A Visit From the Goon Squad

 U.K. Cover

Literary prizes are frustrating things. I mean, we all know that literature, like all art, is highly subjective – but its prizes are riven by politics, seemingly unearthing as many duds as genuine classics. At least that’s my take, having read a fair few recent Booker and Pulitzer winners; for every The Road or Vernon God Little, there’s a Tinkers or The Inheritance of Loss. So, given the fanfare of rave reviews, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, I approached Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad with much trepidation – even if it did seem like my kind of book.

Thankfully I was wrong to feel apprehensive and can safely state that it is a wonderful book and a worthy winner. It is a bold and idiosyncratic work, which has much wisdom to impart about its central subject matter of time and its effects – and, by extension, the concomitant themes of ageing, loss and compromise. Much has been made of its experimentalism, but I think far too much. Egan herself has said, “experimentation serving anything other than a human story is boring, and I’m not interested in it;” Pynchon or Robbe-Grillet it ain’t. The fact that every chapter is told in a different way: 1^st person, 3^rd person, even 2^nd person – with different focalizations – and that there is a chapter told entirely in PowerPoint, is definitely distinctive. But there would have been no other way to compose the story without seeming repetitive.

For the book tells the story of a large cast of characters orbiting round the twin suns of Bennie Salazar, an ageing record producer and former punk rocker, and Sasha, his faithful assistant. It spans continents and decades: from the 1970s to the future, and explores not just the Proustian themes of À la rechereche du temps perdu, but also the modern effects of technology on human interaction. Therefore, playfulness with form allows the author to paint a more detailed, vivid picture of these sad, changing lives destroyed by excess and tinged with failure.

Jennifer Egan

There is also a virtuoso mixture of genres: ranging from political satire, through David Foster Wallace-esque non-fiction parody, right up to a dystopian future – each one pitch-perfect. Yet, as you might expect, given the central nature of the music industry, many of these stories are profoundly melancholy and affecting, narrating as they do the fall out of past immoderation. Nonetheless, it is the wisdom and compassion of Egan – not the skilful writing – that stood out for me. The characters all seem realistic, no matter how outré their behaviour and it all works towards a conclusion that never feels sentimental or mawkish.

I would recommend this gem of a novel to anyone – as there genuinely is something for everyone. Don’t be put off by PowerPoint chapter (which works wonderfully, by the way) or the word postmodern. This novel-in-pieces forms a triumphant whole. I'm intrigued and excited to see what HBO make of it.

Remainder

Given the hoo-ha surrounding Tom McCarthy narrowly missing out on the Man Booker Prize this year, it is safe to say that his literary celebrity is now confirmed. I haven’t read C but I have read Remainder, a book considered by many to be better. Declaimed as “One of the great English novels of the past ten years” by Zadie Smith in a 2008 New York Review of Books essay, it is an interesting, idiosyncratic read. As for greatness: time will be the judge.

It tells the story of an unnamed man who is the unfortunate victim of an unknown accident, about which all he knows is that it was: “something falling from the sky.” Hospitalized and in a coma for a number of months, the protagonist (or “enactor” as Smith labels him) is forced to relearn how to use his body and to recover the function of his right-hand side. This process causes him to feel inauthentic: as if his actions were somehow second-hand or acted. In exchange for his silence, the victim is paid eight-and-a-half million pounds by an unnamed, Kafkaesque organization. Unsure of how to spend the money and dizzied by déjà-vu, the man remembers vague scenes from his life, which he decides to have meticulously reconstructed and acted out by an army of people he employs with his new-found riches. Only inside these sets can he feel real: a sensation which physically manifests as tingling in his right side. As time passes, his re-enactment fetish becomes an obsession, and the events he chooses to re-enact more and more perilous, unhinged.

Praised for its “imaginative brilliance” by The Telegraph, the book owes an obvious debt to Samuel Beckett in its laconic, anti-lyric style and its plot reminded me of 2008 film Synecdoche, New York and the J.G. Ballard’s classic, Crash. McCarthy himself has mentioned Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pécuchet, in which two Quixotic figures re-enact gestures from book illustrations in vain bids for imagined authenticity” – so the “imaginative brilliance” isn’t quite as absolute as suspected. It is a really great idea, though, and one that raises interesting questions that are at once philosophical and about the novel itself. Failed transcendence is a favourite theme of the author.

One thing that I will say is that the repetitive style – where whole phrases or details are repeated many times – is trying after a hundred-or-so pages. One yearns for more detail, more information and the meticulous descriptions of texture and the enactments kills some of the momentum built up in the book’s first part. This is partly a legacy of the Francophile McCarthy’s love of Robbe-Grillet and the avant-garde and partly an accurate reflection of the trauma-trashed brain of the protagonist: a necessary evil. Style is not really the point, anyway.

McCarthy has said his job as an avant-garde writer is to “navigate the wreckage of [the modernist] project”, and for that, in today’s anodyne literary environment, he must be applauded. The book is brilliantly controlled and bursting with ideas and questions quite different to those found in much middlebrow (or even highbrow) fiction today. Just don’t believe he is as original as some people say – or some of the hyperbole spoken about this book; provocateurs get extreme reactions. Have a read and make your own mind up.