A Visit From the Goon Squad

This collection of inter-connected stories won the Pulitzer Prize for Jennifer Egan this year. I liked it, sort of, but I was also a bit confused by it. Each story is connected to one another by one or more characters, but it's best to read it fast, because if you take a while, like I did, you may forget who is who and how they are related.

It also escaped me how these stories spoke to something greater than the sum of their parts. Most of the through-line concerns music, specifically rock music. Most of the characters have something to do with music, whether as performers, record company employees, or promoters. The action covers a wide swath, from the 1970s to well into the future, but are told out of sequence.

The core of the book is Bennie Salazar, who founded a punk group in the 1970s in San Francisco, and then went on to discover a big group and start a record company. His assistant, Sasha, is also a character, and we first meet her when she is dealing with kleptomania. There's a certain harping on the alienation of youth, as the kids in Bennie's band are picaresquely described in a story called "Ask Me If I Care," one of the stronger entries. Sasha's own misspent youth in Naples is documented in "Goodbye, My Love."

Egan plays with time, especially in a story called "Safari" (which appeared in the Best American Short Stories of 2010), which tells the mildly humorous story of Lou Klein, Bennie's mentor, as he takes two of his children on an African safari. Egan uses a technique of stopping to reveal what will happen to everyone many years in the future, which can be quite effective in honing what we have read so far (is there anything more fascinating than looking at a child and wondering what they will grow up to be?)

"Safari" was the earliest story, chronologically, the last being "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," which is told by Sasha's daughter in PowerPoint slides. Her brother, Lincoln, is obsessed with rock songs that have discernible pauses, and in some ways is as frightening a view of the future as I've seen.

My other favorites of this collection are "Xs and Os," in which the mercurial singer of Bennie's band visits him years later in his fancy record-company office, and brings him a fish, and an uproarious take-off on celebrity profiles in glossy magazines. In this example, a journalist meets a minor young starlet for a typical interview, but it becomes all about him, complete with footnotes, to the point that he painstakingly describes how he attacks her in Central Park.

Less successful is "Selling the General," in which a washed up publicist has to take on a brutal, genocidal dictator. She hires the starlet mentioned above to play the general's girlfriend, but things go badly. It's broad, paranoid nature didn't fit with the rest of the book.

There are parts of A Visit From the Goon Squad that are vivid and touching, but I just missed there collective purpose.