A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Marg's Review)

Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former 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 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 as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to aver the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city's demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own whilst starting at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nationale. We meed 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, reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang - who thrived and 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 undertone 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.

With inside cover copy like that, and the fact that this is the book that won the Pulitzer prize and others, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize as well, who needs a review!

When I look back on this book in a couple of years time I think the thing that will still be strong in my memory is the structure of the book - if you could call it structure as such. It isn't a novel as much as it is an interlocking collection of short stories. This isn't a book that goes from point A to point B. It probably starts at point G and eventually gets to point Z with side trips past point A and B.

In my own mind I was trying to think of a comparison to show how this book works and the closest I could come up with was one of those puzzles we used to have as kids where there was a mixed up picture in a square and there was one piece missing so you had to move all the pieces around until the picture was formed. At first you would get occasional glimpses of what the jumbled image was going to look like, but then you would have to break the picture up to make another piece of the puzzle fit. Eventually though, the last piece slides into place and you see the whole image.

Another analogy might be a really long conversation with a very good friend, where you jump topics with ease, reminiscing about the past, talking about the future, and sharing a joke. Never a linear conversation but rather one that starts at one point, and then ends up somewhere completely different and you find yourself wondering how you got there!

Another aspect of structure that was very different in this book is that Egan experiments with all different forms of storytelling. There are chapters written in the form of a magazine column, another in Powerpoint as well as different tenses and points of view.  I think the Powerpoint chapter was amazing! The language was sparse, the story barely there on the page, but the concepts and the narrative were still strong enough to be clear for the reader, and I loved that we got to see Sasha's future life.

After looking at the structure, how about the characters. I can't say that I particularly related to the characters that we met in the pages of the book, but such is Egan's skill that you actually didn't need to. Our two main characters are Sasha and Bennie. Sasha is on a date with Alex when her habit of stealing things, anything, causes her to steal a wallet whilst in the bathroom. As she analyses why she steals with her shrink, Alex crosses one of her boundaries without even knowing it. We meet Sasha again as a young woman struggling to make ends meet living as a runaway in Naples, and then through the eyes of her best friend Rob who has plenty of demons of his own.

In the next chapter we meet Bennie, who is Alex's boss. He is a divorced man who is struggling to relate to his 9 year old son. One way that he can occasionally connect is through music, but even that is problematical. Through the book we see Benny with his ex wife in happier times, then we meet him as a youth revelling in the punk rock scene with his friends. We meet his mentor Lou and his very young girlfriend and her friend.

The links as we move from chapter to chapter are at times tenuous, but they are all there for a reason. Along the way, Egan makes comment about some important issues. Not only the power of music to transcend time, but also for example the power of media when a washed up PR person is employed to try and rehabilitate the image of an African dictator.

Another chapter that I really liked, not because it was enjoyable but because of the food for thought it provided, was the final chapter. It is set in New York in the not too distant future and Egan has taken our current obsession with social media and expanded it to the nth degree to come up with a quite scary world where even the youngest child has exposure to the media in a way that is similar to our own world but amplified many times over. A washed up musician is being bought back for a live concert and one of our characters is being asked to find some parrots - people who can spread the word, hype up the event to make it a success, to make it the kind of event that everyone who is anyone will claim to have been at even if they really aren't. In a way it kind of reminded me of a discussion of the difference between buzz and hype and how one, or the other, is generated, whether it is organic or whether there is someone in the background pulling the strings to manipulate the public.

This is the second Egan book I have read and liked. A few years ago now I read The Keep which was a kind of modern, gothicky ghost story. I am not sure why I haven't bothered to go and track down her other books. I will definitely be watching to see what the author comes up with next as she doesn't seem to be afraid to take risks in her writing and to take her readers on the journey with her!

Rating 4/5

2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - Marg's Review

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, this book is not a book that you read if you want fast moving action. Ostensibly a letter to his young son, it is also a study of the faith of John Ames, particularly in the context of the relationships he had with his family, his parishioners, his best friend, and his namesake who is the rebellious younger son of his friend.

I particularly enjoyed reading of the struggles as John Ames tried to learn how to communicate with his namesake Jack Boughton. Jack is a man who never fitted in anywhere, even in his own family, and the persistence between the two to try and get to understand each other.

The writing is beautiful, and I am sure will touch many people, but for me, I think that this was not the kind of book that I needed to read at this particular moment. It was just too introspective I guess. There were magical moments scattered throughout though. An incident that happened in the late 1800's involving a horse getting stuck in a collapsing tunnel had me laughing out loud on the train, and the ending had me tearing up, once again on the train!

The reason why I read this book now is because it is this month's book in a group I read in. It's interesting looking at the dynamics of the group and seeing who enjoyed it compared to those who didn't. The discussion with this particular book tends to make the reading experience for me! So the rating below reflects my own personal reaction - I might review it later once others add their interpretation and I get extra insights!!

Rating 3.5/5

2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy - Marg's review

A searing, post apocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

I'm pretty sure that I have mentioned here before that I used to be a regular over in the Oprah book clubs, and I know several people who are now bloggers from those groups. Reading with those groups gave me a much greater understanding of books like One Hundred Years of Solitude. Now when a new Oprah book is announced I add it to my TBR list, with the intention of joining in on the discussions on the boards. With the announcement of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I did get around to reading it, but I never did really get around to discussing on the boards.

Reading this book wasn't easy. Given the whole post apocalyptic setting, the environment is bleak, the story itself is bleak, the language is sparse. Despite the fact that it is never clear what happened to the world, it is clear that it was an event that affected both men and the natural world.

A man and his young son are travelling the road, trying to walk to the coast where they hope to find something different. There is very little interaction between the pair and other humans, mainly because it is difficult to trust anyone. There are gangs of armed people who will pretty much kill anyone they find...in some cases as a way to provide food. The man is always very wary whenever there are signs of humans, even if the person is travelling by themselves, always teaching his young son that you have to be careful who you trust.

The man tells the boy that he is carrying the light and that they are the good guys, and the young boy struggles to understand how they can be carrying the light when they are guilty of many of the things that the father says the bad people do.

As they travel along the road, close to suffering starvation, the father despairs of how to provide for his son, especially as they both suffer illness. Each time they come to a town or isolated home, a search is done through the houses and shops to see what others who have been there before them may have left behind, luckily stumbling on a couple of caches of food that help sustain them.

Upon reaching the coast though...they basically find nothing, and they will have to keep travelling.

It is a bleak story, full of griminess and at times hopelessness, but it is definitely well written, and I can definitely see why the book won the Pulitzer. The relationship between the father and the son is complex, but also compelling in its depth and closeness.

I am not sure that reading this book has inspired me to go and read more by McCarthy, although I am sure I will get to him again eventually!




This review was originally posted on my blog in May 2007.