Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.
The Rock and Roll novel is hard to pull off, there have only been a select few that have been go0d (The Ground Benath her Feet by Salman Rushdie, Great Jones Street by Don Delillo). Now you can add A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan to that list.
Egan is a brilliant writer and one of the few women writers to be a postmodern writer with a literary bag of tricks. This novel features a celebrity magazine interview with footnotes (a la David Foster Wallace) and a compelling chapter told in a Powerpoint Presentation. It’s also told out of order.
The novel focuses on Bennie Salazar, a former punk musician turned record producer who hates the music he puts out and feels digitization has sucked the life out of art. Sasha is his trusty assistant who has the talent but never rose above her position and she is also a kleptomaniac due to her bad childhood. Bennie has been with a lot of women but he’s never been with Sasha, even though he wants it to happen. There are a lot of cast of characters in this book , all who are realistically drawn.
This is a great book with a lot of memorable set pieces like Bennie’s high school days with his bandmates or when a disgraced publicist is trying to improve the image of a murderous foreign leader. As well as the chapter set in New York in the future, where babies can buy music with one click on an Iphone like device.
This is a flawless story that entertained me from beginning to end.
—Reviewed by THE LIT GUY
