"Time is a goon, right?" asks a passing character—in a book chock full of passing characters—some one hundred pages into Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad . "Isn’t that the expression?"
"I’ve never heard that," comes the response.
"Would you disagree?"
There’s a pause, and finally the considered judgment. "No."
Okay, I hadn't heard that saying either According to my dictionary, a goon is "someone big and dumb who commits acts of violence for money.” (My spouse chimes in now: "No, that’s an NFL player…")
What’s Egan up to here? Although she is serving up a brash rock-and-roll novel, our author is clearly unconvinced by Mick Jagger’s assertion "Time is on my side" or David Byrne’s proclamation that "Time isn’t after us. Time isn’t holding us." In A Visit from the Goon Squad , Father Time has apparently sharpened his scythe and joined a street gang.
Critics are forever tempted to compare novels to other novels—a lamentably reductive process, but one that at least gives potential readers some measuring rod for what they might encounter in a new work. So indulge me. In this instance, Egan’s willingness to play fanciful games with chronology brings to mind two famous books about heroes "unstuck" in time—or, borrowing Egan's jargon, books in which time is a goon —Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler’s Wife . But Egan’s work reminded me even more forcefully of the one-story-begets-another virtuosity David Mitchell demonstrated in his novel 2004 Cloud Atlas . In both works, each chapter is connected to the next one in the same way I might, by playing the "six degrees of separation" game, find my personal connection to the President of the US or the Dalai Lama.
Like each of these three predecessors, Egan presents a genre mashup that mixes in elements of science fiction without losing her book's pedigree as a "serious book." I’ve written at length about this trend in contemporary fiction, and in particular about imaginative power of recent works of literary fiction that borrow genre elements, but Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of the most striking examples yet of this tendency at work.
Yet Egan offers her own twists that you won’t find in any predecessor—both in the formal structure and kaleidoscopic content of this brilliant work. Each chapter in A Visit from the Goon Squad abandons the central plot of the preceding chapter, but holds on to a least one familiar character—who serves a springboard to set another story in motion. These separate tales are each so individually compelling, that I was reluctant to move on to the next. Indeed, I feared that Egan was leaving behind more loose threads than a frisky cat in a yarn store. But— mirabile dictu — she somehow manages to resolve almost every plot complication during the course of this peripatetic novel. And she does this, moreover, without every returning directly to the plots she has abandoned. The structural wizardry involved here is quite prepossessing.
That said, the content is as extravagant as the formal architecture of the novel. Consider yourself forewarned: if you are looking for stories built on subtle aperçus and ruminative accounts of the quotidian, you are advised to steer clear of A Visit from the Goon Squad . A manic and maximalist sensibility pervades this work, and as the chapters move along, Egan seems to be engaged in a game of can-you-top-this with herself.
Which story here is the edgiest? Is it the tale of the NY publicist who takes on a genocidal dictator as client, and makes him wear a fluffy hat to improve his image? Is it the story of the journalist for a major magazine who interviews a starlet over lunch, and then decides to abduct and assault her instead? Is it the interlude about the ailing rock star who wants to go on a suicide tour, pushing himself so hard on stage night after night that fans will come—if only to see if he will collapse and die in mid-performance?
Yet the final sections of the book, which take place a decade or more in the future, make these preliminary stories seem tame by comparison. Egan drags her key characters into a dystopian nightmare scenario, a world ravaged by global warming and waning resources. These stories stay true to Egan’s character-driven approach to fiction—so the science and technology never become the main course here, as in so many "genuine" sci-fi books. The landscape is more akin to the futuristic urban environments that serve as backdrop to, say, Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest . By setting this part of the book in the future, Egan is not driven by an obsession with gadgetry and technology—although she offers some creative perspectives here. Rather, she embraces the openness of unwritten history as a way of re-imagining the cultural and personal perspectives of her story and as a springboard for psychologically rich narrative development. She is as interested in what people's attitudes will be like in the future as in their high tech accessories.
Her depiction of a world in which marketing concepts become psychological frameworks—imagine Freud rewritten by the faculty of Harvard Business School, and you will get an idea of what she is up to—is both insightful and hilarious. But I am even more shaken by her attempt to project both the future of storytelling and the future of music. What do they look like? It’s worse than I could have believed, and all too plausible: stories morph into corporate PowerPoint presentations and the music industry is built on the tastes of 4 year-olds. In all honesty, these visions are just logical extensions of what we already see around us—but perhaps that very fact is what makes them so frightening.
I read and enjoyed Egan’s previous novel The Keep , but she has moved up a notch, or maybe even two, with his follow-up work. In short, A Visit from the Goon Squad is an important work, a crystallization of many of the most provocative developments in contemporary fiction, yet also freshly original in its deviations and digressions. It's worth adding that A Visit from the Goon Squad is also what non-academics call “a good read.” And that rare combination of smarts and sheer storytelling panache will keep me on the lookout for what else this very creative author might have up her sleeve.