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A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Knopf
June 2010
On Sale: June 8, 2010
288 pages
ISBN: 0307592839
EAN: 9780307592835
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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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