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.

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