A Visit From The Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan has said that her 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From The Goon Squad was inspired by two unusual sources: Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, and HBO’s The Sopranos. They might seem like unlikely bedfellows, but reading this book, they make sense together.

A Visit From The Goon Squad defies easy definition, in that it reads like a novel but it’s actually thirteen interrelated short stories. Any one of the ‘chapters’ could be read in isolation, but taken together they’re undeniably connected and come full circle. Each story follows someone connected to record company executive Bennie Salazar: his assistant, his former band-mate, his wife, a producer, a journalist, a friend… Each story finds them at a different stage in life, at different places and periods in time (from California to New York to Italy to Kenya, from the 1970s to the 2020s), disparate pieces of a puzzle that takes a while to come together.

I’ll say up front that it’s probably best to read as much of A Visit From The Goon Squad in one sitting as possible, or at least smush the reading sessions together as close as you can. I stretched it out over several days, and found it really hard to keep track of who was who to whom, and to recall enough detail to see the connections between them. So, learn from my mistake.

You might be wondering where the title comes from. “Goon squad” definitely evokes a Sopranos-esque image, a group of violent thugs exacting payment or revenge. The meaning is a bit more nuanced in the book’s context, though, where a couple of characters refer to time as a goon, one that robs rising stars of their youth and vitality. As one of them says, quite memorably: “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?”. As different as the characters are, across the course of A Visit From The Goon Squad, each of them loses innocence, relevance, or success. It’s part of what connects them (and all of us, etc etc).

The most iconic and talked-about chapter of A Visit From The Goon Squad is, of course, Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake, a story told entirely through Powerpoint presentation slides. A teenage girl creates slideshows as a kind of journal, and in this collection she describes her life with her family, especially her brother neurodivergent brother Lincoln, who is obsessed with rests or pauses in popular rock songs. It’s unique, and certainly a stand-out, but it’s not the only draw card.

Found Objects, for instance, is remarkable – it’s the very first chapter, and a strong opener. Sasha is a kleptomaniac, talking to her therapist about a recent date with a man that went awry when she stole a woman’s wallet in the bathroom, only to shame-faced-ly return it later, unbeknownst to her date.

The other story that lives in my head rent-free is Safari. A music producer takes two of his children and his new girlfriend on a wildlife safari in Kenya, which goes horribly wrong when one of the other travellers tries to get a close-up photo of a lion. He’s mauled, and one of the guides has to shoot the animal. On the side, that same guide is having an affair with the producer’s girlfriend, and one of the kid accidentally rats them out.

And there’s one story in A Visit From The Goon Squad in particular that’s a must-read for any David Foster Wallace fan, a brilliant send-up of the troubled essayist’s signature style: Forty Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon! Jules Jones Reports. It starts off hitting all the usual beats of a magazine article about an up-and-coming actress, but quickly veers into the absurd and obscene, as the journalist tries to penetrate the public persona of the young woman, and culminates in his attacking her in Central Park. The ‘article’ is written from his jail cell.

All told, A Visit From The Goon Squad is a great book in the sense that it’s incredibly well-written and meticulously crafted. At the same time, though, it’s a frustrating read, in the sense that you get the feeling you’ll need to re-read it two or three times to fully appreciate it. It’s one I’d only recommend picking up if you’ve got the time and brain space to dedicate to it, as it deserves no less.

My favourite Amazon reviews of A Visit From The Goon Squad:

• “I have a bad habit of finishing what I start reading. Books like this emphasize just how bad that habit is.” – ajc
• “I can understand why non-New Yorkers would find it to be entertaining and realistic” – Beatrice Izzey
• “stopped reading this book during the chapter where the ex PR queen took her daughter and an actress to some genocide general’s house; too far fetched.” – M. Richard Roehl
• “apparently you can judge this book by the cover because the cover is ugly.” – Sarah Berkner
• “I haven’t hated reading this much since being forced to take Russian History my freshman year of college because it was the last open class left.” – Maria Kalli
• “I have a Ph.D. in English, which is good for one thing and one thing only: I know how to read, and finish, dreadfully boring books. And yet I still couldn’t finish this train wreck of a novel. It’s so bad, in fact, that I eventually came to loathe the nighttime, when I had some free time to read. I would do anything to avoid picking it up: documentaries on the Holocaust, CNN interviews with such luminaries as Tate Reeves and Nancy Pelosi, even grading student essays–all of which were more enjoyable than Egan’s book. The only goon in this context is the person who decides to buy and read this book.” – KT