Pitch perfect.-New York Times Book Review Best Books of 2010 Is there anything Egan can t do? Remarkable. Very smart and very funny-BBC Radio 4 s Saturday Review Goon Squad hangs together with the airiness of a mobile, constructed to catch the slightest gusts of longing and lust. The GuardianĮgan s writing is remarkable for its ability to anchor postmodern trickery to more reassuringly solid novelistic virtues. Thriftily evokes many disparate American lives in less than 300 pages, vividly showing how the virtues of the realist tradition historical depth and strong point of view can be combined with a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and dissolution. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to Powerpoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to the basic human hunger for redemption and the universal tendency to reach for both - and escape the merciless progress of time - in the transporting realms of art and music.
"A Visit from the Goon Squad" is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. We learn what became of his high school gang - who thrived and who faltered - and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's far flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.
We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life - divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed up band in the basement of a suburban house - and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her longstanding compulsion to steal. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs.
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