A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread, by Ivan Kreilkamp (chapter 1)

Side A, track 1 T I M E ’S A GOON: FROM A TO B

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rose fiction is so flexible a literary form, definitionally loose and baggy, that it can seem silly to try to name any one consistent quality or focus throughout its endlessly varied history. But if pressed to choose a single preoccupation, one could do worse than to choose time: the sheer fact of movement forward, through temporality, that all fiction registers, represents, and sometimes resists. Fiction’s basic form is inescapably temporal, more so than other literary modes. A lyric poem might outline the thought of a single moment, whereas virtually any novel involves the representation of extended duration: at the typical minimum, as in Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway, a full day, but more often, years or generations.

Order, duration, frequency; time passed and time regained; time’s forward march and memory’s backward loops: these are at least among the most constantly recurring preoccupations of prose fiction and of the novel, from its eighteenth-­century origins to its twenty-­first century. We often distinguish between a classic or more traditionally “realist” fictional mode, perfected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—­as opposed to the more modernist or experimental (and eventually, postmodernist) approaches that began to emerge in the twentieth century—­on

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the basis of different approaches to the aesthetic problem of the representation of time. Many of the most notable innovations in fiction in the past century or so have taken the form of a fracturing, scrambling, or restructuring of the familiar realist temporal orders. But whether in a more traditional or experimental mode, even the shortest of novellas calls attention to the reader’s own experience of time’s passing.

And not just any time’s passing, but often the passing of specifically modern time: novels are ineluctably bound to the industrial and postindustrial age. The critic Christina Lupton memorably observes of the experience of reading a realist novel that “the pages of the book give materiality to the tick, tick, tick of modern life, with . . . ​one minute following the next” and “even the most personal life narrative occurring in regular, daily time.”1 The novel has long served (although it may no longer do so) as a crucial timekeeper for our sense of what constitutes the modern “everyday,” even the “real.”

Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad draws on the legacy of prose fiction’s grappling with temporality in many ways, with a particular attentiveness to the question of whether and when fiction can resist temporality’s steady and linear forward motion—­whether it can evade or halt or disrupt that “regular, daily time.” It does this, in part, via a sidewise adaptation and mediation of a range of rival media forms of our day, especially those associated with rock music. Rock and punk music provide Goon Squad ’s richest source of metaphors, images, and ideas regarding the passage of time and the many ways that human beings name it, think about it, evade it, memorialize it. Egan offers the rock song as an analogue for fiction, a comparable form for temporalizing human experience, and that many of the novel’s characters work in the youth-­obsessed music industry imparts an additional layer of concern with time and aging.2

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Egan’s novel has received a lot of attention and posed some categorical challenges for its unusual form. Grouped by one critic into a twenty-­first-­century category of “multi-­protagonist fictions,”3 Goon Squad takes the form of thirteen chapters (six on Side A, seven on Side B, like a classic album), each one focalized around a different character. Egan has explained that the novel began with the first chapter, “Found Objects,” published in the New Yorker as a story, narrating a single day’s experiences of a young woman, Sasha, who works as a music publicist for Bennie Salazar, only briefly alluded to in this first chapter/story.

Initially, Egan says, she intended the references to Bennie in the story as no more than a humorous sketch about a neurotic record producer. . . . ​But then I found myself thinking who is Bennie Salazar? Why does he do that stuff? Which prompted me to write the next chapter. And the same thing happened again: a minor character would catch my eye, and I’d want to crack them open. I knew pretty early that it wasn’t a conventional novel, or a story collection—­it didn’t fit into the standard literary genres that were available to me, so I thought, well, it’s a record album. The pieces all relate, they tell one big story, whereas often in a story collection—­certainly collections of connected stories—­there tends to be a sameness of tone and world, and I really didn’t want that.4

Neither Sasha nor Bennie focalize more than their allotted single chapter, but they do arguably serve as two dual protagonists for the novel as a whole: as other characters come and go, emerging temporarily at the center of one section only to fade into minor figures in other characters’ dramas, Bennie and Sasha recur, and their two interrelated life stories serve as

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primary through lines for the whole. Amid continual temporal and characterological leaps and jumps in the novel, we gradually can piece together a coherent narrative mostly centered around two primary character strands: first, there’s Bennie Salazar and his friends Scotty, Alice, Rhea, and Jocelyn, who first (temporally, although not diegetically) appear as teenage punk fans and musicians in San Francisco in the Bay Area in the late 1970s, where Bennie and Scotty form the short-­lived Flaming Dildos; then there’s Sasha, who, after some tumultuous teenage years in which she runs away with a punk drummer to Tokyo and then moves alone to Naples, Italy, returns to attend NYU in her twenties and later becomes Bennie’s secretary, and then assistant, at Sow’s Ear Records, the successful Manhattan independent label that he founded. All of the other characters in the novel connect in some way to the “Bennie” or the “Sasha” strand, or to both; the novel’s final chapter is focalized by Alex, who makes a fleeting appearance in the book’s opening chapter when Sasha goes on a date with him and then has sex with him in her apartment; by the last chapter (when he is living with his wife and daughter in the apartment with the imperiled view of the Empire State Building), he is hired by Bennie to do PR for the comeback performance by Scotty that concludes the novel. The novel unfolds nonlinearly, continually twisting back on itself, but permitting an attentive reader to grasp the ways that all of the sections and characters ultimately do connect logically to one another to constitute a plausibly realist world (albeit one that eventually slides into science-­fiction territory, in a 2020s grappling with extreme climate change).

One could imagine Egan’s early thoughts for the novel having taken the form of something like “Proust, but set in the late 20th/early 21st-­century pop music industry.”5 She has also acknowledged “a great debt to Quentin Tarantino [his 1994

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Pulp Fiction in particular], for the way Goon Squad plays with chronology and narrative,”6 as well as to David Chase’s The Sopranos. She commented about her aims in the novel, I thought about it . . . ​as a novel about time, and I did think carefully about who else has done that and what they did, Proust being Number One. I thought about other literary novels about time and I wanted to be a part of that ­conversation. . . . ​I think there’s a huge amount of tension around the issue of time, and especially chronology, in fiction, and we’ve been wrestling with that from minute one.

Look at a book like Tristram Shandy, which is so crazily experimental in a way we still have yet to match. There’s such a desire not to just say: this happened and then this happened and then this happened. The tension is between the incremental and inexorable passage of time and the leaping, stuttering quality of consciousness. The two do not match up. One result of that is that time is passing gradually, but we experience its effect as very sudden. Our perception of time is full of all these gaps. That really interests me, and I think it informed the fragmented structure of the book. I wanted to capture as many shocking discoveries of time having passed as possible, which is difficult to do if you’re just moving forward in time.

I also was just really interested in gaps. Things that happen when you’re not looking.7

“There’s such a desire not to just say: then this happened and then this happened” declares Egan’s disinclination to follow the path of what might be seen as a mainstream of realist Anglo-­American fiction. But in pointing to Tristram Shandy as standing at the origin of an alternative path for experimental fiction, she signals a relative disinterest in the category of postmodern fiction, which

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she can seem to sidestep, even as she uses certain techniques often associated with it; Goon Squad has been aptly characterized by Cathleen Schine as “an enormous nineteenth-­century-­style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche.”8 Goon Squad begins with two epigraphs from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, including the following one from vol. 3, The Guermantes Way: “Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”

Proust identifies a fallacy—­that to “enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth” will be to “recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago.” But such a recapture is impossible; it is “in ourselves that we should rather seek.”

Speaking of “the garden where we played in our childhood,” Proust continues, “There is no need to travel in order to see it; we must dig down inwardly to discover it.”9 Proust, a peer of Freud’s, advises that an individual must travel into the unconscious realm of memory in order to attempt to recover the previous self, but he also demonstrated that the novel allows a kind of portal by which any reader can vicariously experience a similar journey, or at least a simulation or representation of one.

Egan too seems to approach the form of the novel as a potential time-­travel device, a means of supernatural “omnitemporality.”10 If we are, in our everyday lives, locked into time in its remorseless forward travel, fiction can serve as a magic carpet, a door into the past, a spell to halt or to reverse time’s arrow, if only temporarily.

One great critic, Paul Ricoeur, had declared that the “modern novel . . . ​has constituted for at least three centuries now a

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prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of composition and the expression of time.”11 Such claims are notably true of Goon Squad, which is at once a “tale of time” and a “tale about time”—­the latter Ricoeur’s phrase for a novel in which time’s passage does not simply (as in every novel) provide a basic structure for the narrative but one in which, in his words, it is “the very experience of time that is at stake.”12 Egan’s characters are often stunned by the passage of time, feeling taken unawares, unprepared for its effects. “How did you get so old?” a character, Jocelyn, wants to ask an older former lover, Lou, revisited after twenty years, who has been incapacitated by two strokes.

“Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you?. . . ​Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?” (85). These questions remain, however, unvoiced; the fact of aging and its decay can be a source of embarrassment or even shame. Lou’s “second stroke really knocked him out—­ the first one wasn’t so bad, just one of his legs was a little shaky” (84). This series of Lou’s two strokes offers a mininarrative of time’s violence upon the body—­ a central preoccupation throughout the novel—­its one-­t wo punch that starts out not “so bad” but then becomes crippling. Egan’s characters, amazed at how fully time has overtaken and “ambushed” them, look back for clues about when it took its hold and about its duration—­ whether it occurred “all at once, in a day,” or “bit by bit.” And the novel itself operates as, among other things, a finely modulated device for measuring time and assessing its effects (in that, somewhat like a human body).

The novel takes its title from another exchange, also revolving around a passage of twenty years—­a temporal duration that seems to function in this novel a bit like a modernized and compressed version of Walter Scott’s “sixty years since” (the subtitle

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of his historical novel Waverley) or the forty-­year span from which George Eliot looked back to 1830 in Middlemarch—­that has left a formerly vital person decrepit and ill. Bosco is a former rock star, now a has-­been, visited at home by his publicist Stephanie (Bennie’s wife) and her brother Jules. Bosco is proposing a concept album based around the fact of his own decline: “The album’s called A to B, right?” Bosco said. “And that’s the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck nobody cares about? Let’s not pretend it didn’t happen. . . . ​Th is is reality, right? You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”

Jules had drifted over from across the room. “I’ve never heard that,” he said. “ ‘Time is a goon’?”

“Would you disagree?” Bosco asked, a little challengingly.

There was a pause. “No,” Jules said.

(127)

The title phrase recurs when Bennie says to Scotty (another washed-­up rock musician), “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty replies: “The goon won” (333). The word goon, in the United States, acquires the meaning in the late 1930s of a “person hired (esp. by racketeers) to terrorize workers; a thug,” and so a “goon squad” is an organized group of such thugs.13 Given the beginning of several of Goon Squad ’s primary character arcs at the end of 1979, when Bennie and Scotty’s band the Flaming Dildos play a gig at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens, it seems possible that Egan was thinking of Elvis Costello’s song “Goon Squad,” from his 1979

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album Armed Forces: “Goon squad / They’ve come to look you over and they’re giving you the eye / Goon squad / They want you to come out to play / You’d better say goodbye.”14 “Time’s a goon” is not, to my knowledge, an actual idiom, so if Egan did in fact invent it, it functions as a telling neologism in the novel, as if in this fictional world that is primarily, but not entirely, a plausibly realist representation of our own, the personification of time as a threateningly violent “goon” is one marker of a just slightly intensified cultural preoccupation with the tragic effects of time.

Bosco’s proposed album serves, a bit like Lou’s two strokes, as a very compressed model of narrative sequence and order.

One of the key theorists of fiction’s relationship to time, Gérard Genette, suggests that even the most complex narrative—­such as a Homeric epic or Proust’s novel—­ can be viewed as an “amplification” or “development—­monstrous, if you will” of a simple, “minimal” subject-­verb sequence: “the Odyssey or the Recherche is only, in a certain way, an amplification (in the rhetorical sense) of statements such as Ulysses comes home to Ithaca or Marcel becomes a writer.”15 Bosco’s planned album presents itself as just that kind of “minimal” narrative; From A to B is a reduction or quintessence of narrative itself, minimized to the most basic one-­ t wo sequence. Egan plays with compression and amplification, as if to explore how long a duration of time can be condensed into a tiny phrase and—­in the other direction—­how much language can be spun out to describe crucial moments or bursts of time.16 The containment of Bosco’s album within Egan’s novel illustrates two extremes of compression/minimization (the album) and extension and amplification (the novel). The question of his own failure is one Bosco “want[s] to hit straight on,” even if Egan’s own text suggests the value of approaching such questions less directly and at far greater length. Egan often

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seems to be thinking on the page about the questions she raised in the interview about fiction’s representation of temporal progression. We can see her at times seeming intentionally to shift in and out of “minimal” or maximal modes, exploring different degrees or scales of amplification for different purposes, experimenting with very different scales of meaning.

The endings of her chapters sometimes offer such occasions. For example, the first chapter, the story of Sasha and her shoplifting, concludes with Sasha’s anxious desire “to please” Coz, her therapist, “to say something like It was a turning point; everything feels different now . . . ​or just I’m changing I’m changing I’m changing: I’ve changed!” (18). Sasha sees herself and Coz as “collaborators” (like the members of the Flaming Dildos?), “writing a story whose ending had already been determined: she would get well” (6). This desired story would require forward movement, “turning points” and “change”; for it to be a successful story, Sasha feels, it cannot be static. “I’m changing I’m changing I’m changing: I’ve changed!” marks the difficulty of locating that exact “turning point” when “change” occurs (it would have to have occurred in the point in the sentence where the colon appears).

The chapter ends with Sasha and Coz “in silence, the longest silence that had ever passed between them.” She lies on his couch, in the chapter’s final sentence, “claiming . . . ​these minutes of Coz’s time: another, then another, then one more” (18).

As a conclusion to the chapter, this moment operates with notable self-­awareness, as Egan invites consideration of the ways that different genres or kinds of stories (such as novels or the “story” of a therapeutic analysis) define themselves in relation to temporality. Sasha (and Egan) conclude here in a “minimal” mode; there may be “such a desire not to just say: this happened

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and then this happened,” but this in fact resembles how this part of Sasha’s “story” concludes. This moment seems to hint not yet at “progress” or “change” but at a self-­acceptance on Sasha’s part that may be the prelude to eventual change. Sasha’s thefts can be interpreted as attempts to stop time; here, she achieves a kind of perhaps only momentary ability simply to be in time, allowing “another” minute, “then another, then one more” to pass without commentary or resistance. This is, in a sense, the exact opposite of “omnitemporality”—­rather, an absolute acceptance of a single limited track of experienced time, one moment after another. This could be taken to be a capitulation to time as the “goon” (allowing time to “win”) but might also be viewed more as a form of stepping away from an adversarial relation to it.

The subsequent chapter, dedicated to Sasha’s boss Bennie, also concludes in a manner that calls attention to temporality, sequence, and continuity. The depressed Bennie has jeopardized his working relationship with Sasha by making a romantic overture to her that she gently rebuffs. Looking at Sasha, Bennie realizes, “it was a girl’s face, but she’d stopped being a girl when he wasn’t watching” (38) (this is later echoed by Sasha’s uncle Ted: “She had grown up. . . . ​Ted experienced the change as instantaneous” [216]). Since the end of “Sasha’s” previous chapter, we too have, in a sense, stopped directly “watching” her, as Egan strikes a characteristic note, making us aware that the novel’s characters are developing and aging even as our attention has moved away from them. The chapter ends with Sasha saying something to Bennie through the car window that he initially misses. “As he struggled to open the door, Sasha said it once more, mouthing the words extra slowly: ‘See. You. Tomorrow’ ” (38).

“Kreilkamp writes brilliantly about Egan’s fictional practice. His homage to A Visit from the Goon Squad does double duty; this book is also an elegiac, loving account of the novel form in the late phase of its history.”—Deidre Lynch, author of Loving Literature: A Cultural History “Kreilkamp’s lucid reading offers a refreshingly unapologetic appreciation of an important recent novel. This timely and engaging book argues that A Visit from the Goon Squad poses fiction as uniquely capable of grasping the experience of time.”—Jeremy Rosen, author of Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace Ivan Kreilkamp is professor of English at Indiana University. His books include Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (2018), and he is coeditor of Victorian Studies. He has published pop-music criticism in the Village Voice, Spin, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.

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Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky Cover illustration: Jessica W. Schwartz

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REREADINGS

A Visit from the Goon Squad REREAD

“Clear-eyed and sure-footed, Kreilkamp tracks the Goon Squad down.

A passionately informed reader, he knows how to reread Egan, knows where to find all the scars on the wrecked bodies, knows about the losses—political, existential, aesthetic—that they mark, knows about the digitally compressed arts that we once shored against our ruin.

His meditation is a worthy companion to the novel, a testament to the surviving power of song and story.”—Jed Esty, author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development

KREILKAMP

“A brilliant investigation into Jennifer Egan’s modern classic, exploring how A Visit from the Goon Squad uses both the novel and the pop song as forms of elegy. Ivan Kreilkamp is a music critic as well as a literary scholar, versed in both Middlemarch and Minor Threat, so he brings revelatory insight into Egan’s punk-inspired story of time lost and time regained.”—Rob Sheffield, author of Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

A Visit from the Goon Squad REREAD

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