‘The goon won…’
I bought A Visit from the Goon Squad over ten years ago and it has sat unloved on my bookshelf ever since, until this week, when I was too ill to leave the back bedroom of our house and so I had to find something on the shelves that didn’t look too challenging and that I hadn’t read before. I think one of the reasons (let’s be honest, the main reason) why I’d shunned it for so long was because I thought it was about mobsters. I thought the titular Goon Squad were mobsters. They aren’t…
We begin with a story about a date in New York City between a kleptomaniac named Sasha and a man named Alex. What follows are 12 other chapters, each with a different narrative perspective, spanning continents, decades, and the inner machinations of the music industry, in which all the characters weave in and out of each other’s lives like a tangle of vines suffocating an old house. One character might be the focus of one chapter and then be mentioned in passing in the next. Indeed, many of the chapters were originally published as short stories in publications such as the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. While this unusual narrative style is a bit jarring at first, once you get used to it, it becomes very liberating for a reader. If you’re not vibing with one chapter, you know that another one is coming along in another 20 pages or so.
The title, not a reference to mobsters, is actually about time. “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” intones one of the characters at one point, and that’s what the book is really about – time. We meet characters in the prime of their life and then meet them again when their tender bloom of youth is dying and this makes for a novel that is both poignant and at times sobering in its unblinking take on mortality. The music industry setting provides a solid grounding for anyone interested in pop culture, and Jennifer Egan (the writer – who I probably should have mentioned in the opening paragraph but here we are) has a knack for crafting lived-in and authentic characters.
A Visit from the Goon Squad won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The Guardian named it the 24th best book of the 21st century. So yeah… It’s pretty damn good.