368 pages, Corsair
Review
by Pat Black
“Time’s
a goon, right?” Not half.
Jennifer
Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is a strange journey through interconnected
lives, jumping around between past, present and future. Music is a theme, but the
backbeat, as Mr Morrison said, is difficult and hard to master. It is an
awkward book to review because it doesn’t stick to any one character, plotline,
theme or timeframe. But it is, happily, a very easy and rewarding book to read.
It’s
a Pulitzer Prize winner, one that restored my faith in the award. The previous
Pulitzer winner I read was Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a book so well
written, and yet so innately, horrifically bad it prompted some basic
philosophical questions, like “Why is life so awful?” and “Writing: why do I
bother?”
A
Visit From The Goon Squad is a collection of short stories with lots of interconnected
characters. These characters flit in and out of each other’s histories, at
different times and stages of life. If there’s a lynchpin, it is New York
record label executive Bennie Salazar. New York itself is the main focus of the
novel’s events, although the narrative does take wee holidays in Africa, Italy
and an unnamed Central American former dictatorship.
Connected
to Bennie are Sasha the recovering kleptomaniac, Lou, the sleazy music industry
mogul – Bennie’s mentor – Dolly the PR supremo, Jocelyn the teenage punk and a
host of other characters. They inhabit, enhance and inhibit each other’s lives.
To
paraphrase Frank Zappa, time would be a boring jumble of dates and deadlines if
we didn’t have music to decorate it with. The physics of sound and its
interaction with time is a distant notion here, though, compared with musical
fashions and the ways fame can surge and retreat, often leaving people high and
dry. Nothing stays rock n’ roll forever. Fashions and technologies change, and
what seems hip and stylish can be old hat and snigger-worthy soon after… before
suddenly lurching back into fashion again.
This
was probably a metaphor for the other driving themes of the book: regret, loss and
entropy. Everyone in this book is lamenting something or someone. Bennie goes
from aspiring bass player to record label mogul, but when we meet him he’s more
or less impotent, reduced to sprinkling gold flakes in his coffee as a snake
oil remedy for his missing libido. Good looking people get old and ugly in a
hurry; aspiring musicians like Rhea and Jocelyn, in their ripped T-shirts,
safety pins and CBGBs punk scene make-up, miss out on their love life targets,
and end up having hugely differing fortunes – and indirectly affecting the
lives of those who adore them, unrequited. Lou the record company boss treats
people like toilet paper, but ends up with his own horror to deal with, seeded
in the past, flowering in the future. Scotty the guitar player ends up working
as a janitor, fishing direct from the Hudson, near-psychotic and twisted with
jealousy over the success of his ex-bandmate Bennie in his 34th
floor Manhattan office. Another musician famous for his Angus Young-style stage
presence turns into a fat, cancer-ridden burnout. And so on.
Even
after such lows, people can rise again – but the book makes it clear that this
is only temporary. Everyone’s time in the sun is short, Egan is saying.
Everyone has regrets – you, your partner, your children, the rich friends you
envy, rock stars, models, kings, popes, whoever. It’s maybe the one experience
we can all share.
And
everyone has a missing space in their lives. Sasha the klepto struggles to get
over the lack of the Twin Towers on the Manhattan skyline, and that’s a great
big metaphor for the losses people spend their whole lives trying to recoup, in
this book and in reality.
Goon
Squad has a very curious, although well put-together section in which a child
tells a story through the use of graphs,
pie charts, grids and Venn Diagrams, a means of understanding an autistic
sibling and a damned good idea well-executed. It’s another example of the many
great stories in this book, an absorbing, addictive piece of work which will
raise your spirits, even as you consider some very bleak facts of life.
I
wouldn’t recommend reading it on the last day of your holiday. But sometimes a
comedown is no bad thing.
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