A fresh take on style, but dealing with timeless concerns

June 20, 2010|Jessica Treadway

In her new book, “A Visit from the Goon Squad,’’ Jennifer Egan sends her story caroming off traditional expectations about chronology, narrative form, and point of view. Readers of her three previous novels and story collection have already discovered Egan’s unique sensibility and style, which defy easy classification and which some newcomers may find disorienting. Others will come away exhilarated and pleasantly breathless from the unpredictable ride.

The book’s 13 sections are told from disparate perspectives, and in that sense it may seem less a novel than a pastiche of linked stories featuring characters that recur, some more prominently than others, in one another’s lives. Yet as in a novel, the reader does feel — especially as the individual narratives accumulate — an overarching omniscient consciousness binding the stories together.

Early on, it’s tempting to resist leaving one character for the next, particularly because Egan does such a good job of engaging us in their psychic struggles. The first and primary story belongs to Sasha, who is trying hard to stop stealing personal items from others, including children, despite that the habit excites her and fulfills a need she finds difficult to identify. During and between sessions with her therapist, she resolves to change: “Redemption, transformation — God how she wanted those things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?’’ Egan makes palpable Sasha’s desperation, her shame, and her desire to change her destructive actions, and she does a masterful job of piquing our sympathy and our curiosity about whether this character will achieve her goal.

But it will be a circuitous route that takes us to the answer. Just when we have settled into Sasha’s troubled heart, we move in the next section to the perspective of Bennie Salazar, Sasha’s boss, a former punk rocker and record executive who — like his employee — is plagued by “shame memories,’’ fragments of which he scribbles down to recount to his therapist. To Bennie’s horror, Sasha finds and reads the list aloud: “Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can,’’ but luckily she mistakes them for song titles. This early in the book, we realize not only how well Egan can render angst and poignancy, but how extremely funny she can be on the page.