Ratings106
Average rating3.9
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an ageing former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life-divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed up band in the basement of a suburban house-and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, revelling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardour for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang-who thrived and who faltered-and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's far flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to Powerpoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both-and escape the merciless progress of time-in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.
Featured Series
2 primary books3 released booksGoon Squad is a 3-book series with 2 primary works first released in 2010 with contributions by Jennifer Egan.
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Any book with a chapter discussing pauses in popular songs (with The Four Tops' “Bernadette” being a particularly great one) is doing something right. Egan is a very skilled writer, who says more in a paragraph than other writers say in a chapter. Though her characters were really well drawn, I didn't particularly like any of them. So while I savored every page, it felt like something was missing.
I really thought I was going to love this book early on.
The first chapter is told from the perspective of a kleptomaniac, who lies to her boyfriend about the actions of a woman whom she stole something from. Her boyfriend goes on a rant about the (false) actions of the woman, and the narrator becomes “irked by his obliviousness even as she strove to preserve it”. That line to me was just a brilliant representation of a weird internal conflict that I was hoping would continue.
Unfortunately, while the first few chapters delve into these sort of human weaknesses, as I got further into the book I found it dipping farther into more of human depravity that I did not find enjoyable. And by the end, the “future” premises are entirely ridiculous (even if that is supposed to be the point), where society has become so commercial that babies just a few months old have their own advanced cell phones and are directly marketed to, I was just completely checked out.
I think there are some neat things here and there. Each chapter jumps around in time and to different characters that were usually tangential characters in a previous chapter, which is something I haven't really seen before and is often effective, but almost as often is very unsubtle (“Hey, remember that time that thing happened 30 pages ago?”).
I listened to this via audiobook from the library on the Libby app. The narrator Roxana Ortega was good. It felt like she chose a single main tick of each character to base her voices of them around (in control, frantic energy, sultry, etc), which can be a bit on the nose, but does a good job of differentiating a big cast and allowing you to understand the character quickly.
A different kind of novel. Short stories, perhaps, but still a novel. Poignant. I was totally immersed, inside the characters. It's unusual for an experimental work to be so accessible.
Time is a stealth goon so read this one slowly appreciating every chapter's poignant portrait.
Loved it. Such unique storytelling in many ways, really captivating and just generally fun and interesting to read.