Time is a goon. And it always wins.
Published: 2010
Genre: Literary Fiction, Slice of Life
CW: Drug Use, Sexual Assault, Adult/Minor Relationship, Suicide, Drowning, Infidelity
★★✬☆☆ (2.5/5)
Egan's novel is difficult to summarize, as it doesn't have an overarching plot; instead, it consists of 13 interconnected short stories about former punk rocker turned music executive Bennie Salazar, his assistant Sasha, and various people they meet in their lifetimes. I find short story collections one of the hardest types of books to review, as the quality can often greatly vary between each piece. This is the case I find myself in with The Goon Squad.
That isn't to say the book in poorly written—it did win the 2011 Pulitzer Prize after all. But I will say that the stories felt a bit uneven. Egan employs some fairly experimental styles throughout the book: one story is written as a David Foster Wallace inspired magazine article, complete with tangential footnotes; another in told through a series of PowerPoint slides. The most effective is the story "Out of Body," which focuses on Sasha's college friend Rob in the aftermath of a suicide attempt and is told almost completely in second-person perspective. Each of these stylistic choices really adds an extra layer of personality to the protagonists. However, these are used in only three stories in total. I wish that Egan had been more experimental with the other stories in this collection, although I understand that having to write 13 stylistically distinct stories would have been extremely difficult.
Another issue I had with the book was that only five of the protagonists actually interested me. Other than Rob, this included Rhea and Jocelyn, two of Bennie's high school friends with differing opinions on a middle-aged record producer that Jocelyn becomes involved with as a teenager; Sasha, who struggles with kleptomania and appears most often throughout the collection; and Sasha's 12-year-old daughter Ally, who copes with her hectic family life by making PowerPoint presentations. Most of the protagonists appear as minor characters in other stories throughout the book, and while I admire Egan for not always picking the most obvious characters to focus on, many of the characters I actually wanted to hear about never got their turn in the spotlight. For example, Kitty Jackson, a young starlet, appears as a minor character in three of the stories, where the protagonists often view her as nothing more than a mirror or an object of desire. I kept waiting for her to get a chance to tell her own story, but it never happened. Instead, I read about the thought process of the man who assaults her or the career failings of Bennie's ex-wife's old boss.
Ultimately, A Visit from the Goon Squad is about the passage of time and how it can take us places we never thought we would end up. Several times throughout the book, characters will say, "Time is a goon," with one character stating in the final story, "The goon won." Egan doesn't seem to have much sympathy for them. Which I can somewhat understand; most of the characters are not great people. But if this is meant to be satire, I'm not entirely sure what the point is. Is Egan trying to say that there is no hope? Because in a time when the future is so uncertain, that sort of cynicism isn't going to get us anywhere.
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