A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

My review in the Sunday Times 27th March 2011

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Corsair

£14.99

288pp

One of the pleasures of good writing is being taken to a world we might otherwise have no experience of, or even any apparent interest in. If rock music happens to be your thing, then A Visit from the Goon Squad is a must read. But don’t be put off if what you know about rock music begins and ends with the Rolling Stones. Jennifer Egan’s new novel is irresistible on its own terms as fiction of the highest quality.

‘How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?’ asks one character. It’s not so much a question as an existential cry of despair at the ravaging of time. There’s Bosco, for example, once a world-famous guitarist for the Conduits – a West Coast punk rock band of the 70s – who now has a stringy grey pony tail and an ‘unsuccessful hip replacement.’ Wondering how he can make it big again, he has hit on what he thinks is an idea of genius: a suicide tour.  And there’s Scotty, one-time lead guitarist for the Flying Dildos. (The Mad-hatters, the Stop/Go Sisters: Egan has such a good ear I couldn’t always tell which bands she had invented and which were real.) But Scotty, too, has fallen on hard times, spending his washed-out middle-age days fishing on New York’s East River, deluding himself that there is ‘no difference between being “inside” and “outside,” that it all comes down to X’s and O’s.’ Until, that is, the pain of being on the outside becomes almost too great to bear.

When we first meet Dolly (known then as La Doll) she is at the height of her PR fame. But a few pages (and several years) later she is ‘copy-editing textbooks until 2.00 am,’ up again at five to make ‘polite chit-chat to aspiring English speakers in Tokyo.’ Dolly’s downfall comes as a result of a party too far. She wants it to rival Truman Capote’s famous black and white ball, ‘or Malcolm Forbes’ seventieth birthday, or the party for Talk magazine.’ But when her ceiling decorations melt and pour out boiling oil, five hundred ‘generally fabulous people’ are scarred for life. ‘Her guests shrieked and staggered and covered their heads, tore hot, soaked garments from their flesh and crawled over the floor like people in medieval altar paintings whose earthly luxuries have consigned them to hell.’ In a way, she gets what she wants, but at the cost of her agency and a prison sentence for criminal negligence.

At first, it might seem as if the novel is a loosely constructed series of vignettes. There is a large cast of characters, and only a few of them emerge as major players. Some lives are amusingly wrapped up in a single paragraph of prophecy: ‘Four years from now, at eighteen, she’ll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she’ll nearly die from salmonella poisoning…A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties…’ Other lives, the reader must self-assemble out of seemingly random chunks not even in chronological order. This task is not as onerous as it might sound. Egan’s style is compellingly dark and knowing. There are dozens of clues scattered throughout the novel that weave the scenes together into a satisfying whole. In fact, there’s so much fun to be had working out how everyone connects up, I’m eager to read the novel again to see what I missed.

Sasha, who at thirteen discovered the thrill of stealing and who could hardly count the days until she could do it again, turns out to be one of the novel’s persistent characters. She arrives in New York with a list of ambitions she pins to the wall of her tiny apartment:

‘Find a band to manage

Understand the news

Study Japanese

Practice the harp’

The harp isn’t mentioned again, except once and with passing brilliance in a chapter narrated by a ghost, a gift from Egan to the attentive reader.

The novel earns its euphoric ending. At least one ‘fat fuck’ has a last hurrah. And, in a chapter as black and funny as anything in Waugh, we see Dolly claw her way back into business. A much-needed payment into her bank account is enough to obliterate ‘the tiny anxious muttering voice inside her’ that her new client is a genocidal dictator.  She has the brilliant idea that the despotic general should change his hat. Because, after all, ‘How could a man in a fuzzy hat have used human bones to pave his roads?’  By the time Dolly has finished her PR makeover – which involves a terrifying and hilarious trip to some unnamed country with an ex-starlet in tow – the General receives an invitation to speak at the UN.

‘Time is a goon, right?’ says Bennie, a music promoter who has had his share of ups and downs. ‘You gonna let that goon push you around?’ That the answer is so often ‘No,’ is what makes Egan’s novel ultimately so moving and so life-enhancing.