Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the
lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record
executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he
employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's
pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret
lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with
theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San
Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch
in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to
steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her
as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in
Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal
impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings
and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead
marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city's
demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a
sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet
Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life--divorced,
struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a
washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house--and then
revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender,
reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardor
for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what
became of his high school gang--who thrived and who faltered--and
we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor,
along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's
far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.
"
A Visit from the Goon Squad" is a book about the interplay of time
and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations
set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of
our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from
tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of
self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the
basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to
reach for both--and escape the merciless progress of time--in the
transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating
work from one of our boldest writers.
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