The Goon Squad is coming for everybody. On Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Back in 2011, Egan won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which left many to scratch their heads, and after having read it, I’m also scratching mine. Though I need to admit, Goon Squad is not a bad book by any means. It is a well-written, loosely structured slice of middle-class Americana, the kind that does its damnest to push what the form of the novel can do, and at times pulling it off.
But it reminded me of two authors in particular who shares the same style as Egan’s multi-faceted, multi-perspective storyline: Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Safran Foer. Ellis often writes in short bursts with different viewpoints which more or less creates a cohesive whole. I loved this style when I was in university but I don’t know if I feel the same now. Safran Foer experimented with the actual medium of the paper itself and how it can tell the story, such as the reverse falling man flipbook at the end of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Egan’s Goon Squad lies somewhere in between and the more moderate version of the two.
In search of the Goon Squad
No, there’s no goons here who’d put on their brass knuckles looking for unassuming victims, or the ones who would tie a cinder block to your heels. The goon is time, taking everything away: your youth, your joy and that feeling of invincibility. The characters meander in and out each other’s storylines, we see them in their past and future selves, their past selves reckless but carefree, their future selves broken and mutated.
It is difficult to summarise the storylines, for each one is quite different. But there are patterns to the characters: they’re all unlikeable, their background is struggling middle to upper-class white America, they have an involvement in the entertainment industry. It’s very Bret Easton Ellis in a way. The teenagers who started off as talentless musician may turn out to be high wheeling music producers, the perverted music producer would in turn rot to their bones. The young promising journalist would attempt to rape a young actress, the young actress would in turn would eventually become washed up, selling their company to African despots. The promising young journalist? Some sort of publicist for a dying rockstar.
Each chapter captures a different time, a different place, a different viewpoint. A chapter that is written in the third person in New York could be followed by a chapter with a chapter with a first-person point of view back in the seventies. A chapter can be a feature article of a journalist’s experience interviewing a movie star that he would attempt to sexually assault, another chapter is divided into three different parts to reflect the terrains of the African continent. And who can forget the chapter that includes seventy odd powerpoint slides, created by a teenager who doesn’t use the medium for a living?
In a way, Goon Squad is structured almost like a vinyl record. Each chapter is a song, which could be interconnected in some ways but can exist on their own. Each chapter may even be a different genre with its versatile formats, but they belong to the same pen of the artist. As in each record, you’d probably have your own favourites and I have mine.
The pauses that matter
We know that America is sick and had been sick for a long time. The maladies of the American culture is evident in the fissures within her entertainment industry — something that America exports best and infects the world with her toxic expectations of success with the Western mindset. But lately we have seen the wheels falling off, the axles are cracked and the driver’s blowing ten times the DUI limit. Look at the saga with Harvey Weinstein, the sexual allegations rampant in Hollywood or the substance abuse that had taken many lives once immortalised in the posters pasted on bedroom walls of young teenage boys.
Goon Squad deals with all this: the music producer who’d take two teenagers out to a gig and gets one of them to go down on him while kissing the other; the washed out guitarist who were never really any good but trying to pull favours from old friends who are in a better place than he is; the publicist willing to forego her values to make a buck to put an African despot in a better light. And so it goes.
The entertainment industry is one facet to be balanced by another prong of the American life: the family unit. For each of the story, the question of where the family fits into the scheme of things is central. Children will always betray their parent’s expectations and in turn, children will always be disappointed with their parents. The wife would cheat and so would the husband, and friction that had been buried in the past will surface to an explosive end.
The phoniness of the entertainment industry is comparable to the phoniness of the relationships. In Selling the General, Dolly as a failed publicist must sell the general’s image to the reprimanding public by any means necessary: a blue hat tilted backwards (with no ribbons tied to his chin) and to set him up with a faded starlet in Kitty Jackson. Upon meeting the general in Africa, Dolly also brought her teenage daughter along. Yet, it is another story of a disappointed child when Lulu learned that her mother’s job is nothing but smokes and mirrors, and that she had also put their lives at risk.
The breakdown of America and her dream is the breakdown of the family unit. In the Great Rock and Roll Pauses, Alison’s viewpoint of the breakdown of marriage between Drew and Sasha as told by powerpoint slides is actually poignant. Especially in the contrast between the slide “Us” which included all family members in Venn intersecting bubbles, to an empty one at the conclusion of the chapter where there was no “us” anymore, but only intersecting bubbles.
Alison’s brother, Lincoln was also obsessed with the pauses in rock songs, like. And perhaps they are these momentary pauses which make up the fibre of the novel. It is everything that is left unsaid in between, when we see the character from point A and when we see them later at point B. The pauses cheat the expectation of the reader that the character’s storyline had ended, when actually the storyline will continue interwoven to another storyline in the following pages.
In some ways, this pause is similar to Safran Foer’s gaps where the character can go either way when making a decision— the nothing spaces. These nothing spaces often determine the outcome of a character’s storyline. The gaps and silences in Goon Squad are often more deafening than the story that is presented to us, from point A to B. It is up to us to dream up what had happened to the character up to point B, and we can only make our assumptions based on what we see in point B.
In the same vein as Safran Foer’s Incredibly Loud, Egan’s Goon Squad is also a post 9/11 novel. There is a sense of foreboding and loss throughout the novel, as the characters ponder on the past when the towers still stood. The emptiness of where the towers should have been reflects the character’s sense of loss of the past, though they may view the past in rose-coloured glasses in misleading nostalgia.
Whether Egan had earned her Pulitzer Prize is not for the scope of this article. A Visit From the Goon Squad remains a meditative work of what had happened to the American Dream, the phoniness of that same Dream and the consequences on its main victim: the American family, albeit the middle class family. Watch the pauses.
