A Visit From the Goon. Squad
by Jennifer Egan
First Reviewed March 2013
I remember liking this book but not much beyond that and, of course, the powerpoint chapter. Surprisingly, I have little negative to say about 2013-me’s writing: that was a year that I spent most of my spare time writing, and I clocked something like 43 reviews. I say “something like” as a softener—I can, and did, reference goodreads, and it was definitely 43. No wonder I got dumped shortly after.
Ah, to be alive and writing on the internet in the era where overusing m-dashes made you look a little pretentious and not like an AI. I didn’t find much to edit out of this review, but I would, if writing it. now, rework the reliance on the m-dash. Such was the style of the time. At least for me. Apparently.
Nascent amateurism nibbles at the edges of entrenched criticism; awards like the Pulitzer fuel contrarianism and emphasize the urge to seen as capable of unique understanding, unswayed by what the establishment laudes. This is not an argumentum ad populum, or an appeal to authority; it’s just that I agree with the establishment. A Visit from the Goon Squad is very, very good.
When it opens on another New York City 30-something author-cipher, the warning flags start waving. After that appealing but sort of humdrum first chapter—“She saw her apartment as he must see it—a bit of local color that would fade almost instantly into the tumble of adventures that everyone has on first coming to New York,”—each chapter transition is jarring; the reader must puzzle out not only the who, but the when, of the narrative. Although you see—feel, actually—each character in each subsequent chapter, they aren’t really there. They jump, temporally, so seamlessly that, although they almost seem as if they could be self-contained short stories, it would be difficult to pull them apart from the narrative whole. Flawless transitions are unpredictable but obvious in hindsight. “It jarred Sasha to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that Alex would struggle to organize a year or two from now: Where was that place with the bathtub? Who was that girl?”
It would be hard to ignore the PowerPoint chapter, which was a gimmick. But a gimmick done well—once—is nothing to be derided. It wanted to be—will be, in a few years—a video diary. It was a bold choice done well. More bold still was the choice to extend the chronology into the near future; buffered by the format change of the PowerPoint, the genre shift into the final chapter, which dared to walk the line between tawdry speculative fiction and reasonable near-future dystopianism, . It’s an unsubtle extrapolation of current trends to their most absurd; it would have felt completely out of place with the grounded, contemporary-reality setting if not for the break in pacing. The purposeful weave to the narrative—beyond the tentative, “two ships passing in the night” ties to the ostensible main characters—is only apparent during this final chapter.
The well-written but tepid—“She’s calm and happy now that Scotty loves her. I can’t tell if she’s actually real, or if she’s stopped caring if she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?”—chronology of Sasha and Bennie could have ended on the scene with in Napoli. It would have, if this was just another insightful novel of human lives interacting. That it doesn’t, that the climax requires society to be a broken, satirical mess of uber-networked human uniformity, that the most marginalized outcast-class of current times becomes the messiah for reclaimed personhood, moves A Visit from the Goon Squad from an wonderfully clever piece of writing into a novel of real substance, with a message and a voice for society writ large.