“Time is a goon,” says Bosco, a character who doesn’t appear until midway through Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

“The question I want to hit straight on…[is] how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?”

Bosco is a has-been, former frontman for the 1980′s band The Conduits, now inflicted with cancer, obesity, and gray hair. In “A to B” (chapter seven), he implores his publicist, Stephanie, to help him promote what he calls a Suicide Tour, his last hurrah before death. In fact, he hopes the tour will cause his death. He wants his suicide to be an art form.

Where does Jennifer Egan come up with these ideas?

Bosco’s publicist is Stephanie, wife to Bennie Salazar, a famous and successful record producer. Bennie is the boss to Sasha, the subject of the introductory story, “Found Objects,” first published in The New Yorker in 2008. Sasha is a kleptomaniac who in some way haunts each subsequent story (or chapter): a ghost of time past, present, and future.

Egan created her latest book as a series of narratives, each connected to the other pieces through characters who appear and disappear in prior and subsequent chapters. The stories can stand alone; Egan has made sure not to label her latest work a novel. But it’s not a book of short stories, either. The reader pushes through chapters with the same momentum as she would a novel, with the same inquiries about conflicts and characters. Where did they go next? Where have they been? Where will they end up?  Time is a goon–as Bosco says–in that it doesn’t stop, doesn’t relent. It just keeps on going, or it kept on going, and characters find themselves…well, here, in chapter ten (“Out of Body”), or there, in chapter two (“The Gold Cure”), which chronologically, happened after chapter ten. Phew. Each time a character reappears, we are struck with the obvious realization that people, everywhere, keep on living their lives whether they are still part of ours or not.

Modern society is a facebook and Twitter society. We are haunted by our past, just as we are haunted by characters who disappear and flicker like ghosts throughout Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. That friend from elementary school is living somewhere now; we know, because we see the pictures on facebook. A former coworker tweets that she is growing her own lettuce. The same astonishment, allure, and voyeurism exists in Egan’s latest artistic exercise. We find out about Bennie Salazar’s failed marriage in the second chapter, but we aren’t told exactly what happened until chapter seven. A teenager who falls in love with Bennie’s mentor appears later, at his death. Bennie’s wife’s boss has a downfall of her own, and her daughter grows up to work for him.

In some way, all of our lives are intertwined, and in other ways, they are not. We just pass on the street with a steady gaze, not knowing the story of the person whose air we breathe for a short time. But Egan’s characters are not sentimental; they are mysterious and detached, which adds to their allure. The story of Sasha that opens the novel shows us a woman struggling with an addiction, a desire for adventure or connection to another human, but she holds us–as she holds everyone–at a distance. Finally, we see her through a younger person’s point of view, and while there is joy in the progress Sasha has made, there is also awkwardness in what we know about her past.

Egan is, in my opinion, a hip and accessible literary genius in plain clothes. Her books are thought-provoking and innovative when it comes to the power of fiction and imagination. A Visit from the Goon Squad is quite an accomplishment in this postmodern, modern world. When we think we’ve conquered all other things, Egan reminds us that we can never forget our past–or when we do, our past remembers us.

{ 1 comment }