Music and Grit

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of those novels where saying whether you like it or don't like it seems beside the point. It inhabits its own world, which will continue to exist outside of your personal opinion.

Bennie Salazar, a record company executive, and his assistant, Sasha, provide the throughline for the novel, which shifts its focus to various characters (all tangentially related through work or life to Bennie or Sasha or both) and moves back and forth through time. This shifting gives the novel an elusive quality, mimicking the was memories can bend and twist until we aren't quite sure of the sequence of events or who was present at the time. 

This is no walk down memory lane. The punk scene impacts the complicated lives of the characters, some of whom struggle with mental illness and criminal behavior, all of whom wind up compromised in one way or another. It's gritty. It's sometimes intense. The wide range of characters and their quick entry and exit creates a kaleidoscope effect that I occasionally found difficult to follow. 

This map helped (click to enlarge, so you can read the connections that the arrows represent -- tessiegirl did a great job on this!):

Ultimately, though, the novel is about the passage of time and how that affects all the characters -- and by extension, the reader. The music industry, with its emphasis on youth and novelty, accelerates what we all confront, sooner or later: our own mortality and the truth of what we have done with our lives. 

We may be busy with our daily lives, but brute-like time stalks all of us. There's no escaping the visit, when it finally arrives.

Excerpt:

[Stephanie] was thinking of the old days, as she and Bennie now called them -- not jut pre-Crandale but premarriage, preparenthood, premoney, pre-hard drug renunciation, preresponsibility of any kind, when they were still kicking around the Lower East Side with Bosco, going to bed after sunrise, turning up at stangers' apartments, having sex in quasi public . . . because none of it was serious. They were young and lucky and strong -- what did they have to worry about? If they didn't like the result, they could go back and start again. And now Bosco was sick, hardly able to move, feverishly planning his death. Was this outcome a freak aberration from natural laws, or was it normal -- a thing they should have seen coming? Had they somehow brought it on?

Jules put his arm around her. . . . 

"Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet."    

Note: This book counts toward the Color Coded Reading Challenge and the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.