egan presentation

8/6/2019 Egan Presentation

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A VISIT FROM THE GOONSQUAD

A Review, in Annoying Powerpoint Form


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A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) is a workof fiction by American author Jennifer Egan. Itwon the 2010 National Book Critics CircleAward for Fiction, and the 2011 Pulitzer Prizefor Fiction. It is being adapted by HBO into atelevision series.

The Pulitzer Prize Board noted that the novelwas an "inventive investigation of growing upand growing old in the digital age, displaying abig-hearted curiosity about cultural change atwarp speed".In commenting on her Pulitzer, NPRcritic Jonathan Bastian noted that "Egan is theone of the most recent and successful examplesof a trend that has been steadily seeping into

the world of contemporary literature."Manycritics were impressed by some of Egan'sexperiments with structure, such as a sectionformatted like a PowerPoint printout.

[This stuff is all straight from wikipedia]


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The novel's 13 chapters hop about between agroup of disparate, but interlinked characters.They're all a bit broken, a bit flawed, but veryfew are actively alienating, and some really getinto your heart, as a reader. Affluent post-Boomers with a thing for music. Several ofthem, when young, are in a band called TheFlaming Dildos. No, really.


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What does Abigail Nussbaum have to say?http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/

Egan's writing is deft and her characters are immediately believable andaffecting. The stories span a period between the early 70s and the early 2020s,with characters appearing at different points in their lives, taking over thenarrative thread after having previously played a supporting or walk-on role insomeone else's story. For the first half of the novel, this seems like a clever and

well-executed trick, but ultimately a self-defeating one, as it seems to prioritize asoap opera reading of the novel, in which what's important isn't the work as awhole but simply knowing how character X ends up. It was only very slowly that thebrilliance of Egan's approach crept up on me, because of course what happensnext, for all that it takes many forms, is ultimately the same--disappointment,disillusionment, and death.

This seems to me pretty much right .


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What is the novel about?

Its about time (no surprise there)Time: thats what the titular Goon Squad is

(Go On, you see). It visits all of us, takes ouryouth and hope and turns them into old ageand more-or-less bitter experience, andeventually it kills us off. Cheery.You see.


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For what? For mally .

Formally, Egan renders this theme through twostrategies. Im not talking about her bravura,andalmost entirely brilliantly achievedstylistic

variety, in which different chapters are written notonly in radically different voices, but different forms(a consecutive narrative; a David Foster Wallacestyle magazine interview; a powerpoint

presentation and so on). This is as old as Uly sses ,and (indeed) older; and most of Egans chapters ar econsecutive narrative, actually. Which is fine.


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Im talking about two specifically temporal textualstrategies. One is Egans cut-up approach to chapter

order ... the chronological logic jumps about, more orless at random; we start with Bennies burnt-out,anhedonic middle age; then we go back to Benniesurgent, driven youth, his early successes, then his calmer

dotage, and in between we have chapters from varioustimes in the lives of the characters Bennie knows andloves, throughunless I miscount-mefour generations.This is, depending on your view:

CoolAnnoying


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The other?

The other is something shes lifted from Virginia Woolf(you know what I mean: the interludes in To The Lig hthou se , for instance). Most of the book is realisedvia a Franzennian-Couplandish density of cool affect;lots of well observed detail, a thickness of characterand setting and description that draws you in, well-handled elements of Quirkiness and Humour and ablending of painstakingly achieved verisimilitude withopera bouffe nonsense. OK, good, fair enough. But

heres the thing: from time to time Egan will drop injolting glimpses into a given characters future, grindingout some neat-o textual effects by these spoilers.


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Franzennian-Couplandish

You know what I mean by this.


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For

Example ...............


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Examples: our characters meet a Samburu warrior onAfrican safari, and watch him dance, when suddenly weretreated to a little excursus on one of this warriors sixty-three grandchildren: Joe will go to college at Columbia andstudy engineering, becoming an expert in visual robotictechnology ... Hell marry an American named Lulu andremain in New York where hell invent a scanning device thatbecomes standard issue for crowd security [65].

Or: one long chapter concerns an Art Historian called Tedtrying to track down his friends runaway daughter inNaples, a girl called Sasha. We follow the experience indetail, reading to discover what will happen next: he findsher, loses her again, tracks her down a second time, and weare a little startled when the prose opens vertiginously,suddenly (on another day more than twenty years after thisone, after Sasha had gone to college and settled in NewYork ... and married late and had two children, one ofwhom was slightly autistic ... Ted, long divorcedagrandfatherwould visit Sasha at home in California 241)


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The abruptness of this is well judged. It mimics the way timeactually passes for us, for instance: incrementally, slowly, slowly,and suddenlybam. Ted knows this:

On a trip to New York, riding the Staten Island Ferryfor fun, because neither one of them had ever done it,Susan [Teds wife] turned to him suddenly and said Letsmake sure its always like this. And so entwined weretheir thoughts at that point that Ted knew exactly whyshed said it: not because theyd made love thatmorning, or drunk a bottle of Pouilly-Fuiss at lunch because shed felt the passage of time. And then, Ted

felt it too, in the leaping brown water, the scuddingboats and windmotion, chaos everywhere, and hedheld Susans hand and said, Always. It will always belike this. [240]


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Always. It will always be like this.


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Always. It will always be like this. [240] It wont, not for them, oryou, or me. P an t a r hei, oud en menei, after all. Hence

The Billy Pilgrim-ish narrative structureThe near-future setting of the last 100 pagesnot just that they areSF, but the sort of SF they are (the sort that says: the environmentwill change radically, and society will change radically, and a newgeneration will grow up so fitted to the new world that they willseem a little alien and spooky. And this is by way of saying it w ill not al w ay s be like this.Egans fondness for moments of emotional epiphany and intensity,happy and (more often) melancholy. She does this well most of thetime, although it sometimes gets cloying. Its her version of theKeatsian combined hymn to and lament for the transience ofpleasure, the line about bursting joys grape against your palatefine.Sunsets and sunrises. The book is full of these: [next slide! Click now!Now!]


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The sun blazes into view, spinning bright and

metallic against your eyeballs, ionizing the waterssurface so you cant see a bit of pollution or crudunderneath. It looks mystical, biblical. It raises alump in your throat. [209]

The sun was beginning to set. The sky was electricblue above the trees, but the yard felt dark.Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat,

her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil werestill warm from the day. She wanted to cry but shecouldnt. [142]


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OK, thats only 2 examples. But there are

manymore.


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See, sunrise and sunset give the illusion of narrative. But thereal secret of the sun, the spiritual secret (if you like) is notnarrative at all. One of Egans characters has a mystic

dream, in part the consequence of a childhood habit ofstaring directly at the sun.

I ge t a lot of h ea d ac hes f rom ey e d ama ge I ha d a s a kid , an d the pa in is so int ense tha t it th row s off b rig ht , ex crucia t ing

p ictures. Tha t a ft ernoo n I lay on my bed an d closed my ey es an d sa w a bu rn ing hear t suspend ed in d ar kness, shoot ing off lig ht in eve ry d irect ion. It w a snt a d ream , beca use noth ing ha pp ened . The hear t ju st hu ng there. [110]

The heart just hung there makes a pretty good summary ofEgans novel as a whole, actually: lyric intensities, brightprose, genuinely affecting emotional content, but in the end,and deliberately, no progression. Still: bravo. Brava.Bravissima.

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