For those of us blessed by fortune to have long lives, we will greet the dawn tens of thousands of times. We will wake from dreams and perform our jobs. We will consume our favorite foods and our favorite entertainment. We will ponder what's ahead while reflecting on what we've long since left behind. And in the midst of all of this thought, this life, we will try to understand our essential selves, to separate hype from truth, socially inspired flattery from real identity, to tease out that one fundamental kernel of personality that governs our actions.
Who are we truly? And which version of ourselves is the truest version? And if we're lucky enough to recognize that version, to understand it, to seize it, how can we hold onto it when the merciless abrasions of time are so good at wearing us down until we've released what we know into the chaos of the world beyond us? Ms. Egan considers in her ephemeral novel.
Though time stands still for no one, it has moved with particularly cruel speed in the world of rock music. From the exceptionally creative heights of the 1960s and 1970s to the soulless, corporate control of the more recent past, it has known the sweetest highs and the most decrepit lows in its journey to speak to the people about their lives and how they plug into the broader, complex world. It has endured deaths and drugs, breakups and lawsuits, file-digitizing and file-sharing, but though it lives on, is it relevant? Is it meaningful?
To a loosely connected circle of people who, at one time or another, live and work in New York City, the answer is ambiguous. For instance, Benny and Scott, once best friends and bandmates who fell out over a girl, hold opposite views. The former is now a powerful rock producer, president of his own company and a force listened to. Scott, meanwhile, is a vagabond, an aimless, damaged soul whose talent sparked up and died out in one chaotic night of rock glory now decades in the past. And yet Benny is the man struggling with his disenchantment while Scott lives free of such doubt. All around them, meanwhile, spin the lives of their friends and wives, assistants and children, orbits uniting and separating, merging and clashing as they too try to come to grips with the devastation of growing old in a world obsessed with the young and the new.
A rumination on the nature of time and lost selves, A Visit From The Goon Squad is a fascinating if insubstantial novel that manifests as quickly as it evaporates. A collection of formative experiences that span nearly as many decades as characters, it speaks to the nature of fame and relationships, notoriety and war, as a means of divining some measure of understanding about a life which is increasingly bombarded by false sentiments, false transcendence, false fame. In depicting the cutting betrayals and the life-altering bustups, the moments of painful truth and the moments of absolute fear, it directs us to hold on more preciously to the days and hours that pass us, to treasure them as dearly as we do our loved ones. For soon, they will only exist as phantoms in our memories which will grow increasingly unreliable as we decay into old age.
More interesting than the novel's plot, which at times borders on the brink of non-existence, is its structure. A Visit From The Goon Squad is comprised of shortstories that, while interconnected, could easily stand on their own as individually packaged set pieces. Consequently, Ms. Egan has permitted her novel's structure to hang so loose that the ordinary governors of plot, a notionally linear progression of time and events, are overturned, discarded in favor of a narrative that is unstuck in both time and perspective. This ambitious play largely pays off thanks to a cast of embittered characters who each entertain the reader with their quirky and self-destructive takes on a life that permits us very little by way of control.
However, though the structure largely succeeds in re-enforcing the themes of fame and decay that pervade the work, it fails when its characters fail. Ms. Egan has winningly rendered the divergent paths of Benny the sellout and Scott the authentic musician, but some of the peripheral players who have been touched by them never take flight. Rather than exposing us to their problems and their burdens, they merely delay a return to the work's centerpieces. Some readers are bound to have affinities for most of these actors, but rare will be the reader who has affinity for all, obligating us to wade through unenlightening segments for a very minimal payoff.
A Visit From The Goon Squad is a piece of literary art, an experiment in style, and a rumination on cultural trends. In this, it is pleasingly done. But the intentional weakness of the work's plot prevents it from making any lasting impressions. For an award-winning novel, it feels exceedingly forgettable. (3/5 Stars)
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