A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan’s novel ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is an iridescent array of narratives from interconnected lives. This is a book about growing up only to find out that the person you grow up to be turns out completely different from, yet still inextricably connected to, the person you once were. The “Goon” in the story represents the inescapable passing of time. It’s the central character to the plot, the thing that ties the lives of the people in the story together and that eventually catches up with each of them.
The novel centers on two characters: Benny Salazar, the middle-aged owner of a successful record label who used to be a punk rocker, and Sasha, his personal assistant with a troubled past. However, no real main characters appear in the novel, as each chapter tells a story from a different person who is somehow connected to these two characters. Each new chapter introduces a new character’s perspective, slowly building an arching history of Benny and Sasha’s lives.
The narrative in ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ spans from the 1970’s to an unspecified time in 2020. It doesn’t follow time in a linear fashion, but rather, jumps around from one point in time to another, moving back and forth between the past, present, and a hypothetical future (or maybe even hypothetical present) in which social media and text messaging have become an integral part of everyone’s lives and even babies use txt msgng lAngug frm brth. Jenifer Egan uses different writing styles and techniques to convey the viewpoint of the different characters.
In one section of the book, Egan tells the entire story from the perspective of Sasha’s daughter through a power point presentation. Who would ever think that such a cold format could elicit such an emotional response? Yet, Egan uses the power point presentation in a way that seems to reflect the on the emptiness of technology and the underlying humanity trying to bubble to the surface. There are slides that reflect the daughter’s family dynamics, slides that talk about her younger brother’s obsession with long pauses in songs, and many other slides that show funny anecdotes from the daughter’s life.
In the slide, “Annoying Habit #92” (in which Sasha’s daughter lists the things that she finds annoying about her mom), the narrator captures an exchange between her and her mother, Sasha, about why she habitually creates power point presentations. It goes something like,
[Mom (seeing me making slides): “Again?”]
[Me: “So?”]
[Mom: “Why not try writing for a change?”]
[Me: “Excuse me, this is my slide journal.”]
[Mom: “I mean, writing a paper.”]
[Me: “Ugh! Who even uses that word?”]
[Mom: “I see a lot of white. Where does the writing come in?”]
But that is the beautiful part of ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ because much of the writing comes in the white spaces, or pauses, between the each narrative. The mother, Sasha, who Egan presents through the eyes of her daughter in this section of the book, appears to be a completely different character from the Sasha at the opening of the novel, a woman in her early thirties who battles an embarrassing and self-destructive habit of kleptomania while on a first date. She’s different from the fourteen year old Sasha who ran away from home to Naples, Italy and was tracked down by her uncle, who found her sweeping a hall in a boarding house to pay her rent.
Time is a goon, isn’t it? It’s doomed to visit us all and to change us until we become almost unrecognizable when compared to the people we once were. ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ poignantly portrays these life transitions. However, Jennifer Egan leaves the reader with hope and the chance for redemption by the end of the novel. I highly recommend Jennifer Egan’s smart and innovative novel.
