A Vist From the Goon Squad

An interconnected tale where one character leads into the lives of another, in some small, chance way A Visit From the Goon Squad the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Jennifer Egan is a unique depiciton of multiple self destructive lives as they reflected, regret and hide from themselves. Often people find interconnceted stories a bit forced, or, for whatever reason, just simply unenjoyable, but Goon Squad had a simplicity and realistic quality to it which pulled characters together in a range of ways - from the significant to the unnoticed, in order the weave a full tapestrey of experience, leading some critics to describe it not as a Novel, but rather a Series of Short stories. (For my purposes I'm going to stick with Novel, because a that's how it read to me, and b) it was marketted/formatted as such.

Punchy and gritty, the novel is steeped in Punk and Rock and Roll - from the glamour to the depressing, dictating this in its own distinct style, both raw and refined, allowing the reader the taste of the times without diving fully into the culture of it (in say, Trainspotting style). The tone of the novel, however changes with each tale. Whether it be teen would-be punks with green hair getting wasted and tripping out at the local grunge bar, a struggling musician or the success of the CEO of a new record label, fame fortune and music preside over the story, tying them all together. With a focus on the dismantling of life over time, it follows the hopes and failures of life with a nearly objective clarity.

Because of the style of the novel - several little stories piled up into one, it is likely that the reader will find at least one which they can relate to on a deeper level, and connect their own path to. However, many of the tales are unfinished, or simply alluded to later when the name crops up in someone else's story, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks and try to connect the dots. I appreciated the fact that not all the dots are given to you. though I occasionally found it tricky, reading the name 'Drew' and thinking, where do i know that name from again? it was an interesting challenge to connect that character to the one from a previous story, and piece the aspects of a single persons life back together. I found it very life like, in that way, as discriptions and reminders were not provided (this is Sasha, she's the assistant, remember?) so that our understanding of characters was based purely on memory, and that hazy process of flipping through our personal memory name/face databases. This idea was further by the fact that the novel is not chronological, slippingfrom the late 60's to present day and back, while similarly picking and choosing between characters past, or teen years, and their adult (or even elderly) lives.

Though at first somewhat removed from the characters - perhaps the hard edged style or simply my own experiences didn't resonate with those in the novel as deeply as they might, preventing strong emotional attachment to the novel, there was still a sense of triumph in the little victories of the characters I read, and moments where I shared the empty broken feeling for girls like Jaqi who let her life slip away from them in a childish game of chasing their youth. Some of the most moving moments for me were, suprisingly, within the chapter written entirely in PowerPoint format, flowcharts and little graphs and speech bubbles rather than paragraphs. Not something I expected to enjpy 'reading', I found myself moved by the simple (and often unspoken) truths of the pages, and the underlying connection of pauses in music - a seemingly useles obsession, and yet it said it all: the unspoken parts of a song, the unsaid parts of your life. There was something beautiful in the formatting of these pages which I must admit, probablly wouldn't have carried as well in 'conventional' narrative form.

"Time's a goon, right?"
the novel is a vaguely multi-media approach to the destructive effects of time on the lives of those that most try and flee. Through each story, and each form it allows the reader to connect and observe from varying perspectives, the course of each characters life - those that succeeded or those that (more often) failed, winding up a million miles from where they started, or, more dissapointingly, in exactly the same place they started.