An adolescent girl, a decade or more hence, does her homework in Powerpoint the tensions between her father and brother wrench, even in a chapter written entirely in slide form.Įgan has created, instead of an arc, a narrative constellation, one in which Sasha and Bennie have weak gravitational pull. A now-obese singer, once as lithe and explosive as Iggy Pop, tries to convince his publicity team that an aggressive tour - which will probably kill him - is his only choice. A bitter celebrity journalist writes an article - with exacting footnotes - describing his ill-fated interview with a dewy starlet. Two teen girls’ lives are irrevocably changed by the charismatic Lou, with his red convertible and purple crushed velvet bedspread. These stories, even as they bend away from Sasha and Bennie, draw us in. Given voice, they become the main players.
Sound tangential? Sure, but the strategy succeeds, because these characters move so fully into center stage. Another follows a disgraced publicist who used to employ Bennie’s ex-wife, while a third is narrated by a college friend of Sasha’s. Sometimes they’re not even present: One chapter, set in Africa, focuses on the adolescent son of Bennie’s musical mentor Lou, years before Bennie was in the picture. What follows is no set of cause-and-effect flashbacks: Scattered across time, the narrative spins freely apart, like an uncapped centrifuge.Įach chapter is told from a different character’s point of view Sasha and Bennie are pushed to the margins. Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.” His failures resound in his head so loudly that he writes down a litany of humiliations, hoping to excise them.īennie and Sasha’s intersecting paths are illuminated by the subsequent chapters. The problem was precision, perfection the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh…. To Bennie, today’s music is “oo clear, too clean. He’s been dumped by his wife, can’t seem to communicate with his son and, worst of all, has fallen out of sync with the music business. Punker-turned-executive Bennie Salazar is also in trouble. She’s in therapy - she knows she’s in a bad way. Her only thrill comes from stealing she doesn’t profit from it, instead keeping her take - a wallet, a child’s scarf, a seashell - as relics. She’s extremely competent at her job, bored, nonplussed by the date who marvels at her old-style bathtub-in-the-kitchen New York apartment. We start with Sasha, a wry 35-year-old with sticky fingers. It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer. Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” is a lively novel in stories about Sasha, an assistant in the music business, and her boss, Bennie Salazar.
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