“A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan, $25.95
Sasha is a kleptomaniac with curatorial intent. The objects she steals — sunglasses, a child’s scarf, pens, keys, soap, a screwdriver, wallets — are souvenirs of her tenuous life. Proof of her existence. Talismans protecting her from her need for and distrust of love.
But now that things are more stable, she is trying to stop. She’s in therapy, and she’s devoted to her job assisting music producer Bennie Salazar. Once a brash indie genius, now a stressed-out corporate cog and divorced dad disgusted with what digital technology is doing to music, Bennie has taken to adding flakes of gold to his coffee in the hope that it will revive his libido. His trust in Sasha is absolute.
Music is the lifeblood of “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” the fourth work of incisive fiction by Jennifer Egan, author of “Look at Me” and “The Keep.”
We see Sasha as a fatherless child, a teen runaway living hand-to-mouth in Naples, Italy, as a 21-year-old college freshman and as a mother of two who creates sculptures out of odds and ends that slowly succumb to the desert’s eroding forces.
Egan, a writer of uncanny perceptions and exceptional artistry, handles time as though it were a record album, playing tracks in a sequence determined by emotion and subterranean connections. Each episode is dramatic and intensely involving on its own.
But when the book is read in full with high attention, when you are as alert to clues and opportunity as a pickpocket, you will discern the complete, intricate web of blood, passion, risk, creativity and longing that holds Egan’s cast of electrifying characters together over the course of four difficult decades, reaching into the 2020s.
Egan adeptly conveys the texture of life in different times and places as she traces the immensity of social change precipitated by technology, from electric guitars to computers to small mobile devices that mediate every interaction, even when people are face-to-face.
In Egan’s imagined future, even small children are equipped with “Starfish,” or “kiddie handsets,” and so-called “word-of-mouth” is actually generated by paid “parrots” whose handset chatter creates the buzz that brings a huge crowd together for a concert in the novel’s ravishing closing scene.
But however manipulated, phony and intrusive social networking becomes, however desiccated words become as they lose their true meaning on the Web — words such as “friend,” “real,” “identity” and “search” — genuine human emotions and intelligence persist. Music still transforms us. We still watch the sunset and moonrise in awe. We still long for and count on the restorative heat of an embrace.
For all its sensory richness, social and psychological insights and brilliant layering of ideas and commentary, Egan’s time-bending tale is laced with suspense and punctuated by emotional ambushes of profound resonance.
A novel to read, and read again, “A Visit From the Goon Squad” asks: What sort of creatures are we? How well do we know ourselves or one another? What must we do for others, especially the young? Does technology bring us closer or pull us apart? What do we inherit? What will our legacy be?
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