Ms. Hen reviews A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Anchor Books

2010

Ms. Hen decided to read this because her hen sister bought it recently, and hadn't read it. Ms. Hen thinks this is the kind of book her hen sister would like to read if she did read books. She buys them, and they pile up, and then Ms. Hen usually borrows them and reads them eventually.

This is a novel in stories about different characters that all connect with each other surrounding the music business and show business. Ms. Hen didn’t know what it was about when she first started reading it, but she got into it quickly. She thinks this would be considered a “cool” book, and imagines it should be hoisted into the canon of other cool novels that cool people should read, which incidentally are primarily written by men, ON THE ROAD, NAKED LUNCH, POST OFFICE etc. There are certain authors that are not put on the bookshelves with other books in some bookstores because they are stolen more often. Ms. Hen doesn’t think that this novel will be a frequently pilfered book, but she thinks there should be a possibility because it is cool enough.

The novel starts with a character named Sasha who has a problem with shoplifting who is on a date with a man. She steals a woman’s wallet in the ladies room at a hotel, but gives it back. The entire novel twists around the music business, and Sasha is mentioned in several other sections of the book.

One of the characters, Rhea, who lives in San Francisco, is a teenage punk rocker who is upset that she has freckles because punk rockers aren’t supposed to have freckles. (Ms. Hen doesn’t understand this because the majority of punk rockers where she lives have or had freckles. She found out that 22.8% of the population of the Greater Boston area are of Irish decent, which is the highest in the country for a metro region. This is why freckles aren’t uncommon where she lives.)

Ms. Hen thinks the subtext is well done is this novel; there is a lot that is said without it being said.  The character Ted, Sasha’s uncle, who goes to look for her in Naples, Italy, is an adjunct art history professor, whose sons play a long list of sports. Ted doesn’t muse on his sons’ preference for sports, but the reader gets the idea that he prefers artistic endeavors, and is disappointed in his sons’ choices. Also when he meets Sasha, he finds her with a hanger bent into a circle. Nothing is said about this, but the reader can infer what that means.

There’s a section of the novel that breaks out into a PowerPoint diary by one of the characters, and it reminded Ms. Hen of ULYSSES by James Joyce, when that novel contains a play in the middle. A VISIT FROM THE GOOD SQUAD is post-modern in its own way, much like Joyce, and it becomes something entirely different at the end, but Ms. Hen won’t tell you because it’s so good, and right up her alley.

Ms. Hen adored this novel. She thinks it deserved the Pulitzer and all the other prizes it won. It’s important, not just because it’s cool, but it shows us how people can be wrapped up in their own worlds, but other’s lives are always affected, and we are all intertwined in this tapestry of the Universe, connecting or not connecting, but breathing the same air; we live on the same planet, and ultimately come from the same stardust.