| A Visit To Your Bookshelf |
| Written by Joey Goodman | |||
| Thursday, 09 September 2010 10:08 | |||
 Jennifer Egan is a novelist, journalist, and satirist of our information saturated blogosphere-downloading-Google-searching-Facebook-Tweeting-social-networking culture. In addition to her latest piece, A Visit from the Goon Squad, she is the author of four other books, titled The Emerald City, The Keep, Look at Me, and Invisible Circus. Her fictional contributions have been featured in a range of publications, ranging from Harper’s to GQ and The New Yorker. Egan’s latest novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, will undoubtedly confuse readers at first glance. What opens with a Proust quote segues into a roller coaster spanning New York, LA, Africa, Naples, old museums, garage-rock parties, and existential coincidences. There are a myriad of interlocking narratives that set the vignette style of the text, while blurring exactly what events are transpiring. At times intellectual, and at other moments purely cynical in an adult fashion, Egan has written a piece for mature audiences. This one won’t be making it to the high-school curriculum any time soon. Benny, the man who ‘makes it happen’ in the book, is a record producer with a history of unrequited romances. Benny is a particular character with selective taste. He paints rose parquet designs on his floors. The head office of Benny’s record label, “Sow Ear’s Records”, is situated in a green glass building on the corner of Fifty-second Street and Park Avenue. By transporting her characters across Manhattan all the way East to the Williamsburg Bridge, Egan pays homage to the geographical magnitude of the city and the dizzying effect it can and so often does have on career hungry newcomers. The novel begins on a therapist’s couch in New York and somehow abruptly shifts to velvet bedspreads and PowerPoint slides. Think something like an East-Coast rendition of a Bret Easton Ellis novel that dips its fork into a California sunset every two chapters or so.
At moments, this book is clearly way too LA for a New York narrative. The plethora of secondary characters makes dialogue at times uncanny and subverts the normative structure of the adventure story. Stephanie, Benny’s publicist and booking agent, moves from the Midwestern suburbs accompanied by her tattoo of a Minoan octopus. Other characters are equally comical. Dean is a blond actor who speaks in platitudes, commenting insightfully on the state of the weather, how “the mountains are beautiful” and “the African Sun is strong”. And yes, these characters somehow find their way aboard an African Safari. Lou, an old confidante of Benny’s, brings his wife Mindy along for an escapade into the wilderness. Mindy is a Levi-Strauss reading anthropology PHD student at Berkeley, who serves as Egan’s antidote to Kerouac.
Narration in the novel is not monolithic in the least. Rather, it provides insight into the psychological complexity of secondary characters that would otherwise go unnoticed. There is no “moral” beneath all the parties, failed romances, and concerts. Egan’s latest piece, to use literary discourse, is New Sincere. New Sincerity is a term some critics have adopted that signals a rebellion against the irony central to postmodernism. Theory aside, Egan shines through in her exposé of the hypocrisy that surrounds indie music and the controversies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ that come with signing to a record label. This novel is a must for fans of musical literature. Cover photo by Express Night Out Photo 1 by Chicago Tribune Photo 2 by Huffington Post
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