What is wonderful and bracing about Egan is that she cares about freedom, risk and venturing into new territory more than about producing the perfect, pretty package. The novel's climax, which zooms into the future to 2021, is a stunner. The graphic element not only depicts time's passage, it also embodies it this is new media redeemed and redemptive. Yet, the risk of including the lengthy visual "slide journal" of Sasha's 12-year-old daughter (the interlude in PowerPoint) is unnervingly moving. Spending too much time on peripheral characters also diminishes this otherwise exceptional book. An irritating habit of lurching out of a scene to project what happens to a character is distracting and defuses power. Yet, time not only wounds heels, it heals some wounds.Įgan's handling of time can be jarring or brilliant. "Time's a goon," observes one character, who has become more of a relic than a rock star. Despite her innovations, Egan's themes are classic: our human longing to master time, to escape its inexorable passage through fame, immortality, or redemption. Interestingly, in this boundary-bending book, Egan chooses two epigraphs from Proust's InĪ Visit from the Goon Squad, she employs a kaleidoscopic spin of styles, switches up points of view and emotional tones, even creating a dazzling 75-page interlude in PowerPoint.
He kisses a Mother Superior on the mouth after signing the nuns for a record deal.Įgan is a fearless writer, game for risk. A girl Bennie lusts after walks in on him while he is on the toilet. His barber discovers lice on his son's scalp. His humiliations are embarrassing, albeit very human. One of the novel's themes is the loss of that vitality in our world, which is beset by sterilization and digitization, "which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh." It is not only music that is at risk, but also art, film, photography, literature and, most important, the self.īennie decides to list his catalogue of shame on a parking ticket, hoping this will puncture its power. These are no simple recollections, rather a visceral "raking over … and leaving gashes," a reliving of each moment when the image of his best self was shattered and soiled, colliding with the underbelly of reality.Ī Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan understands the power of shame, simply because it makes one present in the moment as effectively as fear or desire. While listening to the band to see if their sound is still gritty, Bennie is flooded with shame memories. Executives at Sow's Ear Records in New York City's TriBeCa want to dump a band he discovered, he's lost his mojo and, after consulting a book on Aztec medicine, now mixes flecks of gold with his coffee to resuscitate his sex drive.
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