A Visit From the Goon Squad

November 2014 Discussion

The Fairfax Library Book Discussion Group will meet Thursday, November 13th at 7 p.m. in the meeting room of the Fairfax Library to discuss our November book, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

Discussion questions are below.

Here are some links for additional background and information:

Character list and timelines

Jennifer Egan’s favorite non-fiction title: The Image

Video interview with Jennifer Egan (long!)

Coming up, we have the following book to look forward to reading:

Thurs. Dec. 11^th        Where’d You Go, Bernadette?  by Maria Semple

Thanks for reading with us. I look forward to seeing you at the Fairfax Library.

Beth Bailey-Gates

Friends of the Fairfax Library

NoveList Discussion Questions

A Visit from the Goon Squad
by  Jennifer Egan

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Author:

Raised in San Francisco, Jennifer Egan studied at the University of Pennsylvania and St. John's College, Cambridge. During her student years, Egan traveled extensively, exploring Europe, the USSR, China, and Japan. These locales and the adventures she had would inspire much of her later work. Moving to New York City in 1987, she worked a wide variety of jobs while beginning her career as a writer. Her first forays into the world of literature were short stories, which appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta and McSweeney’s, among others. These were included in her first book, a short story collection entitled Emerald City (1993).

Egan's first novel, The Invisible Circus (1995), was well received by both critics and readers. Again the novel drew from Egan's life experience, and it was adapted into a movie in 2001. Her second novel, Look at Me (2001), was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her next book, The Keep (2006) was a national best seller. Her most recent novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, was a concept years in the making:

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called A Visit from the Goon Squad, though I had no idea what kind of book it would be. As I worked on it, I kept wondering, 'Who is the goon?' I liked the sense that there were many answers. And then I found myself writing 'Time is a goon,' and realized that of course that's true — time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-29/jennifer-egan-interview-a-visit-from-the-goon-squad/

A Visit from the Goon Squad is an unconventional novel that pushes the boundaries of both metanarrative and format — part of the story is told as a PowerPoint presentation. Egan uses this iconoclastic approach to explore ideas of time, aging, music, and identity through the lives of a handful of vivid characters.

Egan's literary and journalistic work has been honored with a number of awards and fellowships, including the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, and most recently a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Egan's journalism frequently appears in The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two sons.

Summary:

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a thoroughly postmodern novel, offering a disjointed narrative and elements of speculative fiction, as well as unconventional format for parts of the narration. It follows a handful of characters as their lives intertwine over several decades. Sasha leaves home as a teenager, parties with rock stars, indulges her kleptomania, and travels abroad as a poor, disaffected youth, before returning to the US and getting a job as a executive assistant, eventually achieving a kind of stability. Alex, a relatively normal young man and Sasha's would-be suitor, deals with his own life as well as her eccentricities. Bennie Salazar, a music producer, deals with the changes in his own field, his own aging, and his complicated relationship with Sasha, whom he employs for a time. Stephanie, working in PR, tries to rehabilitate both an aging rocker's career and her own brother Jules, a former journalist who was imprisoned for assaulting a teenage star. Dolly, a former PR guru herself, struggles to support her daughter after her career takes a disastrous turn, and is forced into an alliance with an unsavory third world dictator. Ted, Sasha's uncle, attempts to find his niece at her mother's request, travelling to Naples to search for her.

These stories all take place around the present day. The final portions of the novel, however, move into the near future. A PowerPoint presentation written in the 2020s by Sasha's daughter, Alison, reveals Sasha's future as a married woman with a family, still dealing with the specter of her own past. Her husband Drew is a doctor; her daughter precociously snoops through her parents' histories; while her son Lincoln develops an obsession with pauses in classic rock songs. It also reveals the changes that time has brought to the world, including major environmental shifts and economic collapse. The final portion of the novel takes place at the same time, in a very different New York City from ours. Bennie, showing his age, calls upon his old friend Scotty to perform one last concert. Despite Scotty's concerns about age, he delivers an amazing performance. The novel ends with Bennie and Alex reminiscing about the past, dealing with the many changes in their own lives, and wondering what became of Sasha.

Questions:

While answers are provided, there is no presumption that you have been given the last word. Readers bring their own personalities to the books that they are examining. What is obvious and compelling to one reader may be invisible to the next. The questions that have been selected provide one reasonable access to the text; the answers are intended to give you examples of what a reflective reader might think. The variety of possible answers is one of the reasons we find book discussions such a rewarding activity.

How does the novel approach social trends and fads?

Taking place over the adult life of its central character, A Visit from the Goon Squad reflects on social trends and how they change. Many of the characters in the chronologically earlier parts of the novel pride themselves on their appearance and how it sets them apart from mainstream life. Stephanie reflects on this after she and her husband move into an upper middle class neighborhood that emphasizes appearance and conformity:

She'd noticed one or two blonde heads pausing by the court to watch and had been proud of how different she looked from these women: her cropped dark hair and tattoo of a Minoan octopus encompassing one calf, her several chunky rings. Although it was true that she'd bought a tennis dress for the occasion, slim and white, tiny white shorts underneath: the first white garment Stephanie had owned in her adult life. (p. 87)

Stephanie's appearance challenges the conventional notions of beauty that surround her. Her tattoo is a sign of her nonconformity. Her dark hair, close-cut, contrasts sharply with the carefully styled blondes around her. However, she is not immune to the desire to fit in, as her acquisition of a tennis dress shows. She may pride herself on her individuality, but Stephanie, like all of us, experiences a desire to belong, and will even break a lifelong habit to do so.

Then, the futuristic sections of the novel delve into the ways in which social trends change over time, in part as a result of the characters' aging. Lulu, in her twenties and the assistant to an aging Bennie, serves as an example of this. Her generation has embraced a new fashion sense, a rebellion against that of their parents:

She was "clean": no piercings, tattoo, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses? (p. 258)

The trends of youth often become the embarrassments of old age. In this case, traditional signs of rebellion and individuality in the form of body modification have become repugnant, as the young now associate them with their aging parents and grandparents. This detail is a commentary on the ephemeral nature of social trends, particularly among the young.

How does the natural environment transform over the course of the story?

The novel portrays how the physical world changes over the course of the narrative. The story begins in the present day, when contemporary environmental issues are a prominent concern. The final sections of the novel, taking place 15 or so years in the future, show that these environmental worries were justified.

The weather has changed, as Alex notes just before the concert in the final section of the novel, which takes place in early spring in New York City:

The concert day was unseasonably warm: eighty-nine degrees and dry, with an angled golden light that stabbed their eyes at intersections and stretched their shadows to absurd lengths. The trees, which had bloomed in January, were now in tentative leaf. (p. 265)

The climate has changed in the Big Apple, become more tropical. Trees bloom in mid-winter, when in New York of the present day they are still covered in snow. By the end of the novel, it seems that the threat of global warming has been realized, driving temperatures worldwide toward extremes. Alex and his family are forced to use mosquito netting at home: apparently, an increase in the number of those pests has come along with warmer temperatures.

Alison's part of the story, told as a PowerPoint presentation, explores this a bit further. She notes the changes that have come to New York in her own brief lifetime:

When I was little, there were lawns.
Now, you need a lot of credits for a lawn, or else a turbine, which is expensive.
Our house is next to the desert. Two months ago, a lizard laid eggs in the sand by our deck. (p. 184)

Further details, revealed in her presentation, indicate that climate change has led rapidly to energy and water shortages, ending the lawn as New York knew it. The local golf course, where her father used to play, is now abandoned and overrun by desert (p. 231). However, Alison also notes that steps have been taken to address these problems, most notably an immense stretch of solar panels, presumably there to provide clean energy:

The panels go on for miles.
It's like finding a city or another planet.
They look evil.
Like angled oily black things.
But they're actually mending the earth. (p. 233)

Even with this strange, transformed landscape, there are reasons to hope that things may get better as people correct some of the environmental damage that has been done.

What is the role of music?

Music appears over and over throughout the story. Bennie's career has been spent in the music industry. Sasha has been part of the music scene as well. Their experiences and the music itself shape and permeate the novel. And like so much else in A Visit from the Goon Squad, music and the people who make it are the victims of the ravages of time.

These come in a variety of forms. When discussing one of the acts they represent, Sasha and Bennie voice a great truth about the music industry: it is ephemeral. Musicians and musical trends rise and fade very quickly. "Sasha turned and stared at him. She looked angry. 'Who am I talking to?' she asked. 'You're Bennie Salazar! This is the music business. "Five years is five hundred years" — your words'" (p. 26).

Bennie is aware how fast thing can change in the music world, and has passed that wisdom on to Sasha, who can in turn remind him of it when he forgets. Interestingly enough, throughout the novel Bennie endures as part of the music industry, suggesting that the generalization may not be entirely true.

Bennie also reflects on how changes in society and technology have affected the business of music. Things have changed, and contemporary music is a victim of rapid technological advancement:

But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud. (p. 18)

Bennie's point is that digitization has robbed many art forms of the minor flaws and human qualities that gave them their heart and soul in the first place. In turn, this "aesthetic holocaust" may foreshadow the environmental and economic holocausts portrayed at the end of the novel. It also connects with Sasha's future son Lincoln and his obsession with pauses in music. He seems to focus on older songs — Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, the Four Tops — and the organic qualities pauses bring to the music. As he says in his notes on the pause in Hendrix's "Foxy Lady": "Another great early pause: 2 seconds long, coming 2:23 seconds into a 3:19-minute-long song. But this one isn't total silence: we can hear Jimi breathing in the background" (p. 186). More than just a sign of Lincoln's mild autism, his interest in pauses may reflect a desire to return to the human and organic in a damaged, digitized world.

What is the significance of the title?

The phrase "a visit from the goon squad" may recall bad gangster movies and threats of violence from the repo man. However, as the novel unfolds, it reveals a different take on that expression, which actually refers to a very different goon with a unique but equally destructive agenda.

The goon squad of this novel is a thug from whom no one can escape. Stephanie, working as a PR agent, is charged by her aging former rock star boss with reinvigorating his image. Bosco offers his own ideas for how to approach his comeback:

"I want interviews, features, you name it," Bosco went on. "Fill up my life with that shit. Let's document every fucking humiliation. This is reality, right? You don't look so good twenty years later, especially when you've had half your guts removed. Times's a goon, right? Isn't that the expression?"
Jules had time to drift across the room. "I've never heard that," he said. "'Time is a goon'?"
"Would you disagree" Bosco said, a little challengingly.
There was a pause. "No," Jules said. (pp. 96-97)

Years later, at the end of the novel, a parallel conversation happens with another aging rock star. A well worn Scotty Hausmann doubts his ability to perform one last time. Bennie pushes him forward, using an argument similar to Bosco's.

"You can, Scotty — you have to," Bennie said, with his usual calm, but through his thinning silver hair Alex caught a shimmer of sweat on his crown. "Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?"
Scotty shook his head. "The goon won." (p. 269)

Despite this apparent concession of defeat, Scotty goes on to deliver an amazing performance. Time is a goon, bullying, beating, and mauling many of the characters. However, each of them gets to choose their response. Some age gracefully, like Sasha, moving into better lives. Some, like Bosco, Bennie, and a reluctant Scotty, refuse to give in and instead rage against the dying of the light. The novel leaves us with the message that time changes all things, and our only choice is in how we react to the changes.

How does the novel approach aging and old age?

Due to the timespan covered by the story, we get to see some of the characters change as they age. This happens most prominently with Sasha. We know of Sasha's youth, her kleptomania, how she left home to travel the world, the things she resorted to in order to support herself. However, when her daughter, Alison, encounters Sasha's past through a photo in an old book, of her mother with a rock star outside of a club, the young girl discovers a new perspective:

Mom's mouth is smiling, but her eyes are sad.
She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be. (p. 200)

Intrigued by this new view of her mother, Alison asks about her past. Sasha refuses to talk about it for her own reasons:

"I don't trust my memories."
"It feels like another life."
"It's all so imbued with my own struggles."
"What struggles?" I asked her once.
"Nothing you need to think about," Mom said. (p. 201)

There is more to this than a mother shielding her daughter from her own unsavory past. Sasha has become a different person: settled, more or less happily married, exploring her creative side. She is the mother of two children. This new Sasha is a different character from the Sasha we meet in the first part of the novel. By refusing to discuss her past with her daughter, she is protecting them both from reliving some of her more difficult years.

After the concert in New York City in the last section of the novel, Alex and Bennie reminisce about the old days. When Sasha comes up in conversation, they remember that they are near her old apartment. They decide to visit and see if she's home. Alex finds himself reacting strongly to this encounter with the past:

Alex imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there — his young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet. The fantasy imbued him with a careening hope. He pushed the buzzer again, and as more seconds passed, Alex felt a gradual draining loss. The whole crazy pantomime collapsed and blew away.
"She's not here," Bennie said. "I'm betting she's far away." He tipped his gaze at the sky. "I hope she found a good life," he said at last. "She deserves it."
They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't."
Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us." (p. 274)

Alex's brief encounter with the lingering ghost of his past leaves him drained, for reasons he has difficulty articulating without Bennie's help. Here, on its final page, we may have reached the real point of the novel: time passes, people grow up, and you can't go home again.

How do relationships between men and women appear in the story?

A Visit from the Goon Squad presents relationships — of all kinds — between men and women as complex affairs. Their origins and the shapes they take as in real life, are often difficult to understand.

Though we only see them together briefly, Bennie and Sasha have a complex emotional relationship. She is ostensibly his assistant, but they share a much deeper bond. This comes to the surface during one scene, when Bennie is dropping Sasha off at her apartment:

"Listen," he said. "Listen, Sasha."
She looked up. Bennie felt no lust at all — he wasn't even hard. What he felt for Sasha was love, a safety and a closeness like what he had with Stephanie before he'd let her down so many times that she couldn't stop being mad. "I'm crazy for you, Sasha," he said. "Crazy."
"Come on, Bennie," Sasha chided lightly. "None of that."
He held her hand between both of his. Sasha's fingers were trembly and cold. Her other hand was on the door.
"Wait," Bennie said. "Please."
She turned to him, somber now. "There's no way, Bennie," she said. "We need each other." (p. 29)

There are a number of ways this can be interpreted. Bennie's feelings for Sasha might be a way to fill an emotional void left by his previous romantic failures, or they might be a misinterpretation of an important friendship. Sasha may reject Bennie out of reluctance to risk her career or their friendship, or as an acknowledgement that anything romantic between them would be bound to fail. Relationships are ambiguous: they're complicated, open to interpretation, and often the victims of communication breakdowns.

Relationships also bear the weight of the past, the emotional baggage accrued throughout a lifetime. When we meet Sasha through the eyes of her daughter Alison as a married adult and a mother, we get a glimpse into a marriage that is haunted by a past event: the death of a close college friend. Rob's death pushed Drew to become a doctor, as he admits to Alison (p. 214). It also has a lasting effect on Sasha, who "keeps his picture in her wallet," according to Alison (p. 215). Alison, ever inquisitive, asks her mother about their relationship:

"Did you love him?" I asked Mom.
"Yes. As a friend."
"What was he like?"
"He was sweet and confused, like a lot of kids." (p. 215)

Alison's part of the story indicates that Rob's death pushed Drew and Sasha together, and is at least partially responsible for some of the tensions in their marriage, even years later and after having two children. Relationships are invariably complicated by the emotional history of two people, though sometimes the source of the emotions is unclear.

Why does the novel focus on Sasha?

Sasha is an engaging character, displaying the most personal changes of any figure in the novel. Like all the characters, Sasha grows and develops in response to the world around her. Her background, world events, social change: all are reflected in Sasha and the course her life takes.

Sasha has a fairly normal early 21st century family life: middle class upbringing, absentee father, mother remarried. She rejects the relative normality of this life and runs away from home as a teenager, diving headfirst into the seedy world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll:

Sasha had resurfaced periodically, requesting money wires in several far-flung locales, and twice Beth and Hammer had flown wherever it was and tried in vain to intercept her. Sasha had led an adolescence whose catalogue of woes had included drug use, countless arrests for shoplifting, a fondness for keeping company with rock musicians (Beth had reported, helplessly), four shrinks, family therapy, group therapy, and three suicide attempts . . . . (p. 161)

The novel does not romanticize Sasha's time abroad; rather it shows the gritty desperation of poverty while away from one's family, in contrast to the normalcy of life at home. Sasha seeks out an aggressively different path than that of her parents, in response to what she sees as their failings.

Reflections show reversed images, and Sasha's life is often a reflection of the larger world in which she lives. Sasha's adulthood in the mid-2020s, as seen through her daughter's PowerPoint presentation, is surprisingly normal and stable. She belatedly married her college boyfriend, has a home, and is successfully raising two children. Her life is not devoid of problems: she and her husband still carry some guilt over the death of a college friend, her son Lincoln has some mental health problems, and her husband's work puts a strain on their marriage. Nevertheless, these are normal issues of the sort that many married adults must address. Sasha is leading a normal life; however, the world around her has gone mad. Global climate change has drastically altered the weather in many parts of the world. A large stretch of solar panels covers the desert in the US in an attempt to provide clean energy. The US has suffered economic and social collapse as a result of years of war and recession. In this dramatically transformed setting, Sasha emerges as stable and normal, in direct contrast to her early rejection of both those qualities.