anything could happen

Notes: A visit from the goon squad, Jennifer Egan

I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad!

Until I read it.

Damn you hype-mongering critics, raving friends and false-hope-boosting Pulitzer Prize committee. I struggled, from the opening scene on a therapist’s couch (really?) to that pointer business in the final dystopian (really?) chapter, to understand just what warmed the hearts of my fellow readers and left mine a cold hard stone. I admit that I don’t generally like clever literary gimmicks. Then again, the best book I read last year was David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a magician’s hat-full of sparks and smoke and subterfuge. It took my breath away. Goon Squad did not.

Reading Goon Squad, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that Jennifer Egan chose forms before she had stories to squeeze into them. Let’s see… PowerPoint presentation, David Foster Wallace spoof, pretentious grad student goof, genocidal dictator gag, check check check check. I’m surprised the author didn’t hire a comic artist to illustrate a chapter. Graphic novels are so hot right now.

Actually, the infamous PowerPoint works for me more than I thought it would—maybe because it’s one of the few fresh ideas here. And definitely because its telling (by a keen-eyed 12-year old) synchs with its tale (about her autistic brother’s obsession with pauses in popular songs). I also really like the Uncle Ted chapter. A century earlier, this frustrated scholar who views the world through an art prism, would have featured as a minor Henry James character. Searching for his niece (and hoping he won’t find her) in modern-day Naples, Ted’s an almost-tragic anachronism. The Keep, one of Egan’s earlier works and a book I like a lot, also concerns Americans in Europe. Less ambitious and much, much stranger, The Keep works with similar themes about time and how the past’s always haunting the present—and it’s so much more fun to read. Egan may want to stick to the expat beat. She’s good at it.

As for Goon Squad’s tier one characters, Sasha and Bennie… I kept wishing Sasha would return to the early Mary Gaitskill story collection from whence she came. And I’ll be a much happier fiction reader if I never pick up another book about a rich, successful dude in midlife crisis. This is as good a place as any to say that the whole “novel about music” angle is way oversold. Bennie could as easily produce films or manage a hedge fund. In fact, if Egan really wanted to hammer home the old ravages of time theme, she could have set it in the fashion industry with minor edits. That said, the PowerPoint segment made me realize one music-related thing: All rock critics are at least a little autistic.

This probably comes off as unnecessarily harsh, and you can chalk a lot of it up to personal taste and, I dunno, past reading-related traumas? I can’t recall who Egan’s fellow Pulitzer nominees were (except for Jonathan Franzen, ahem), but I’m confident she deserved the prize as well as anyone. Great novels—for the ages novels—just don’t come along that often, nor should anyone expect them to.

Speaking of great novels, Good Squad calls up one in particular. Several times, Egan uses a lazy, and to my mind, unnecessarily cruel, device to cast off lesser characters. Consider:

Rolph feels his self-consciousness miraculously fade away, as if he is growing up right there on the dance floor. Charlie feels it, too. In fact, this particular memory is one she’ll return to again and again, for the rest of her life, long after Rolph has shot himself in the head in their father’s house at twenty-eight.

Sure, killing someone we don’t know very well but about whom we nevertheless feel some emotional connection like this serves the book’s larger themes. But it’s also kinda a cheap “gotcha.” Such liberties are superficially similar to something Virginia Woolf did in To the Lighthouse, where several primary characters depart this world in parenthetical asides. But because there’s no doubt about her affection for her creations or despair over the seeming inconsequence of individual human lives, it’s like a shelf of china’s come crashing to the floor—spitting porcelain shards everywhere. It’s incredibly painful and moving. Woolf, incidentally, has a few wise things to say about time and narrative structure, too.

Two down, 28 to go.