Jennifer Egan, 2010

the fifty-ninth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Niklas Larsson

When I was in high school, I wrote the first chapter to a lot of novels.  I wrote the second chapter to a couple of them.  That’s as far as I ever got.  In college, I tried writing a novel that was to be called Ready, Okay!, but it bogged down after 350 pages.  I was not the only one with this problem.  I had an account on a text-based online service called GEnie that had a “Writers’ Round­table” full of published authors, and I once saw someone post a question about how to see a novel through to the end instead of adding to the trunk full of first chapters.  One of those authors offered up a piece of advice that really stuck with me: write shor­ter stories.  Get practice finishing things.  Start with a one-page story.  Then write a three-page story.  Then a ten-pager.  Twenty, fifty, a hundred.  Around this time I read Maps in a Mirror, a short story collection by Orson Scott Card that was divided up into five sections: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, religious fiction, and spe­cifically Mormon stories.  I decided that to get practice finishing stuff, I would write a story in each of those genres.  So during my year off between college and grad school, I set Ready, Okay! aside and did just that.  The resulting stories ranged from eight thousand to forty-six thousand words.  And midway through the project, I had an idea: link up the stories and try to pass them off as what I called a “composite novel”!  The execution was half-baked, to be generous.  A minor character or even just an object from one story would appear in another, and ta da⁠—an integra­ted whole, right?  A Visit from the Goon Squad is a far more successful execution of the same idea.  We have thirteen short stories, with no overarching plot, a different focal character for each, set in different times and places, with different styles and even formats⁠—one is a set of Powerpoint slides⁠—but there is a set of core characters who show up in multiple stories: the pro­tagonist in one, a key supporting character in another, a cameo in a third, and so on.  It’s neither a novel nor a story collection, but somewhere in between.  I saw one cover blurb call it a mosaic.  That seems like as good a description as any.

The stories are linked not just by shared characters but by theme.  “Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?” one character asks; he’s wrong about the second part⁠—I see no hits for this phrase prior to the publication of Egan’s book⁠—but right about the first, as we watch character after character fall prey to the ravages of time.  The “time’s a goon” character is the former lead guitarist for a multiplatinum rock band, now asking, “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?”  Another character is an aspiring rock star who wins a love triangle and gets the girl… only to find himself divorced, working as a janitor, and feeding himself by catching fish in a polluted river, while his one-time rival has become a successful record exec.  Time passes; now that record exec’s career is on the skids and his personal life is a wreck.  His mentor, in the ’70s, would openly get blown by teenage cokeheads as he watched bands he was thinking of signing; time passes, and he’s incapaci­tated by a stroke, clinging to the hands of faded matrons who hate him to try to capture one last echo of the old days.  We meet his son, decades earlier, on a family safari; time passes, and that son is dead by his own hand, and we’re left to fill in the gaps.  Etc., etc.  And… I mean, once you’ve reached an age when time has started robbing you of things, it’s hard not to find this a cen­tral theme of existence itself.  But then at the end of this book, Egan finds a way to twist the knife a little bit more: she adds two last chapters set in the future.  The last one is a satirical future⁠—the combination of a postwar baby boom and the pacification of unruly infants with smartphones means that the music charts now cater entirely to one-year-olds⁠—but it goes to show one more thing that time robs us of: the world we recognize.

The main thing that kept this book from really singing to me was simply that I didn’t really click with any of the characters.  In fact, I think I have to add a new pattern about this:

So, yeah.  Well written, interesting, thematically rich… but I saw a map online of the connections among the dozens of characters, and as I looked over all the little dots, I couldn’t help but muse that for every last one of them, my thought was basically this:

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