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. 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 longstanding compulsion to steal.
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 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. This sly, startling, exhilarating work
comes from one of our boldest writers. |
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