Visiting with Egan's "Goon Squad"

Winning an award for your work is inevitably an honor and for some readers the mark of the Pulitzer Prize is a compelling emblem; for others it is intimidating. This year’s winner is a laudable accomplishment as well as a comprehensible and engaging read. In fact the most elusive feature of Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is the title.

The first chapter, and first story, introduces us to Sasha. She is a thirty-something single woman in New York, discussing her most recent setback with her shrink. The scene is typical so far. Sasha, it turns out, is a kleptomaniac and her fervid encounter with an online date concludes in forgettable sex and a poignant theft.

Sasha's story introduces a few of the characters who appear in the successive stories. Egan cleverly extracts minor figures from early stories and fleshes out their worlds as the book proceeds. For a time, the reader is traveling backward in time, retracing history, but ultimately we arrive somewhere in the future. While Sasha’s presence is a fundamental thread in the book, she never entirely reclaims the narrative as her own. The reader pieces her life together through the eyes of her contemporaries and acquaintances, and we learn almost as much about them along the way. It is fair to say that the story is no more hers than it is any of theirs.

“Goon Squad” follows its population of protagonists to Naples, Africa, and the suburbs, but it always returns to New York. The city harbors the wounded and spits out the derelict. It is a place where gifted musicians become riverside fishermen, PR magnates light their guests on fire, people find their callings, and others find themselves selling their foundering souls. By reconnecting with Egan’s characters in different stages of their lives, we become acquainted with a panorama of their choices. Throughout the book their mistakes and triumphs come into focus and give them a very human identity. An aging producer who seduces young girls is also a father and a mentor while an American sweetheart actress morphs into a political rebel. Egan’s characters are unfailingly complex, and like most people, they continue to surprise us.

In addition to the creative tool of intersecting but not continuous or chronological storylines, Egan uses a variety of methods to tell her story. A troubled college student speaks about himself entirely in the second person, until he reaches a mental climax and collapse. A young girl illustrates the fluctuating complications of her family via power point, and a few conversations are had entirely via abbreviated Ts, a form of texting reduced further than our own. These methods reflect both time and states of mind.

Egan’s characters' narratives come together like puzzle pieces. It is a sly approach and one that Egan executes with grace. It is somewhat disappointing, however, not to acquire a full view of any one of her characters. This is partly a compliment to Egan's craftsmanship as a writer that we want to intimately understand everyone she creates. But the sliver we are given, no matter how substantial, is never enough. Arguably our chagrin at remaining on the fringes of these realities should be swallowed in homage to artistic license. Egan is, perhaps, using these slices to paint a larger picture. I resented the deprivation nonetheless. “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is a novel in short stories. I am a fan of both genres and Egan’s book is a well-developed delight, but I couldn’t help wishing I’d had one or the other because both didn’t give me enough of either.

Bloom Cross-examines Love in Recent Collection

The stories in Amy Bloom’s collection Where the God of Love Hangs Out depict the accidents, evasions, and conclusions provoked by the wily deity of the title. Bloom captures the innumerable gradients of romance and base physicality in her engrossing illustrations of attraction. Her twelve stories contain moments of triumphal love as well as love that is mistaken, worn, and familial. Whether you recognize something from your past or see something you want for your future, Bloom ensures your interest with her sharp eye and rare prose.
Bloom begins most of her stories with precise declarative sentences. The reader is dropped into the lives of her characters with a thud; by that first sentence one is already captured by the voice. Although these are largely women’s stories, Bloom never reduces the opposite sex to a caricature. The pain, expectation, failure and fulfillment of men and women vibrate on equal planes in Bloom’s voice; the decibel may change but the depth remains constant.
In two of the four sections of her collection, Bloom traces the trajectory of two different couples. Both storylines have an element of the forbidden but Bloom does not write to scandalize. She isn’t interested in naughtiness, she is merely aware of the odd unions that can be produced circumstances both strained and comfortable. Her characters’ predicaments are deeply felt and the choices they make are not made lightly.
In the first quartet, one half of two couples combine to form a new pair. These fresh lovers are not young themselves and the affair that unfolds is laden with the experience of age, the weight of what this indiscretion means, and the sharp delight of desire. In Bloom’s second quartet, a young widow and her stepson arrive at a dreadful impasse while in the throes of their grief for the man they loved. The results of this encounter are not exactly tragic but staggering nonetheless. Neither coupling leads to predicted or similar conclusions. The author’s awareness of the unpredictability of conscience and emotions is reflected in the expansion of her stories. Mortality is a pervasive presence in Bloom’s works but deaths are not used as a ploy or a crutch.
The characters in this collection are entirely fallible and while each story in these two quartets triumphs in its own right, it is through following each trajectory to its conclusion that confirms Bloom’s expertise. Part of me didn’t want to see the fallout of those first indiscretions, but the instinct to move beyond the finite bounds of a single story and to push the reader into the life past the first lapse of judgment is a crucial decision on Bloom’s behalf that strengthens the effect of the stories.
Bloom’s characters are unabashedly sensual and she writes about sex with candor. At times her descriptions are explicit, but no matter the graphics of her prose the result is never squalid. She does not reduce corporeal pleasures to roses and flickering candlelight, but the intimate details she brings into focus are delivered in a straightforward tone, devoid of frills, rendering them curious, not sordid.
Ultimately the stories that had no further elaboration did not stick with me the way the others did. But Bloom’s sense of plot and character are remarkable and her descriptions and similes often had me grinning or grimacing in recognition no matter where they were situated.