Lucy reviews A Visit From The Goon Squad

Hard at work on my next blog entry.

I don't mean to brag, but I liked Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad long before it won the coveted 2011 Rooster from The Morning News Tournament of Books.  Then it won the Pulitzer, and people really started paying attention.  HBO reportedly picked it up and will begin production on a series.

Before I get to my review of A Visit From The Goon Squad, I'm going to list a few other things I liked before they were cool:

1.   Tricycles
2.   Global warming
3.   Polar bears

4.   Stomping hippies
5.   Bacon
6.   Sippy cups
7.   Community
8.   Elmer's glue
9.    Axe Cop

A Visit From The Goon Squad is either a novel, a set of interconnected short stories, or something else.  I'm not quite sure how to classify something that features an entire story/chapter told via Powerpoint.  It really doesn't matter, I guess.  All you need to know is that it features a huge cast of characters that are all somehow connected to aging record producer Bennie Salazar or Sasha, his kleptomaniac assistant.  We jump all around in time, from the late 1970s to the future.  We have multiple points of view.  The action takes place on both coasts and in foreign countries.

So what's it about?  Egan's theme can be summed in one exchange between Bennie and his former band-mate Scotty:  “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?”  Hardly anything new.  Heck, I was considering this theme months ago (back when I still slept in a crib) as I slogged through that piece of crap Middlemarch by George Eliot.  Thankfully, Egan doesn't spend any time complaining about trains and what they might do to nature (answer: make it more awesome) like that pansy Eliot. 

 

Looks riveting, huh?

Characters come and go, but they all have one thing in common:  they are looking forward to the future, to where they'll be in five, ten, fifteen, twenty years or they're looking to the past.  Not a single one is concerned with the present.  So Egan gives us glimpses of the past and one mildly unsettling glimpse of the year 2020 (2020?  20/20 vision?  Hindsight is 20/20.  Man, I'm a clever little bugger) where everyone has become so connected thanks to the internet that it is hard to find a truly unique experience that hasn't already been streamed, live-blogged, and shared with the world.  Entertainment is instantaneous (and boring) and somehow impure because so many cooks were in the kitchen when it was created, and its distribution is sterile and devoid of interaction.  Bennie, nearing  the end of his career as a music producer, stops looking forward and reaches into his own past to pluck out a man who never succumbed to the digital age, never had a profile on Facebook, never blogged anything, and never even owned a computer.  He plops that man up on a stage in New York city with a microphone and a guitar, and guess what happens?

One more thing:  If you want to belabor the Middlemarch point, you can analogize all of Eliot's bedwetting over trains with Egan's bedwetting over the internet.  Back in the 1800s, trains were a big deal because they connected people across a country in a way they hadn't been before.  Same thing with the internet, except it's all digital.  Seriously, Notre Dame, just give me a diploma now.  I can spout crap like this all day with one hand tied behind my back.

I'm not going to lie.  Egan isn't saying anything new or groundbreaking in A Visit To The Goon Squad.  But she is saying it in a way that it hasn't been said before.  And she crafts an entire chapter/story into a Powerpoint presentation that somehow ends up being the best in the book instead of a lame, hipster-y gimmick.  Pretty amazing, if you ask me.  I've embedded that chapter below:

Great Rock and Roll Pauses

View more webinars from JenniferEgan

I award A Visit From Goon Squad 8 out of 10 juice boxes.  I deducted one juice box because I don't really like the way she bashes the internet.  The internet is where I find loads of cool stuff, like this:

I deducted the other juice box because I drank it. 

So next time you're in a bookstore, pick this one up.  You can trust me.  I have my finger on the pulse of our nation, and I know whether a  thing's cool or not, oftentimes before you even knew that thing existed.