fate rob many of the characters of their youth and ostensible happiness. As Egan herself explains, 'time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you.’
Egan’s decision to set Goon Squad amid the music business is therefore a highly significant one. Think about it: what would music be without time, without ¾ and 4/4 and so on? And what would the business of music be like were it not for the passage of time, would the 'next big thing’ stay the 'next big thing’ forever? 'My nine-year-old loves Lady Gaga and refers to Madonna as old school,’ Egan says. 'There’s no way to avoid becoming part of the past.' And, perhaps most crucially, how would we perceive time without music? In Goon Squad Egan frequently focuses on the ability of music to transport us to another time, something I can fully attest to. I hear anything by Blink-182 and suddenly I’m thirteen again, wearing outsized Etnies skate shoes and smiling incessantly. Conversely, when I hear Perfect Day by Lou Reed, I’m sitting front row at my mother’s funeral, contemplating the absurdity of the most important person in my life being in a box to my left, and trying not to shatter like Lalique. Put simply, time and music are inextricably linked.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a truly moving and life-affirming work, with a cast of characters so very human that they seem to get up and follow you around like uninvited guests. Jennifer Egan continues to stun me - and countless others, including the Pulitzer Prize Board - with her versatility and virtuosity. I genuinely cannot wait to see what she comes up with next.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in February 2013.