Time is the goon in this sparkling novel of change and decay that ranges from the late 70s to the near future. Ageing, loss and compromise are explored in all their universal predictability and piercing individuality: we're all getting a visit from the goon squad.
Appropriately enough, Jennifer Egan has set her novel in a milieu predicated both on nostalgia and the race for the next big thing: the music business. In punk-era San Francisco, teenagers in mohicans and safety pins take over from the greying hippies begging on street corners; by the 2020s, in a postwar baby boom, the quest for the youth market and the ubiquity of mobile technology reaches its logical conclusion, with all pop songs directed at toddlers ("pointers", so called for the ease with which they download songs on their handsets). The intervening years have seen the digitisation of music and the mainstreaming of rebellion, and now the youth of tomorrow eschew piercings and tattoos. "And who could blame them, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?"
Egan's sprawling cast of loosely linked characters and episodic narrators are a vibrant collection of dropouts, survivors and misfits; they include record producer Bennie Salazar, Sasha, his kleptomaniac assistant, and various friends and family members. As we dip into their lives at critical points, not always in chronological order, the web of connection becomes ever more complex: Bennie's wife's brother assaults a movie star he's meant to be interviewing, who later works with a PR whose daughter ends up running a viral media campaign for Bennie . . . Mines laid early on in the narrative detonate after hundreds of pages: the book demands, and repays, a second reading.
When we first meet Bennie he's already inured to his success, yearning nostalgically for the muddy authenticity of analogue recordings (digitisation is "an aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud") and sprinkling flakes of gold into his coffee in an attempt to get his mojo back, a habit more ostentatiously expensive than coke. But the "deep thrill of the old songs" lies, of course, in their power to return our youth to us: the Dead Kennedys are his aural equivalent of Proust's madeleine.
The next section jumps back in time to the era of Bennie's teenage punk band, beautifully sketching their adolescent combination of posturing and sincerity, as well as developing currents of mismatched desire among a group of friends who've "done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, Quaaludes".
That list conveys a keen, sweet flavour of time passing, as does the sad wonder with which these baby-faced punks regard their younger siblings, still playing in the lost kingdom of childhood. Throughout the novel, characters strain to apprehend time and its effects on the flux of personality – that desire, as Sasha puts it, to be able to say "I'm changing I'm changing I'm changing: I've changed!" Egan's chronologically jumbled structure is the perfect vehicle to express this, shuttling the reader between prophecy and hindsight. "So this is it – what cost me all that time," says one narrator, reunited with the music mogul, now on his deathbed, who seduced her as a teenager and derailed her future plans. "A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty." What looked at 17 like the beginning of her life story became its dominant narrative.
The desire to step outside time is symbolised in Sasha's autistic son's obsession with pauses in old songs – Bowie's "Young Americans", the Four Tops' "Bernadette", songs that are themselves pockets of frozen time. This section of the book, set in the future, is presented as a series of PowerPoint-style slides produced by a young girl for whom writing a diary in continuous narrative would be utterly old fashioned. Egan conjures a mood of poignant immediacy with these discrete, disconnected statements, as she does with the text messages that stud the final section.
Such formal playfulness and variety is found throughout the book – a celebrity interview peppered with subversive footnotes; episodes narrated in the second person or first person plural, to conjure the disassociated mindset of a depressed college student or the camaraderie of the teenage band – but always used to increase its emotional power.
This is an incredibly affecting novel, sad, funny and wise, which should make Jennifer Egan's name in the UK and is already picking up prizes. As well as being longlisted for the Orange prize, it recently won the US National Book Critics Circle fiction award, an event widely reported in terms of the surprising news that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom hadn't won.
In fact, the two books have a lot in common: poignantly comic social novels told from multiple viewpoints which set up a nice tension between authorial omniscience – Egan often steps back to make casual reference to future events – and the doubts and confusion of their cast. Egan even includes the Franzenesque trope of sending a restless character on an unlikely money-making foray abroad, flexing free-market muscles in an exotic environment where corruption and danger are rather sharper threats than in middle-class America.
While Franzen's last two novels ventured to Lithuania and Paraguay, Egan dispatches a down-on-her-luck publicist to Africa on a mission to improve the global standing of a genocidal dictator by linking him romantically to an American celebrity. (Imagine Charles Taylor doing a Hello! spread with Britney Spears.) It works as a highly coloured satire on PR ("Dolly had worked with shitheads before, God knew") but, like Franzen's similarly OTT interludes, jars with the rest of the book, in which daily life is colourful enough already. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel to relish, and Egan is a writer in her prime.
