Egan's a Goon

Just finished reading Jennifer Egan’s rock n’ roll “novel” (term used here loosely) A Visit from the Goon Squad.

As I waded through the first few cut-and-paste vignettes, my mind warped into painful sync with Egan’s polyphonic study. One moment, I was hanging with a burnt-out record exec, the next with a burnt-out family on a disastrous vacation, and the next still on crazy night with some college burn-outs. I was flipped through time, across space, and into the minds of young and old, crazed and half-sane. It was cool and entertaining. 

Yes, this is a book where "Modernist" (I place the word in quotes because Egan seems almost to be using the movement as a grab bag from which to pick and pick and pick) stuff abounds. Yes, we get stream of consciousness, we get flashbacks, fragmentation, entropy, alienation, and so on. Let's just put it this way, Derrida would be proud. (Ooomph, a Derrida reference?!)

If there’s a Modern Lit. thesis written about some technique (by a coed going to Columbia while living in Williamsburg and riding a 1950’s Schwinn bike to-and-fro), Goon Squad uses it.

Halfway in, Goon Squad began to wear on me. These modernist shifts in voice, character, and style began not only to annoy me, but to "take me out of it". I wasn't reading a series of interconnected stories with which I could somehow relate and connect, I was seeing a clever writer hunched over a typewriter (Egan certainly uses one in lieu of a modern day computer) coming up with these shifting angles and tones. I wasn't immersed. I was merely critical, not emotional. And this was, frankly, a little bothersome. 

The neat thing about the great Modernists (Woolf, Joyce, et. al.) is that, despite their attention to (usually) flowery distraction and technique, they manage to connect with you in some way if you're willing to put in a little effort. The jarring shifts distract while simultaneously attracting. You look on as a critic and are sucked in like a fan. You watch in horror, you smile in fascination. Like how Beckett can weirdly bore us to death with stories about nothing while keeping us riveted. 

A Visit from the Good Squad failed to keep me in this state of awesome paradox. I was simply looking at the technique. It was as though I could see Ms. Egan saying "Oh! Now I can do this! Or, how 'bout this!"

...and then she throws in a chapter that's a PowerPoint presentation.

fin.