(The page numbers below refer to the 2010 Anchor Books edition of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.)
- Redemption, Corruption
Several characters in A Visit from the Goon Squad find “redemption” as they grow older – “redemption” is Sasha’s word (18) – and several fall. How to preserve the perfection of the sun “captured” inside Sasha’s circle of wire? (The sun in the circle of wire, hanging by the window in Sasha’s room in Naples, is the last image in Chapter 11.) How to stay true to the purity of the nuns’ singing, that “unearthly sweetness” that had once “echoed deep” in the young Bennie’s ears? (Bennie has his memory of the singing nuns on the second page of Chapter 2.) How to keep purity pure; how to grow up and still care? (“Ask Me if I Care,” is the title of Chapter 3). These are among the central questions of A Visit from the Goon Squad.
And then there are the many characters in A Visit from the Goon Squad that are neither redeemed nor compromised, and whose example complicates this dualistic and too-easy way of viewing the novel. Which characters fit into neither category?
Also, what is it about our current culture that makes it so hard for a growing adult to preserve her values? Do you think this is a good question; do you think it belongs with this book? Or, in saying that our current circumstance is somehow more corrupting than circumstances past, am I just continuing to blog (and “update” and “tweet”): continuing emptily to react to a half-understood reality only then to “send” my reaction into another reality that is largely artificial? How has the novel informed your thinking on these questions?
Perhaps the above questions could lead to larger ones about whether the novel, despite the artificiality of the culture (s) it describes, offers us hope, and/ or direction. What about the experience of reading it? Is there something redeeming in that? And if there is, must the redemption result only in our becoming better people – kinder to others, more honest, less superficial, etc? If there is redemption here, maybe it is subtler than that, but perhaps more affecting as well.
- Pauses
In the (now famous) “Power-Point” chapter, Lincoln, Alison’s brother, is obsessed with long pauses in rock and roll songs. Alison shares his fascination, A) because she’s a good sister, but B) because they’re fascinating.
“The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.” (281).
One way to conceptualize the novel is as a series of character narratives interrupted by “pauses.” Almost every character in …Goon Squad we will meet at multiple points in their lives, and the intervals, or “pauses,” between those points will often be several decades long. The pauses in music so fascinating to Lincoln, then, we could look to as smaller versions of those pauses in our own character narratives, around which others know us, and then, once we, or they, have moved on, do not. This novel-shape – multiple life-stories organized around pauses – is one to be thinking about before going into discussion with your book group. For now I will propose “the pause” as the novel’s most expressive image – expressive of its major themes, and expressive also of an emotional state evoked by the novel, a confusion or longing, that is (blessedly) hard to summarize with exposition. What are your thoughts, here?
- E-mail, cell phones, Text messages, Facebook, Power-Point, Handsets, T’s, and Starfish
The medium through which many of the novel’s characters “live and move and have their being” is technology – high-speed computer-communications technology. Did the novel get you thinking about the ways in which more or less constant occupation within the virtual arena might be affecting us – affecting our relationships to each other, to ourselves, our memories, our sense of reality? Did you find yourself arriving at different conclusions on this matter than you had before reading A Visit from the Goon Squad? Egan’s project in …Goon Squad seems more to describe the effects of these interactions than to evaluate them – meaning she leaves the evaluating up to us. Do you think her description correct?
- What is your favorite relationship in the book?
One of the reasons I am heartened by Egan’s fiction is for how much she expects from our relationships with one another. It’s one thing to write beautifully complex characters, which, for my money, she does in …Goon Squad a dozen times over. But it’s a wholly splendid other thing to put your characters into relationships that elicit the fullness of their intelligence. Relationships that do hold the fullness of our intelligence are complicated; things go on in them that people on the outside would be surprised to know. Here I’m talking about relationships in which many parts of ourselves are at play, which is to say: any relationship of consequence. What is your favorite relationship in the novel? I think my favorite is Sasha’s with her uncle Ted, though I also love Alison’s relationships with her mother, father, and brother. How about you?
- Character Revelation: Multiple perspectives on single characters
One exhilarating way to review this novel is to consider the (often) multiple perspectives through which single characters are revealed. Take Sasha, for instance. In the first chapter we see her at thirty-five, viewed from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, a perspective that will be richly complicated by her therapist’s understanding of her, and Alex’s. Then, in Chapter 2, we’ll see her from Bennie’s point of view, this time as a (not quite) lust object, but also as his friend, sensitive, it seems, about his painful relationship with his son. Later in the novel, Rob’s perspective will reveal yet other dimensions to Sasha; and then, in Chapter 11, we’ll see her through the eyes of her Uncle Ted, and at two different points in her life: at five years old – and so in this instance, Ted is remembering her as a child, while remembering himself as the young man who took care of that child – and, at nineteen, the age she is as a runaway teenager in Naples. It will be from her daughter’s perspective that we’ll see her in the next chapter (the “power-point” chapter); and then in the last pages of the book, we will see Bennie and Alex wistfully longing for Sasha-at-thirty-five, as, finding themselves in her old neighborhood in the East Village, they try her buzzer, realize she’s not upstairs, and wish her, wherever she is, a “good life.” Which is what she is having – an outcome we are aware of, but they are not.
Rhea’s character, too, will be shown at more than one point in her life, and through the perceptions of more than one character. Same goes with Scotty; same with Rob; Lou; Jocelyn; Lulu; Dolly (or La Doll); Alex; Jules; and Kitty. Indeed in myriad ways we’ll be between competing understandings of single characters on nearly every page.
Such complexity of character revelation is not just valuable for its aesthetic innovation – though innovate Egan triumphantly has, unveiling capacities to the novel, really flexibilities to the novel, that I, for one, couldn’t have anticipated without her. So that’s a huge accomplishment. But for me there is immense ethical value here too, especially given the world through which her characters move: the world of the celebrity machine, in which the individual, collapsed into an image, is conveyed via high-speed visual technology to vast indifferent populations unimaginable to that individual; the world of artificially made “realities” where experience, even as it’s happening, endures only as it can be marketed; and a world in which power and maturity often mean having chosen, and without looking back, disaffection over caring and moral integrity. Never fear, Egan seems to reassure, we still have novels. There’s more to this person than you may have imagined, you with your eyes glued to your iPhone — and more even than that, and more even than that. We still have this “novel” medium through which to observe one another as creatures of history and society, and just look how many histories and societies it can describe. And this “novel” medium can still praise the best that we can be, and the most beautiful that we can feel.
As I don’t want to script your experience of …Goon Squad, I will now back away from my tremendous admiration for the unsentimental curiosity that had to have been in place for Egan to see past her first understandings of her characters to the characters she ultimately wrote. What was it like for you to get to know Sasha et. al. via discrete glimpses across “pauses” in time? Did the novel resonate with your experience of knowing people, knowing yourself, growing older, growing (perhaps) into tarnish and ruin, growing (perhaps) into redemption and grace?
- Raising Children
There are a lot of children in this novel, and most of them grow up in highly unstable environments. Sasha’s parents’ violent arguments result, early in Sasha’s childhood, in their divorcing, a year after which Sasha’s father disappears, never to be heard from again; Scotty’s mother dies of a sleeping pill overdose; Rolph’s father, Ray, the record-label producer, “devours” everyone in his path, disposing Rolph to take his own life at twenty-eight; poor Jocelyn gets sexually involved with Ray when she’s a teenager, “costing herself” her youth (87); nine-year old Lulu is carted overseas by her mother, Dolly, to the home of a genocidal dictator; Christopher, Bennie’s and Stephanie’s son, grows up the child of divorce; baby girls Ava and Cara-Ann fall on one another in a “gladiatorial frenzy” as their neglecting fathers, Bennie and Alex, broker false enthusiasm for a rock concert in “lean, perpendicular couches” above them (311).
And then you have two first-person chapters in which adolescents tell their stories unmediated by an adult perspective: Chapter 3, which is told in Rhea’s voice, and Chapter 12, which is told in Alison’s. Two testimonies to the fragility and preciousness of childhood, offered in belief. “I BELIEVE IN YOU,” their directness seems to say – and here I’m remembering the “pale blue lines” written on the slip of paper Sasha finds in Alex’s wallet in Chapter 1. The directness of those first-person chapters also seems to say: “And I still believe in me.”
What, then, does …Goon Squad have to say about raising children? And: Do you think Egan wants you to be asking that sort of question as you close the book? In myself asking it, am I being too heavy-handed?
- Satire, in particular all the funny scenes involving the body
Many of the scenes in A Visit from the Goon Squad are rendered satirically. To quote the New York Times review-excerpt on the back of the paperback Anchor Books edition, the novel is “darkly, rippingly funny.” Often Egan will set her characters down in highly exaggerated and implausible scenarios to. . . .what? To get you to laugh at those characters? To get you to see their folly, their vanity? To get you to see your own? The “satiric” is a mode of literary representation that runs on irony, exaggeration, and often outrageous circumstance – think of Dolly’s party with the platters of burning oil – and it changes from satirist to satirist, obviously. And it can coexist with other modes in a single work: think of Shakespeare, for instance, who will write a Polonius into a drama as ultimately tragic as “Hamlet.” What sort of work is satire doing in …Goon Squad?
Often the satiric mode will promote the writer as a judge of morals and manners, placing him or her at a station above the people she writes about. And I don’t think that’s Jennifer Egan. I think it’s because so many of the funny scenes in …Goon Squad involve the body, and the body in humiliating ways, that her satire, for me, brings me back into my own, in effect liberating me from my fantasies about my body, fantasies of omnipotence, really, that ultimately isolate me from others, and from myself. What I’m describing here is a kind of relief, and, from Egan, a kind of generosity with her own body, her own physical experience, strange as that may sound. What are your thoughts, here?
- Art, Longing, Memory
Most of the questions I’ve posed thus far are “issue” questions — questions having to do with topical and or ethical issues explored in A Visit from the Goon Squad. And so I haven’t asked the important question. The novel is about loss and the powers of art and memory (almost) to stay it. As we close the book we long for our own Sasha, and for ourselves as we once were. For me the last page holds astonishment: Where did she go? Where did I go?
I don’t want to draw the connection between art and loss in …Goon Squad too explicitly, because I want the terms of that connection to be yours. Let me then only remind us that there is a lot of art in this novel. There is a lot of music, and, in Ted’s chapter, which is Chapter 11, there is visual art. The novel is full of surprises, and one of my favorites is that of Ted dutifully going to Naples to find his sister’s daughter, only not to look for her once he’s there — because he wants to look at art instead. The marble relief of Orpheus and Eurydice Ted so savors might illuminate the rest of the novel in wonderful ways, if only we would savor it ourselves. Yet we have nieces to rescue, texts to send, youth to preserve, youth to mourn, children to fail, images – of our perfection – to post. Does art offer sacredness in this novel? Let’s ask these questions when we meet.
You must be logged in to post a comment.