Ways in which A Visit from the Goon Squad is and is not just like romance fiction

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan was my first foray into contemporary “fiction of the highest quality” for some time, during which I have been reading mostly romance novels, with a smattering of YA and SFF. In fact, I found out about VGS because of the romance reading community’s negative reaction to Egan’s disparaging remarks about chick lit after winning the Pulitzer (for which she later apologized).  I was in a London bookstore when I noticed it had just come out in paperback, was intrigued by the many blurbs therein which describe it as a combination of the best of the postmodern and modern novel, and the rest is reading history.

VGS features a large cast of characters all connected in some way to each other via the rock music industry, over a time span from the punk era of the late 1970s t0 some vaguely postapocalyptic point in the near future. Setting is mostly New York City, but also upstate, San Francisco, and a few other locales, including Africa and Naples. Each chapter in this nonlinear narrative offers a new a new point in time, a new place, a new narrator, and often a new point of view as well (first, second and third person all used here). In some cases, a character is introduced, and his or her entire future, and even kids’ futures, are spun out in a quick paragraph (kind of like the snapshot effect in Run Lola Run), after which the narrative returns to the “present”. It took this reader a few pages in each chapter to figure out whose head I was in (or had access to) and how s/he was connected to the previous chapters.  This technique produced, at some times, a fun or moving “aha” moment, and at others, a feeling of being required to spend unreasonable effort doing what the author should be doing (i.e. telling the story). Although some of the connections felt like Crash-ish deus ex machina coincidences, most of them — and that is a lot, since there are dozens of characters — felt remarkably natural.

The best use of what I guess you would call “postmodern” technique in the novel is the startling late chapter done entirely in what looks like Powerpoint slides, from the point of view of a girl talking about her family (both of her parents, the reader eventually figures out, are characters who have been introduced in previous chapters) who live in the vaguely postapocalyptic California dessert. I don’t think one could cram more gimmicks in a chapter than this one has, including, but not limited to, the necessity of turning the book sideways to read the slides, but the narrator’s images of her heartbreaking but fundamentally worthy family life (in particular, her “mildly autistic” younger brother’s attempts, often unsuccessful, to connect with his brilliant, but burdened doctor father, through the language of pauses in rock songs) were the one thing in the novel that brought me to tears. I thought Egan’s ability — not in every case, but in many –  to draw me in emotionally to totally new characters was remarkable. It was my favorite thing about the book. And I suppose that is one of the “realist” elements critics are referring to when they praise the novel.

Romance novels are often excellent at evoking emotion, too. This is a strength of any good character driven fiction, actually. It struck me that the dominant emotion in VGS is one not so often encountered in romance: shame. Oh sure, you’ve got loads of paranormals where the hero didn’t save the day as a child and now, as an adult, cringes at his worthlessness. Or historicals where the hero fails to recognize how he was hurting someone, or failed to live up to his potential.  I think this is where the structure of genre, which is in many ways a scaffolding, might be a (not, of course, insurmountable) barrier: the hero and heroine have to be, well, heroic. They can be flawed, but the kind of abject shame so many of VGS characters inhabit is not one that makes for a romantic read. I think the difference is that in romance, the shame is either (a) not really earned (it’s really a virtue in disguise), or (b) centers on a character flaw that gets fixed in the narrative (the cop who is afraid of commitment, for example). The shame in VGS is, at one and the same time, both unique to the characters and universal. This kind of shame — the shame of getting walked in on in the bathroom by a hot date, for example, or getting caught stealing, or lying, is an inevitable part of the human condition, not an effect of any particular cause. The question is just when and how you’ll experience it. Egan doesn’t start, the way romance often feels to me to, with the ghost of the (nearly) perfect being as a kind of template hovering on the pages.

The writing is also often lovely. One of the things in VGS that reminds me strongly of romance writers is the embrace of figurative language. And, just as in romance writing, when she’s good she’s very very good, but when she’s bad, she’s horrid. There’s fog that “sneaks through eucalyptus trees”, and “gallups through the windows”, a sun that is “poking into my eyes”, a “croupy church bell”, a mohawk that is “like a million antennas pricking up from his head”, a “chorus line of palm trees vamped against the Bellini sky”, a man whose hip replacement has “left him with the lurching, belly-hoisting walk of a refrigerator on a hand truck”, etc. Also like romance hero/ines, many of VGS’s characters have amazing senses of smell: “He didn’t sound afraid, but I smelled that he was. Vinegar: that’s what fear smells like.” This same character thinks his employee smells of apricots, not apricots exactly, but “their bitterness”, which leads to his prick “rousing itself suddenly like an old hound getting a swift kick”.  The sun is an important image, whether it’s the literal sun, a tether ball, a tennis ball, or the roundness of the fading daylight light through a curved coat hanger hanging on a window. Also, the goon of the title is time. I won’t say more about those things here, but I’m sure essay questions are already forming themselves in English professors’ heads on those topics, which means that Spark Notes is already on it.

Several of the blurbs refer to VGS as “edgy”, and I’ll temporarily forget all the Derrida I have ever read and say I think they are describing mostly the style and not the content. That said, at the end of the book, there is an attempt to be futuristic which did not really work for me as it felt very now. There’s a family with a baby, for example, and they are trying to keep her off of their “handsets”, but these read no differently than present day iPhone struggles (babies like shiny toys). There’s something about surveillance, and something about a return to “clean” bodies after a three generation surge in the popularity of tattoos. There’s a mention of “Bloggescandals”, ??,  and “parrots”, who are people paid to spread positive social media messages about products. Even the discussion of morality (the gist of it being that moral deliberation is really a cover for a decision we have already made) maps precisely onto work in neuroethics being done right now. None of it felt futuristic to me. Wait. Perhaps I was not looking hard enough for irony. I feel like I have just failed a test with this paragraph.

There was a good McLuhan type moment though, when the characters having the discussion about morality resort to their “handsets”, solving the issue in a few textspeak phrases, and conclude, relieved, that texting is better for this kind of communication since “it’s pure — no philosophy, no metaphor, no judgments.” Remembering Derrida again, this is truly a postmodern moment in the book — the conclusion that the farther away we get from pure present consciousness, the closer to the truth we are.

With all of these characters, what about love and sexual desire? These are the topics central to most romance novels. In VGS, divorce, desertion, and adultery are the default relationship statuses. Sex is either off the page, or is a pretty nasty thing in this book, except in one complicating case, which I describe below.

Here’s a young woman on a date in the first chapter, having sex with no apparent sexual desire (I think she’s actually trying distract him or end the night or both):

She kissed him full on the mouth, then undid his zipper and kicked off her boots. Alex tried to lead her to the other room, where they could lie down on the sofa bed, but Sasha dropped to her knees beside the tables and pulled him down, the Persian carpet prickling her back, street light falling through the window onto his hungry hopeful face, his bare white thighs.

He leaves immediately afterwards and they never see each other again.

Here’s another, a teen girl giving an older married man a BJ in the middle of a crowded club:

…I stand there while Lou mashes Jocelyn’s head against himself again and again so I don’t know how she can breathe, until it starts to seem like she’s not even Jocelyn, but some kind of animal or machine that can’t be broken. … Lou grasping my shoulder, squeezing it harder, turning his head to my neck and letting out a hoarse, stuttering groan I can hear even through the music.

And this…

Mindy feels a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist.

A married man, who fears his “helpless and drowning” desire for his wife and so “folded it” in half again and again, until:

His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both.

In romance novels, sexual attraction is presented, well, attractively. Sexual desire and sexual activity — certainly between the hero and heroine –  usually signify the best things human life has to offer: pleasure, love, connection, understanding, support, caring, autonomy.

Here’s the only bit of sexual language reminiscent of romance in VGS:

I experience this contact as revelatory, urgent, as if, in bridging the crevasse between myself and this young actress, I am being lifted above an encroaching darkness.

Alas, the scene is a violent sexual assault. As things progress, we have this:

…I feel this crazy — what? — rage, it must be; what else could account for my longing to slit Kitty open like a fish and let her guts slip out, or my separate, corollary desire to break her in half and plunge my arms into whatever pure, perfumed liquid swirls within her? I want to rub it onto my raw, ‘scrofulous’ (ibid.), parched skin in hopes that it will finally be healed. I want to fuck her (obviously) and then kill her, or possibly kill her in the act of fucking her (‘fuck her to death’ and ‘fuck her brains out’ being acceptable variations on this basic goal).

There are some things I can say about this as a philosophy professor. I can link to my older post about Christopher Hamilton on the dual aspect of sexuality, in particular, the way the sex reminds us of our bodies, of decay and mortality, and disgusts us. Or, I can quote the next line in the passage — “What I have no interest in doing is killing her and then fucking her, because it’s her life — the inner life of Kitty Jackson — that I so desperately long to reach” — and talk about an existentialist account of sexual desire, as an inherently doomed attempt to possess the consciousness of the other. Or I can say something about how this chapter is actually quite amusing — not the parts I quoted so much (although the “ibid.” in the stream of a would-be rapist’s consciousness while in the act has a certain something) but the other parts, and contrast the humor in this novel (it often feels like a joke between the narrator and reader, and not just when the narrator is written from the first person POV) to the humor sometimes found in romance novels (the reader is a fly on the wall, sharing the laughs of the characters).

But as a reader, I was sorry that so much of the sexual desire and sex was written in this way, although I guess it fits the tone of the novel. I haven’t read any other reviews of VGS (something I probably did not need to explicitly state?), but I spent some quality time with the 30 or so review snippets festooning the front and back covers, and I’ll take “edgy”, “funny”, “entertaining”, “clever”, and “ambitious” for a dollar a piece. The cover blurb from the Sunday Times calls it “life-enhancing,” though, and while I enjoyed and admired A Visit from the Goon Squad, I’m not sure I would use that descriptor for a book with so much shame, regret, sadness, desperation, and loss.

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