A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

I almost quit reading A Visit from the Goon Squad 100 pages in. But I knew there was a section near the end of the book that was written as a PowerPoint, and I wanted to get to it. I'm glad I persevered, as the last third of the book is strangely interesting.

Why did I almost give up? The book follows a large cast of characters, all connected loosely or tightly to others in the cast and most involved to some extent in the music business. Every chapter is told from the perspective of one of these characters (some in first person, some in third). Some show up for one chapter and disappear; others, like music producer Benny Salazar and his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha, reappear frequently. I found it hard to engage with many of the characters. Take, for example, La Doll (or Dolly), a top New York publicist. In one chapter, she is the bitchy boss of Benny's ex-wife Stephanie; later, she reemerges in her "own" chapter. She's lost everything because a ballroom full of celebrities were burned by hot oil cascading from decorations she designed for an "it" party. To revive her career, she takes on the image-rehabbing of a foreign dictator who has engaged in genocide. His rehabbing involves wearing an odd hat and pretending to have an American girlfriend, a washed-up 28-year-old actress who just happens ten years previously to have been attacked by Stephanie's journalist brother Jules. You see how this connection thing works, right? Adding to my lack of engagement with the book was that fact that the chapters seemed to be randomly arranged, both in terms of time and character development (I'm sure that's not true--but I was incapable of discerning the reasoning behind their order).

After I decided to keep reading, two chapters in the middle of the book caught my attention because their format differed. One was presented as an article by Jules describing the incident with the actress. The other, focused on a college friend of Sasha's, was written in second person.

Then, the final two chapters really rewarded my decision. First, both of them are set in a rather dystopic future where music, family life, and the environment have all taken hits. One chapter is the PowerPoint journal of Sasha's daughter, who spends a lot of time writing about her mildly autistic brother's obsession with the pauses in songs. It sounds goofy, but it's actually a tour de force, a demonstration of how a talented writer can turn a form designed for another purpose into a narrative tool. The last chapter features Alex, who was on a date with Sasha in the book's first chapter. Many years later, he is a married father hoping that Benny Salazar will give him a job. The chapter's events reveal Egan's view of a possible future for families, communication, and music.

So I'm glad I kept reading. The book's probably not going to be on my Top Ten list for 2010, but Egan's ability to ply her skills and imagination in such varied ways makes it worth the effort.

Favorite passages:

I loved the PowerPoint chapter, but it doesn't really reproduce well as quotations, so I'll go with something from the last chapter:

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity," "search," and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?