A visit from the goon squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad is an upbeat book that pretends, for most of its 273 pages, to be the just the opposite. The novel opens with kleptomaniac New Yorker Sasha, who is having a difficult time controlling her habit: she steals a woman's wallet, and penitently returns it after swearing the woman to secrecy. Later, we are treated to procession of junkies, of musicians grown fat and cranky, of ex-jailbirds wanting a new start; of adulterers; of mildly untruthful wives, and their capitalistically-minded record-producer husbands; of the suicidally unloved. The profusion of characters, and the rather saturnine turns their lives tend to take, is meant to point at the pathetically fragmented lives that the fin-de-siecle generation are doomed to lead; Goon Squad is thus a postmodern novel as well as a novel that aspires to the condition of postmodernity, a rarity in today's literary climate, in which novels of the former kind feature cheerfully self-conscious narrators with a talent, or at least a taste, for the grotesque, and those of the latter kind exist, if at all, as gleams in the eyes of a few comp.lit senior-years from Stanford.

But Jennifer Egan, the author, is too kind-hearted, or perhaps too content, to follow this oddly plausible vision to its logical end. For Egan, pathos = drama, but also pathos = hope, which is a rather obvious, New-York-Times-Top-20 kind of viewpoint. She would rather be programmatically forgiving than thoughtfully vatic; she cleaves to a certain mentality that the rich New York based author seems to find irresistible, namely that a) New York is the center of the universe and b) New York will heal everything, including poverty, deadbeatness, obscurity, kleptomania, and, paradoxically, narcissism. (She shares this aesthetic with several of her colleagues, among whom number Jonathan Franzen, Colum McCann, and nearly all of the anointed twenty under forty, to name only the ones that immediately come to mind.) For her, New York is to literature what LA is Hollywood, a fact which, if true, should cause more depression than joy.

But it's all good. Goon squad achieves a canny populism---readers are sure to praise its large "palette" of characters, its plotless grandeur, its thematic coherence, and its symmetry---at the expense of... almost everything else worth talking about, but this is a loss that such novels can take very gracefully. Egan is one of a cabal of writers---Franzen is another---who are able to silence detractors at nearly every sentence, every scene, every piece of dialogue that passes between their characters; never mind the crumbling building, look how beautiful its bricks are. The fact that we value such novelists over, say, less obviously brilliant ones, the anti-David-Mitchells of the world, the dogged pencil pushers with high-flown artistic ideas but zero economic nous, is probably more our fault than theirs. They, like Fox News or Fukushima, are just giving us what we want.