NOVEL THOUGHTS
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KNOPF, 2010
(available in paperback from Anchor, 2011)
A NOVEL OF interconnected stories, A Visit from the Goon Squad explores how time works to destroy some lives and redeem others. Bennie Salazar, an aging music producer, and Sasha, his troubled assistant, are at the center of the novel, around which the narratives of other characters—whose lives intersect with theirs—revolve. Time moves backward and forward, even into the future, from one chapter to the next; the stories are set in varied locales, from New York City to Naples to the California desert, and emerge from a variety of voices (from first to third person) and in unusual formats, such as a chapter composed entirely of PowerPoint slides.
We first meet Sasha, a kleptomaniac, when she steals the wallet of a woman in a hotel restroom; Sasha’s checkered past as a teenager is subsequently revealed, along with scenes of her later married life, and her intervening years as Bennie’s assistant. Some characters, like Sasha, find a measure of peace, while others struggle with time’s ravages. La Doll, a former big-shot public relations executive whose career took a nosedive after she accidentally maimed her clients at a party, is reduced to taking work rehabilitating the image of a genocidal dictator. Lou, a coked-up music executive who cavorts with teenage girls, ages without grace. And Bennie’s childhood friend, Scotty Hausmann, falls down on his luck later in life, becoming an object of scorn when he brings Bennie a gift at his office: a freshly caught fish wrapped in newspaper. Egan’s characters are tied together by their search for authenticity in both themselves and in their relationships, and redemption from past shames. Time is the enemy of some (“Time’s a goon, right?” asks Bosco, a washed-up rock star about to embark on his “suicide tour”) and the friend of others, allowing renewal and fresh starts.
Throughout, Egan explores the interconnectedness—and discontinuity—of her characters’ lives, and employs music as a metaphor for life.
Jennifer Egan shared how a cookie recipe from her childhood relates to her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Egan writes:
My grandmother, Elva Kernwein, used to make these cookies often when I was a child. She was a terrible cook (her recipe for spaghetti involved the addition of several slices of bread to the sauce!) but a spectacular baker, and I inherited both her sweet tooth and her love of baking. We made these cookies together when I would visit her and my grandfather in Rockford, Illinois, where my mother grew up. What I love most about them is their basic yet somewhat unusual taste: an amalgam of fudge and oatmeal cookies, achieved without baking or refrigeration! They are, I would venture, genre-less cookies—a mix of sturdy elements that are tasty in themselves yet achieve a transcendent unity, even a kind of delicacy—in combination. I was going for that same effect in my novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which consists of thirteen chapters, all very different from each other, that work together to tell a much larger story. Like my grandmother’s cookies, their genre is unclear: story collection? Novel? While working on the book, I tended to think of it as a concept album, but perhaps I should simply have thought of it as a cookie!
NOTE: You don’t bake these cookies, but you don’t actually put them in the refrigerator either.
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2 cups sugar 3 cups quick-cooking rolled oats ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder Dash of salt ½ cup chopped nuts and/or dried coconut flakes (sweetened or unsweetened) (optional, but I recommend adding these!) |
½ cup whole milk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract ½ cup (1 stick) butter |
1. Line several baking sheets with waxed paper. Combine sugar, oats, cocoa, salt, and nuts and/or coconut in a large bowl. Set aside.
Place milk, vanilla, and butter in a saucepan and cook over medium-high heat until mixture comes to a rolling boil. Continue cooking for 2 minutes more.
Pour liquid mixture over the dry ingredients, and stir with a spoon only until the dry ingredients are saturated. Stir contents very little. Drop by heaping tablespoon(s) on prepared sheets, and flatten a bit. DO NOT BAKE.
Allow cookies to rest for an hour or so, then transfer to a cookie tin. The cookies must sit overnight before they attain the desired texture. They cannot be served same day! And do not refrigerate!
Yield: 2 ½ dozen cookies
NOVEL THOUGHTS
Eight women from the Unitarian Universalist Congregational Society Book Group of Westborough, Massachusetts, attended the group’s discussion of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Pam Rogers thought the use of short stories to create a novel worked very well. The group admired the novel’s movement back and forth in time and how characters dropped in and out of the stories. After the discussion, says Rogers, “the few members who were initially confused over the narrative changes or wished that it was a ‘traditional novel’ had a greater appreciation for the book. As a group, we felt that the literary techniques Jennifer Egan used worked well.”
Members chose favorite chapters to discuss at length, such as “Pure Language,” a story they believe “accurately portrayed how teens communicate as well as how they will communicate and work together ten years from now.” Rogers adds, “We found it very believable that Alex and LuLu would be exhausted from talking and start texting, and that toddlers could buy music on their ‘starfish’ handsets. The chapter framed the book nicely with Alex in front of Sasha’s old apartment, remembering her while looking for his young idealistic self.”
The women also enjoyed the creativity of the chapter “Pauses” as it allowed them “to learn a lot about the dynamics of Sasha and Drew’s family,” says Rogers. “A traditional short story may not allow as much to be revealed about the characters, but the informative charts make it easy to imagine the story of their lives.”
Ally, Sasha’s daughter, successfully applies the slogan, “Charts should illuminate not complicate.” In her PowerPoint presentation about the pauses in rock songs about which her brother obsesses, Ally includes a graphic of a teeter-totter showing the weight of the tension created because of her father Drew’s inability to completely accept her brother Lincoln’s limitations. In one effective slide, explains Rogers, Ally lists side by side how Drew and Sasha relate differently to Lincoln, while another slide shows Lincoln’s train of thought and how he has a hard time connecting with his father. “The presentation shows both how much the family members love each other as well as the tensions that exist between them,” says Rogers.
Members admired the thematic concept of time changing the world and the people in it, and how this weaves the chapters together. “Sometimes time offers change and redemption as it did for Sasha,” says Rogers, “but it leaves others feeling like ‘everything is ending’ and yearning for the old days—like Bosco planning a suicide tour.”
More Food for Thought
The eleven members of the San Francisco Bay Area Well Bread Book Group discussed A Visit from the Goon Squad while enjoying a potluck dinner themed to the book. The meal began with Kitty’s Cobb salad (a faux Cobb salad with heirloom tomatoes and edible flowers, for the salad Kitty Jackson ordered during lunch with Jules Jones), followed by baked salmon individually wrapped with leeks, white wine, and lemon slices (for the fish that Scotty brought to Bennie wrapped in paper), green beans with lemon and almonds (for the Chinese green beans that Scotty always ordered), and Ethiopian food (to conjure the chapter on Africa). For dessert, Sarah Marshall contributed coffee/chocolate cupcakes topped with gold flakes (gold colored sprinkles), an homage to Bennie, who put gold flakes in his coffee, and apples, a tribute to Lou, the music producer who ate apples all the time. “It all came together unbelievably well,” says Amelia Graf, who adds that each member explained how her dish was relevant to the book.