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A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

by Jennifer Egan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2010

Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while...

“Time’s a goon,” as the action moves from the late 1970s to the early 2020s while the characters wonder what happened to their youthful selves and ideals.

Egan ( The Keep , 2006, etc.) takes the music business as a case in point for society’s monumental shift from the analog to the digital age. Record-company executive Bennie Salazar and his former bandmates from the Flaming Dildos form one locus of action; another is Bennie’s former assistant Sasha, a compulsive thief club-hopping in Manhattan when we meet her as the novel opens, a mother of two living out West in the desert as it closes a decade and a half later with an update on the man she picked up and robbed in the first chapter. It can be alienating when a narrative bounces from character to character, emphasizing interconnections rather than developing a continuous story line, but Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy that we remain engaged. By the time the novel arrives at the year “202-” in a bold section narrated by Sasha’s 12-year-old daughter Alison, readers are ready to see the poetry and pathos in the small nuggets of information Alison arranges like a PowerPoint presentation. In the closing chapter, Bennie hires young dad Alex to find 50 “parrots” (paid touts masquerading as fans) to create “authentic” word of mouth for a concert. This new kind of viral marketing is aimed at “pointers,” toddlers now able to shop for themselves thanks to “kiddie handsets”; the preference of young adults for texting over talking is another creepily plausible element of Egan’s near-future. Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us.

Pub Date: June 8, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-307-59283-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010

LITERARY FICTION

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by Jennifer Egan

edited by Jennifer Egan ; series editor: Heidi Pitlor

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SEEN & HEARD

PERSPECTIVES

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan - review

T ime is the goon in this sparkling novel of change and decay that ranges from the late 70s to the near future. Ageing, loss and compromise are explored in all their universal predictability and piercing individuality: we're all getting a visit from the goon squad.

Appropriately enough, Jennifer Egan has set her novel in a milieu predicated both on nostalgia and the race for the next big thing: the music business. In punk-era San Francisco, teenagers in mohicans and safety pins take over from the greying hippies begging on street corners; by the 2020s, in a postwar baby boom, the quest for the youth market and the ubiquity of mobile technology reaches its logical conclusion, with all pop songs directed at toddlers ("pointers", so called for the ease with which they download songs on their handsets). The intervening years have seen the digitisation of music and the mainstreaming of rebellion, and now the youth of tomorrow eschew piercings and tattoos. "And who could blame them, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?"

Egan's sprawling cast of loosely linked characters and episodic narrators are a vibrant collection of dropouts, survivors and misfits; they include record producer Bennie Salazar, Sasha, his kleptomaniac assistant, and various friends and family members. As we dip into their lives at critical points, not always in chronological order, the web of connection becomes ever more complex: Bennie's wife's brother assaults a movie star he's meant to be interviewing, who later works with a PR whose daughter ends up running a viral media campaign for Bennie . . . Mines laid early on in the narrative detonate after hundreds of pages: the book demands, and repays, a second reading.

When we first meet Bennie he's already inured to his success, yearning nostalgically for the muddy authenticity of analogue recordings (digitisation is " an aesthetic holocaust ! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud") and sprinkling flakes of gold into his coffee in an attempt to get his mojo back, a habit more ostentatiously expensive than coke. But the "deep thrill of the old songs" lies, of course, in their power to return our youth to us: the Dead Kennedys are his aural equivalent of Proust's madeleine.

The next section jumps back in time to the era of Bennie's teenage punk band, beautifully sketching their adolescent combination of posturing and sincerity, as well as developing currents of mismatched desire among a group of friends who've "done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, Quaaludes".

That list conveys a keen, sweet flavour of time passing, as does the sad wonder with which these baby-faced punks regard their younger siblings, still playing in the lost kingdom of childhood. Throughout the novel, characters strain to apprehend time and its effects on the flux of personality – that desire, as Sasha puts it, to be able to say " I'm changing I'm changing I'm changing: I've changed !" Egan's chronologically jumbled structure is the perfect vehicle to express this, shuttling the reader between prophecy and hindsight. "So this is it – what cost me all that time," says one narrator, reunited with the music mogul, now on his deathbed, who seduced her as a teenager and derailed her future plans. "A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty." What looked at 17 like the beginning of her life story became its dominant narrative.

The desire to step outside time is symbolised in Sasha's autistic son's obsession with pauses in old songs – Bowie's "Young Americans", the Four Tops' "Bernadette", songs that are themselves pockets of frozen time. This section of the book, set in the future, is presented as a series of PowerPoint-style slides produced by a young girl for whom writing a diary in continuous narrative would be utterly old fashioned. Egan conjures a mood of poignant immediacy with these discrete, disconnected statements, as she does with the text messages that stud the final section.

Such formal playfulness and variety is found throughout the book – a celebrity interview peppered with subversive footnotes; episodes narrated in the second person or first person plural, to conjure the disassociated mindset of a depressed college student or the camaraderie of the teenage band – but always used to increase its emotional power.

This is an incredibly affecting novel, sad, funny and wise, which should make Jennifer Egan's name in the UK and is already picking up prizes. As well as being longlisted for the Orange prize , it recently won the US National Book Critics Circle fiction award, an event widely reported in terms of the surprising news that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom hadn't won.

In fact, the two books have a lot in common: poignantly comic social novels told from multiple viewpoints which set up a nice tension between authorial omniscience – Egan often steps back to make casual reference to future events – and the doubts and confusion of their cast. Egan even includes the Franzenesque trope of sending a restless character on an unlikely money-making foray abroad, flexing free-market muscles in an exotic environment where corruption and danger are rather sharper threats than in middle-class America.

While Franzen's last two novels ventured to Lithuania and Paraguay, Egan dispatches a down-on-her-luck publicist to Africa on a mission to improve the global standing of a genocidal dictator by linking him romantically to an American celebrity. (Imagine Charles Taylor doing a Hello! spread with Britney Spears.) It works as a highly coloured satire on PR ("Dolly had worked with shitheads before, God knew") but, like Franzen's similarly OTT interludes, jars with the rest of the book, in which daily life is colourful enough already. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel to relish, and Egan is a writer in her prime.

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Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

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Book Summary

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. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. 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. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. 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. 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. 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. 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. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

Chapter 1 Found Objects

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman's blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that at, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand-it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• A Visit from the Goon Squad shifts among various perspectives, voices, and time periods, and in one striking chapter (pp. 234–309), departs from conventional narrative entirely. What does the mixture of voices and narrative forms convey about the nature of experience and the creation of memories? Why has Egan arranged the stories out of chronological sequence?
• In "A to B" Bosco unintentionally coins the phrase "Time's a goon" (p. 127), used again by Bennie in "Pure Language" (p. 332). What does Bosco mean? What does Bennie mean? What does the author mean?
• "Found Objects" and "The Gold Cure" include accounts of Sasha's and Bennie's therapy sessions. Sasha ...
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Rock music is notoriously difficult to write about, especially in fictional form, where literary platitudes and rhapsodic discursions often fall short of the transformative experience of actually listening to the music. Egan succeeds, though, by offering pithy observations on the sterility of digital remastering ("The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh") and the overwhelming power of listening to music over head phones ("...the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage.."). Music lovers recognize these sorts of truths as gospel, and Egan's obvious affinity with music, especially punk and post-punk, gives the book all the magic of a favorite song... continued

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(Reviewed by Marnie Colton ).

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Beyond the Book

California punk.

Although Jennifer Egan now lives in New York, she grew up in California, and her knowledge of the Bay Area/Los Angeles music scene gives the book a gritty authenticity, with references to bands rarely mentioned in the pages of literary fiction: the Dead Kennedys, the Nuns, Black Flag, the Avengers, the Germs, and Negative Trend are all name-checked. "Nineteen-eighty is almost here, thank God," sneers Rhea, scoffing at the Haight-Ashbury's burned out hippies and reveling in her identity as a green-haired punk. Bennie plays bass while Scotty sings lead in their band, the Flaming Dildos, and Rhea and Jocelyn, attired in dog collars and ripped stockings, attend thrillingly aggressive shows at venues like San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens...

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, a visit from the goon squad.

The story begins in the late ’70s California punk scene and ends in a near future where tattoos and piercings are outmoded and babies are proficient at text messaging. In the 50 or so intervening years, a set of characters drift in and out of the pages, their lives intersecting in often surprising but poignant ways. Brought together by music and concerned with personal expression, art and experience, the characters who populate Jennifer Egan's thoughtful new novel, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, are all dealing with the passage of time and the effects --- positive, negative and neutral --- it has on their lives, beliefs and relationships.

Readers first meet Sasha as she lies on her therapist’s couch discussing her compulsion to steal. From sunglasses to keys, expensive pens to scarves, she has an ever-growing collection of disparate objects taken mostly from strangers (never from stores). In her therapy session, she recalls a date, many years ago, with a man younger than herself. The one-night stand would've been forgettable but for an incident with a stolen wallet, her date's appropriation of one of her trophies and his memory of the night decades later.

We meet another central character in the next chapter. Bennie Salazar is an aging music producer who has a euphoric musical experience while listening to two sisters record a song in their basement while his son joins in on tambourine. The moment brings back for Bennie what he loves about music, but it ends in a humiliating anxiety attack and he is tended to by Sasha, who is, at this time, his assistant. Bennie's story, like those of the other figures in the novel, shifts back and forth in time. Next he is a teenage musician whose friend's inappropriate affair with music executive Lou Kline not only gets Bennie involved in the business end of music, but also introduces a whole group of other characters whose stories are entangled with Bennie, Sasha and their friends.

Some of these relationships are tenuous, others are confusing, and often the novel feels like a connection of interrelated short stories drawing from the same host of characters and themes. Yet Egan moves easily between stories and settings, and in time. We find Sasha as a young adult, in the midst of several formative relationships. Her best friend will soon be dead, and she is years away from the settled mother and wife we know she will become. We are also treated to a chapter told from the point of view of Sasha's young daughter, who explains her autistic brother's fascination with musical pauses in chart and graph form. Bennie emerges later in a second marriage confronted by the closest friend of his youth and an opportunity to make meaningful music once again.

There are so many characters here --- friends, children, business associates, the children of business associates --- that Egan always appears in danger of dropping threads. But that tension serves the story well because tension seems to be at the heart of it. We readers know what the characters don't: how it turns out and how time treats them in the end. We know who survives, who is radically changed, and who loses the battle against time. There are elements of satire here as Egan looks critically at journalism, the music industry, public relations and more. But even as she casts doubts on intentions and integrity, she is never mean-spirited. In fact, the characters she creates are sympathetic. Because we see some of them as children or young adults, we have a sense of what brought them to the point where --- for example, after witnessing their mother try to improve the image of a genocidal dictator with a fuzzy hat and a hug from a down-on-her-luck starlet --- they would attempt to manipulate public interest in the music of a reclusive janitor through guerrilla text messaging.

If it all sounds convoluted, it is and it isn't. A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD is complicated and complex, but because it addresses some of life's big questions, it is philosophically compelling and universal. The particulars of each character are unique, yet the themes remain the same. Despite the occasional fragmentation of the story, the exploration of identity, music and time make for a melodic and intelligent novel.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on January 24, 2011

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

• Publication Date: March 22, 2011
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Anchor
• ISBN-10: 0307477479
• ISBN-13: 9780307477477

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Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page,  A Visit from the Goon Squad  is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.

Extreme End-of-Decade Love for A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD!!

Grateful and Thrilled that GOON SQUAD has somehow remained in the conversation after ten years: ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY :  Best Book of Decade Time Magazine :  10 Best Books of Decade ELLE :  15 Books that Defined the 2010s Philadelphia Inquirer :  20 Best Books of the Decade VOX :  19 Best Books of Decade Literary Hub :  The Best 20 Novels of the Decade

Minneapolis Star-Tribune  and  St-Louis Post Dispatch, by  Ellen Akins, 4/1/22

“Each [chapter] has its own language, its own tropes and terms, which Egan somehow manages to use and skewer at the same time, while maintaining the mystery that makes each person unique and worth knowing.”

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National Post (Canada), 1/10/12

“When finally I read the first pages, I was transfixed. For the next 36 hours I found all other activities bothersome because they took me away from this marvellous book.”

Pop Matters , 2/21/12

“I don’t like this so called high brow versus commercial dichotomy because I feel it isolates both camps in an area that I’m guessing no one particularly wants to be in.”

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Seattle Met , 1/26/12

“I just love not being attached to a machine…Maybe I lose something in terms of velocity, but I think I gain it in terms of freedom.”

BookTalk (UK) 1/10/12

“It feels like I am seizing upon details that suggest to me a life I don’t necessarily know, but is out there and has integrity. I could pursue it if I wanted to, but my goal is to keep my eye on this larger vision.”

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

• Publication Date: March 22, 2011
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Anchor
• ISBN-10: 0307477479
• ISBN-13: 9780307477477
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Themes and Analysis

A visit from the goon squad, by jennifer egan.

In ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ Jennifer Egan tries to explore the theme of time and how quickly it can flash before our eyes, often leaving us reminiscing about some good memories from the past or regretting having lived less than we planned to.

About the Book

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Throughout the book, readers will notice how time takes its toll on the majority of the leading characters – starting with the most frontal ones in Sasha Grady Blake and Bennie Salazar but also extending to Lou, Bosco, Jocelyn, Mindy, and the others. As the story progresses, more and more themes of aging, death, unrequited love, technology, and mental health, among others play out. This article will analyze the frontal themes from Jennifer Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ and discuss the key moments, writing style, figurative expressions, and symbols therein.

A Visit from the Goon Squad Themes

Time passage.

More than just a theme but also a sort of character, time is arguably the biggest villain out to hunt all the characters in Jennifer Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad .’ From Sasha to Bennie – stretching down across to Scotty, Jocelyn, and all the other characters, the readers will find these characters, at one point or the other, lashing out and venting their frustrations on either the fact that time came flying past their hay days too quickly, or that it took a complete detour on them. 

Mental Health 

The issue of mental health among the youth is another vital thematic focus of Jennifer Egan her book, ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad. ’ These issues seem to come as a direct or indirect consequence of the traumas of the time theme. 

Nearly all the characters battle with mental health issues in their own time. Sasha struggles with kleptomania – while Bennie battles over impotence, loss of confidence, and self-esteem. Some – like Jocelyn – suffer devastating heartbeats, while others like Rob become self-destructive and lose their lives as a result.  

Aging and Death 

Aging, and eventually death, is the reason ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ characters have shared malice with the time character – as these themes are the strongest, most imposing, and most fearful instruments it has on humans. After wasting a significant part of her youth living by the edge as a punk rocker, she comes to the realization that she hasn’t really achieved any meaningful thing in her life, and age is not on her side. 

Once this happens, she begins planning the remainder of her life for the better, first by going back to school, then seeing a therapist, and so on. A similar thing happens with all the other characters.

Infatuation, Love, and Unrequited Love 

Incidental themes from the novel, these trios are typical for every book, film, or work of art that focuses on young adults. ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ isn’t different, as there’s no shortage of drama on these three fronts. 

In the first three chapters, we see how Bennie and his clique are caught up in a bizarre love (or infatuation?) circle. Rhea wants Bennie, who wants Alice, who wants Scotty wants Jocelyn, who wants Lou. None seems to be loving another who loves them back, and this unrequited love, and hits devastatingly more on the character Jocelyn (and a bit on Rhea), who becomes miserable over Lou’s games. Thankfully she realizes later and attempts to fix her life. 

New Media Technology 

Technology, particularly social media, is at the center of things in ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad .’ This is written all over Part B, chapter 13 of the book, when Alex and Lulu work with Bennie to promote Scotty as a music brand to the world, and people actually bought it even with they not having prior knowledge of Scotty’s work or personality.  

The Music Industry 

The entire narrative of ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ is built around the music industry. All the characters know or have something to do with someone who knows about music, more specifically, punk rock music. As kids from the 70s, Bennie and his friends vibe to the trendy punk rock music of the era. However, for Bennie, it becomes much more than just a vibe but a passion; that’s why unlike the others, he pursues it as a career – learning everything about it: the best, the production, the music. 

While the whole plot revolves around this genre of music, Bennie and his mentor Lou Kline seem to be the only two people who run a successful business out of it, selling the talents of people like Scotty and Bosco. 

Key Moments in A Visit from the Goon Squad

• Sasha visits her therapist and recalls stealing a woman’s purse – and later – Alex’s wallet. 
• Bennie goes to watch his band’s indoor performance – accompanied by Sasha and his son Christopher. 
• It’s the 1970s, seventeen-year-olds Rhea and Jocelyn convince Lou to come to watch Bennie and his band – ‘The Flaming Dildos‘ – perform. 
• Lou goes on a vacation on safari – accompanied by his family and girlfriend Mindy. 
• Many years later, Lou is old, sick, and dying and is visited by old friends Rhea and Jocelyn (now forty-three-year-olds). 
• Scott, who is leading a reclusive life as a lowlife janitor after his divorce and hiatus from music, visits old friend Bennie.
• Bennie moves to the affluent Crandale neighborhood with his wife, Stephanie, but they struggle to fit in.
• PR guru Dolly Peale, after her fall from fame, tries to rejuvenate her career by selling the genocidal General. 
• Stephanie’s brother Jules Jones publishes his magazine piece about the assault incident with Kitty Jackson.
• Rob, Sasha and Drew’s friend drowns in the East River following a fit of mental health issues. 
• Sasha’s Uncle Ted Holland tracks Sasha to Italy and convinces her to come home. 
• Allison, Sasha’s daughter, shares her family experiences, her brother Lincoln’s struggle with autism, and her defeatist inclination. 
• Alex and Lulu help Bennie promote Scotty’s concert on social media. The show is a success, and they make history together. 

Style and Tone 

Jennifer Egan’s writing style goes in tandem with her postmodernism inclination . She typically utilizes nonlinear plot-style narrative to lend as many eyes to her readers so that her work goes beyond being a mere subjective read but also a multi-perspective experience.

Her book, ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad’ is a perfect depiction of just how composite the author’s writing can be. In this book made up of thirteen chapters – cut in parts A and B, like a phonograph disk, the readers will experience an abundant flush of backstories and foreshadowing, diverse points of view (in the first, second, and third person), and thirteen complete, single story knotted together at their tail end. 

In terms of tone and mood of ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ,’ there are over a dozen of them extractible, and this is because every story is told by different characters based on their distinct mental and emotional state. However, the common tone and mood found in the book are mostly satirical and include; expressions of regret, shame, disappointment, failure, and hope.

Figurative Languages

Egan’s use of figurative language in ‘ A Visit from the Goon Sqaud ’ is thorough and starts well within the book’s title – which is a metaphor for being a merciless bully and tormentor of man. 

Beyond the use of metaphors, there is also a wide usage of devices like satire, allusion, simile, personification, foreshadowing, and so on. 

Analysis of Symbols in A Visit from the Goon Squad

Symbolism plays a major in Jennifer Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Sqaud ’ and so can be found at various important events of the book. Some of the most prominent ones have been explained.

Music is the heart of Egan’s ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ and it symbolizes an instrument of unity for all the characters across the different stories. Despite its changing nature, it still stands as the connector between Bennie and Sasha’s generation to that of Lulu and Alison’s. 

This instrument, as seen deployed at strategic intervals by Egan, connotes different meanings at different points in the book. Sometimes it presents a glimmer of hope for what is to come – like in Ted and Sasha’s scene in her Italy apartment, while other times, it represents an event filled with dread and terror – like in the chapter where Sasha’s friend Rob dies. 

Water’s symbolic depiction in ‘ A Visit from the Goon Sqaud ’ is unconventional – meaning that it is painted as harmful and destructive as opposed to the conventional literary connotation of being the source of life and tranquility. Rob drowns in the East River while swimming with Drew, Jocelyn visualizes drowning Lou when she and Rhea visit, and so on.

In ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ,’ pauses – especially in punk rock music – underpin the activities of time in relation to the characters throughout the book. From point to point, pauses progression of time in the life of these characters – detailing how much things have changed over time. 

What are the primary themes in ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ by Jennifer Egan?

The story of ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’ communicates lessons through several vital themes: from themes of mental health to time passage, and technology use in the punk music industry. 

What figurative element is prevalent in ‘ Goon Squad ’?

Among a plethora of figurative elements used, the metaphor seems quite prevalent throughout the book and even exists in the book’s title to start with. 

What narrative technique does Egan use in ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad ’?

Egan uses multiple narrative styles for the book, ‘ A Visit from the Goon Squad. ’ Across the book’s thirteen chapters, the reader can find the first, second, and third-person perspectives. 

What does sunset symbolize in ‘ Goon Squad’ ?

Sunset in ‘ Goon Squad ’ is like a gate that opens up a little of what is to come; sometimes it’s hopeful and optimistic, and other times it’s hopeless and grim. 

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About Victor Onuorah

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

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Jennifer Egan and the Goon Squad

The novelist talks about her pulitzer-winning book, which includes one chapter written as a powerpoint presentation, and stephen fry discusses greek mythology..

Hosted by Sam Tanenhaus and Pamela Paul

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For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2010 and 2020, respectively.

Jennifer Egan’s latest novel, “The Candy House,” is a follow-up to her Pulitzer-winning novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which came out in 2010. That year she appeared on the podcast and told the host Sam Tanenhaus how she had gone about organizing the book’s centrifugal structure: “What I was really interested in was trying to move through time and work with the difference between private and public. We see people and they seem to be easily categorizable — sometimes they seem like types. And I loved then taking that person that we had seen peripherally and showing us that person’s inner life in a really immediate way,” she says. “It happened very organically. … I just followed the trail of my own curiosity.”

Also this week, we revisit the actor and writer Stephen Fry’s 2020 conversation with the host Pamela Paul, in which he discussed topics including Oscar Wilde, Fry’s own love of language and his book “Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined.” “It’s a miraculous thing about Greek mythology that there is a timeline and a chronology,” Fry says. “It’s probably reverse-engineered by Hesiod and Homer and the later poets, obviously. But nonetheless, it has a shape, a beginning and an end, which other mythic structures don’t seem to have. And they’re so deep in the — I hesitate to use such a cliché, but I can’t avoid it — in the DNA of our own culture and art that it’s part of who we are.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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