In the words of Bosco, one of Egan's lesser characters, time is a goon. I just did not feel the same way with A Visit from the Good Squad. I would have preferred spending more time with Sasha and Bennie. Lou's son, Rolph is a sensitive and naïve child who struggles to connect to his father. The start is promising. The thirteen chapters of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" are like lily pads on a pond. And they went to concerts and they'd all dance near the stage and Rhea mentions that Benny was the only one who really listened to the music. The foreboding sheen of a room filled with excited anticipation and beautiful glimmering presents piled up under the Christmas tree.
I loved the chapter about the uncle, looking for Sasha in Naples, something about the atmosphere, the persons and their stories… I don't really know. How did I get this way? This quote is also a metaphor for the lives of our two main characters, Sasha, and her record company boss, Bennie, who is also a former punk rocker. I'm all for the malleability of forms, but I'm also for truth in advertising. Update: I'm officially the only person who does not love this book, so I am floating to assert my independence. The beats and the pauses, which together creates music as they flow through time, is applicable to human lives also… or so the novelist seems to tell.
Observing a skeleton, few laud the beauty of the bone structure. When you listen to live music, it exists in that moment. At the beginning of any book, fiction or non-fiction, adult literature or children's book, I'm primed for anything. She mentally spells out that she and Coz are writing a narrative together that ends with her being cured of kleptomania (never mind that this is the readers' job, not the writers'), which is just another way of saying that Coz is a stand-in for the author, which is rather facile (and also cliché). "Was Scotty normal then? Doesn't the timestamp on a digital music player continue to increment even when there's a considerably long pause in the currently playing track? He'll have four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side.
Egan's loosely connected narrative structure is reminiscent of David Mitchell, with it's layered together detail. This the best book I've read this year. So while I liked this, I got a bit of a been-there/done that flavor when reading it, and I think I hit depression overload somewhere in the middle of this. She describes the beauty of an ordinary screwdriver, shining, sparkling. As for his assistant, Sasha, she has her own first-world problem, a galloping kleptomania of which secret she only divulges to her shrink, Coz. There are Bennie's rock-and-roll buddies, Rhea who's in love with him; Alice, who he is in love with; Scotty, whom Alice loves; and Jocelyn, whom Scotty loves but who is having an affair with Lou, a middle-aged music producer who is married with kids. So, ultimately, the message from the Goon Squad, Egan's message (like Proust's), is that we must remember to enjoy life. Goodbye, My Love (Ted 1990). The opening chapter tells the story of Sasha's kleptomania, and how she couldn't stop herself from stealing a wallet from a public restroom while on a date. I'm not a huge fan, but he should be given a mention. Bennie: big-time music producer; Sasha's boss for over fifteen years and was in a band when he was in high school; has a son named Chris and an ex-wife named Stephanie. Then you have to go back and search what happened to that character in the last chapter where he/she appeared.
But it won't mean a fucking thing. Panta Rei, as Heraclitus said. A questo proposito, giocando sulla traduzione del titolo originale, mi viene da dire che il tempo più che un bastardo è un teppista – Goon Squad un anno dopo l'uscita del libro è diventato anche il titolo di una canzone dei Deftones. The connectedness of the book's many characters and the bringing together of a multiplicity of cultures, times and places shows there may be hope for us after all. Even if you whip out your Smartphone and record the moment, it still won't be the same. Many of the characters in the story talk about the "movement from A to B", while describing how their lives have changed (many a time in unexpected ways) as they progressed in life. The last time I found myself raving about a book as if it was the Second Coming of Christ was when I read Evening is the Whole Day in December 2009.
It protects experiences against the ephemerality of time, even if the characters are fictional. Remember being indestructible?? Christopher's mother and Bennie's wife and business associate, Stephanie moves from New York City to the wealthy community of Crandale with her family. Jennifer Egan's prose is exciting, her method of bleeding one story onto the next, of building up these, what Mario Vargas Llosa so eloquently calls, "communicating vessels, " is a true feat. But what remains elusive is "x: the unknown value required to secure M's love. " Arguably, her stories are more real, because of the way she tells them. I think teachers who use power point should be hog-tied by their intestines and then sodomized by Mary Lou Retton (and probably people in the corporate world too, but I don't know about that first hand, but I'm sure they deserve even worse). The Strokes - "Hard to Explain"... #! Like poor Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut's novel, the characters in Goon Squad are also, in a manner of speaking, "unstuck in time. " But it is Allison who is perfectly in sync with her brother, and can trace the tortuous connection in his mind when he says "Hey Dad, there's a partial silence at the end of 'Fly Like an Eagle', with a sort of rushing sound in the background that I think is supposed to be the wind, or maybe time rushing past! "
It is moving, somehow, both despite and because of its familiarity. They were young and lucky and strong - what did they have to worry about?? Time is a goon and life is a bitch, eh? Her last chapter is a sepia-tinted description of a young boy's unlikely game-winning homerun, seemingly assembled of the most stock of stock elements (bases loaded, homerun from underdog, crowd goes wild, proud father claps shoulder). For a more popular playlist by Kate Bittman, click here. A dog barked in the distance. "See, " Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. Punk became a fashion just like hippy used to be. "This idea lodged in my brain and I couldn't get rid of it, " Egan said. We have a privileged perspective, a wider gaze. A minor character in one chapter may be the main character in the next chapter.
This book is also about rock'n'roll because music is one of those things that were always better when we were young.