June 14: A Visit from the Goon Squad -- Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan first caught our eye when her short story "Safari" (read it here) appeared in the January 11 New Yorker. Imagine a modernized version of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" with Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Aldous Snow thrown into the mix along with Lou (an aging record producer), Lou's young girlfriend Mindy, Lou's two children Rolph and Charlie from a previous marriage, Lou's travel agent, and, just for good measure, an actor named Dean and two lesbians, who are unattached to Lou's entourage. The result is an unpredictable escapade somewhere in the high grass of Kenya.

Much to our pleasure, Jennifer Egan's "Safari" re-appeared in Egan's 2010 novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the 2010 Pulitzer and National Book Critics' Award. Awards do not always ensure greatness and popular appeal, but Egan's novel is filled with satirical commentary on our pop/techno/material culture, inventive storytelling and characters whom you'll find sad, funny and complex.

Like Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, which won the Pulitzer in 2008, Goon Squad features a series of separate short stories linked through (mostly) two characters, Bennie Salazar and his secretary Sasha. (Don't say you weren't warned when suddenly you find yourself neck deep in novels featuring stand-alone shorts stories loosely connected through minor characters in the next few years.)

The two best stories--other than "Safari"--are the last two of the collection. The penultimate tale is told from Sasha's daughter Alison's point of view, and this twelve-year-old narrates the story of her family through Power Point slides.  Reading it feels like reading a graphic novel with shapes, arrows, bubbles, and graphs providing the visual component. In order to read the story, you have to turn the book sidewise to flip the pages. One wonders what the Kindle version requires the reader to do to experience this chapter.

The last story, which is brilliant, does pull several of the novel's characters together, but Egan's depiction of the near future is what is most exciting about the chapter. Egan envisions a world where text messaging--just called "T", as in, "I need to T someone now"--has widened the generational gap. Also, adults in her story no longer trust the Web or traditional advertising. The result is a new frontier for marketing in the form of micro-Payola. The high rollers of the social networking world--those with many friends on Facebook and lots of followers on Twitter--appear to be easily seduced with cash payments to promote presumably anything--concerts, restaurants, films, t.v. programs, books. Despite how close to home Egan's story hits to this particular blog, the story raises all kinds of questions about social media and the direction in which the Web is heading in the next few decades: Will we become as skeptical about websites as Egan presumes? Will we no longer trust bloggers? How powerful will social media high rollers (within sites) become?

Something about Egan's narrative in the final chapter rings so true that we may all look back to her novel as the definitive novel of the early 21st century. Perhaps it won't reach Gatsby (20s) or The Things They Carried (60s) status, but this novel is certainly on par with Bonfire of the Vanities (80s) as a definitive novel of its era.

There is much more to Goon Squad than a plausible prediction of the future. There's delight in finding the character thread in each story--our little game of literary Where's Waldo--and many of Egan's stories are just plain hilarious. Get a copy of of Goon Squad--and, who knows?--you may be supporting GSD Selects.