This post contains spoilers for A Vist from the Goon Squad.

There may be something sentimental about the idea that we are all connected, affected by each others’ actions and worldviews in ways we can’t see until later. But for a novel that’s ultimately about how art helps us collectively and individually overcome the traumas of September 11, it’s a fitting ideological framework. The events of that day came about in part because of reactions to our actions that we didn’t see, or take seriously enough, in part because a small group of poisonously angry men wanted to make themselves seen, and felt. In the years since the attacks, we’ve mostly responded by trying to regulate the world in a way that’s more advantageous to us, to see everything, even at the expense of privacy and liberty. The power of Egan’s novel comes from asserting a positive vision of interconnection, one governed not by power and victory but by compassion and openness.

Because it turns out, of course, that Alex’s bad night with Sasha in the early years after the attacks ends up becoming the key to his ability to appreciate the event that changes — and maybe heals — a nation. As the New Yorker of longer vintage, she is part of his initiation into city. And years later, her experience of loss will refract back to him:

Before them, the new buildings spiraled gorgeously against the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only seen in pictures), more like sculptures than buildings, because they were empty…The weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint. He perceived it as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and collected over the years: their hidden pulse.

He’s right to be anxious, maybe even more than we can understand. Egan’s very, very good at evoking the future. She places us in time with the reference to a 15-year war and the baby boom that followed, though whether it’s our involvement in the Middle East or another conflict remains unclear. Her description of social networking gives us a sense of vaster, though still personal, webs of connection, of earlier adoption of technology by children. Both the war and the spread of technology have enabled the expansion of the state security apparatus, though whether the fear is legitimate or justified also remains open to question. And the reaction to Scotty’s performance, the moment when “ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched,” are so strong that they suggest that things got truly bad. It might still be possible to make rock music, and to market it, but there’s something shimmering off the page.
Read more

This post contains spoilers through section 7 of A Visit From the Goon Squad. For next week, let’s finish the novel.

Perhaps it’s because I’m writing this at the Television Critics Association press tour, but A Visit From the Goon Squad feels more like a television show than almost any novel I’ve ever read. Normally, that comparison goes in the opposite direction to compliment and elevate a television show, but in this case, it shouldn’t feel like a demotion. Do you remember that opening tracking shot that begins the Battlestar Galactica miniseries that kicked the whole shebang off? Where you skip from one character to the next, and in a couple of minutes, you learn an enormous amount about who’s going to matter and get an initial sense of who they are? A Visit From the Goon Squad feels like that. And much like Battlestar Galactica, this is a novel about climactic moments, both when everything changes for everyone, and little things when people get set slightly off kilter in ways they can only recognize with hindsight.

First, the big thing. This is a New York novel without being heavy-handed about it, and because of that, it’s a September 11 novel in a way that I suspect that terrible day will figure in many events in the future. The references to it will be glancing, not all events will be organized around it, and yet, September 11 will be recognized as a moment that sent almost all of us off in different directions, however slight the course correction. Sasha “hated the neighborhood at night without the World Trade Center, whose blazing freeways of light had always filled her with hope.” For Jules, September 11 is a way of expressing his profound dislocation from the world after his release from prison. He tells Stephanie “I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone’s office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole time they’re talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people.…And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck!” And Stephanie finds a conversation about al Qaeda in New York a symptom of the awfulness of her new life in the suburbs with Bennie, proof of the blinkered nature of the people around her.

That same deftness shows up in the revelations the characters have that aren’t connected to major world-historical events, that might, in fact, be inexplicable to anyone else. There’s Sasha’s realization about why she steals:

It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand—it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist, said), and take the fucking thing.

Read more

I’m sorry for dropping the ball yesterday on starting our A Visit from the Goon Squad Book Club: in between traveling and the first day of the Television Critics Association Press Tour, I got totally caught up. We’ll start next Friday. Same reading assignment.

We’ll do All the King’s Men, which came in a close second, after that, and then revisit the question of Old Man’s War and The City and The City. In the mean time, let’s start A Vist From the Goon Squad on January 6, reading through section 7 for discussion.