ILX Book Club - Jennifer Egan: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Wow, I'm really sorry if I've spoiled things for people. It's hard when you get into a debate about aspects of the book that get clarified later on, and I personally I don't find that my enjoyment of a book is much affected by knowing what happens (even with thrillers) which maybe makes me careless. I should have been more sensitive.

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Frankiemachine - I've deleted your most recent post, and I'll undelete it once the time period for reading the book has passed.

thanks for the apology frankiemachine - yeah i do find that the emotional impact of scenes can be heavily blunted if they've been spoilered.

fwiw since reading/discussion of the rest of the book is 'officially' scheduled to start sunday, i'd say it's all fair game from there on (and i would consciously avoid the thread from then until i'd finished myself). this might be a little unfair to slower readers but i think it's a reasonable compromise.

Thanks Matt, appreciated.

fwiw, ppl not reading the book, e.g. what the pinefox describes as 'orgiastic party' is 'some teenagers smoke dope and feel a little depressed about the fact that one of their number is sleeping with an older dude in the next room'; as always the single malt of the pinefox's often considerable insight is diluted by the tesco value cola of his sometimes plain baffling conceptual filters

or something like that, i didn't sleep very well

I want to read this book now. I will probably hate it in a way that holds my interest enough to make me continue.

PF, we are all of us living lives of mid-table mediocrity, but some of us are looking at an impending takeover by a consortium of anonymous businessmen from the Far East.

haah my gf's away at the moment + she took this w/ her + i just got a text saying 'that book is so bloody good isnt it!!'

I like it! And I just wrote something long, but realised I was including some second half stuff. Then I wanted to respond to a couple of pinefox's observations, but I've got work to do now. Also slightly wary of becoming backlash egan stan straw man fan. Well.

as always the single malt of the pinefox's often considerable insight is diluted by the tesco value cola of his sometimes plain baffling conceptual filters

I want to read this book now. I will probably hate it in a way that holds my interest enough to make me continue.

Also want to read it to see where the Armed Forces connection comes in, if any.

ch6: the business about 'it's all xs and os' and 'we are all made of information' seems a bit lame, actually - sub-Pynchon: not that this reads like Pynchon, but that this kind of talk feels like something that a Pynchon fan would say or want to write. I can't make out so far, across the novel, how far JE is pastiching things like this and how far she means it.

Bennie and Scotty meeting across the desk was OK - the Scotty voice has something; I like its fresh approach to reality. I think I can identify with this outcast and decrepit loser who is shunned by the world but still interested in it, more than I could with any other characters so far.

pp.117-8:
'His father had been an electrician; Bennie could light anything'.

Novelists seem to be keen on this kind of statement. The sentence seems to imply a causality that is meant to carry obviously and naturally from one side of the semi-colon to another. It looks tough and knowing. You wouldn't mess with this sentence.

Actually, guess what? People do not necessarily inherit the skills and knowledge that their relatives have. Any one of us could say 'my mother was X, but I can't do xyz things that her job required'.

OK, a character might pick up some electrical skills from an electrician - or he might not. Would being the son of an electrician (though not an electrician yourself, but a record company executive) mean you could 'light anything'? The causality would be contingent, the skill would be variable, sometimes non-existent; it wouldn't have the kind of natural status that I feel is implied by that semi-colon.

This is like (in the old lament of the 1980s) the way that when Tom Cruise played a barman, he had to be most talented barman in NYC; or when he played a racing driver, he had to be the most daring driver on the track - etc. It's bravado writing - it's a weak sentence in its assumption of strength. It's also like that bad sentence about Rolph and his father earlier - again the writer grasps at a patently misleading symmetry or clarity and it rings untrue.

there's no armed forces connection iirc

Wow, I'm really sorry if I've spoiled things for people.

Me too--I read it all in one day off work, which is a vote in its favour, and got carried away in my commenting. Sorry!

Can't agree with that reading pinefox. The causal relationship you read into this isn't necessarily there. An analagous sentence might be something like:

Bennie's father was a professional golfer; Bennie was a keen amateur who played off scratch.

The second half of the sentence tells us something about Bennie's interests and aptitudes; the first suggests how and why those interests and aptitudes may have developed. The sentence as a whole doesn't mean that Bennie's interests and aptitudes flow inevitably from his father's profession.

I'm reminded of the legal principle that if the wording of a statute can be read in two ways, and one of those ways produces an absurdity, then we ought to assume that the draughtsmen intended the meaning that is not absurd. Your reading of the sentence renders its meaning absurd, and since it is perfectly possible to read it in other ways that are not then I think we ought to give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that the non-absurd meaning is the one she intended.

D'oh draftsmen.

I don't think I understand your disagreement.

It seems pretty clear that the sentence implies a causal relationship between its two halves.

It doesn't say 'was a keen amateur' or 'did at least know how to fix a lightbulb', but 'could light anything' - that's a big part of the problem, the overemphasis. It's like bad Hollywood logic, not real life logic.

The main issue here for me is not the detail that the character could or not be a good electrician, etc. It's something about authorial judgement - the way she lapses into the over-emphatic cos it sounds cooler than something less emphatic; the way she takes a path of least resistance into the over-emphatic option. I think the earlier sentence I quoted re father & son also showed a failure of judgement, so there may be a general problem here, from my POV; though the more general problem I really have is the one that others have noted, namely that the writing doesn't do anything very special.

Given the way this book is going, I can imagine that there may well be a chapter about how B. became an electrician, which would I suppose make the sentence look less lazy and more earned.

clarification: that is, there may well be a chapter about how B. followed his electrician father around from job to job and, through close observation, aquired the skills to LIGHT ANYTHING.

Meanwhile:

In person, Egan is slight, modest, at odds perhaps with the force of her prose, which is lit by a casual brilliance and so compacted as to be almost tangible.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/may/07/jennifer-egan-life-goon-squad

In person, Egan is casual, tangible, brilliantly lit by the son of a local electrician, at odds perhaps with the slight modesty of her prose.

Thought about getting this from the library but all I got was 482 holds on first copy returned of 115 copies- dang, this thing is popular. Read the ebook sample and gotta say that I was having the same anthropologist from mars reaction as the pinefox. For instance, on the first page there is this: We live in a city where people will still the hair off your head if you give them half a chance. Oh really? Who are these people? What do they do with the hair? What is it worth on the street? Is there a hair-legging operation being run by some Williamsburg wig merchants? Maybe in Chapter 7 this will be revealed? Probably not, probably it's just an "inventive" way to say this is a tough town, watch your back.

You might say I am misreading, picking on the poor sentence, but despite all the reviews about the modern, luminous, diamond hard prose, and the 482 holds on the 115 copies, Nabokov it ain't.

aargh. will steal the hair off your head

But maybe it should be "still," which would lead to exciting revenuer chase scene hijinks in Chapter 9.

115 copies of a new novel? your local library must be Alexandria, if not Babel, or possibly Deptford.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/WilliamCrump63/libraryken.jpg
http://www.nypl.org/

If you look closely, Ken C is trying to intercept one of those 115 copies en route to the legitimate next borrower for his own nefarious reading pleasure.

What's wrong with these people who don't know how to use a library?

really that line bugs you?

and saying 'well shes not nabokov' just reminds me of that shakey mo thread abt modern fiction - there are a lot of authors who arent navokov! he was one of the best authors of the 20th century!

and some of us think Nabokov is overrated too!

That line does feel like she was about to write "where people will steal the shirt of your back" and then thought "Woah cliche alert! Hmmm let me see..."

Agree with pinefox also about the bennie/electrician and rolph/father lines, they're aiming for a solidity that just breaks down under analysis.

I have a horrible feeling the Rolph line is an allusion to Proust :(

and saying 'well shes not nabokov'

so you were exaggerating

Don't know about that. Recently I downloaded and was reading or re-reading the first chapters of some of his books and really liking his sentences, such as this from The Gift: "The van's forehead bore a star-shaped ventilator. Running along its entire side was the name of the moving company in yard-high blue letters, each of which (including a square dot) was shaded laterally with black paint: a dishonest attempt to climb into the next dimension."

That line does feel like she was about to write "where people will steal the shirt of your back" and then thought "Woah cliche alert! Hmmm let me see..."

Speaking of author's opinions differing from their characters, I recently read a collection of short stories that I liked where there was a lot of mocking of characters for liking The Grateful Dead. Later I read an interview with the author and he said that actually he was a big fan of The Dead, but he knew a lot of people felt that way so he put that in. Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever it was called.

That's such a typical contemporary US title !!!

I hoped at first glance that you were referring to 'The Dead', which I have just reread.

xxpost i've been meaning to read that! so it was good?

Just a few thoughts: identification, not sure how much this bothers me generally. I like liking and disliking characters in books, and identification can play a bit part in that (on on the widest existential level Josef K for instance). Other times not identifying doesn't matter to me - the characters in Dostoevsky's The Idiots for example, or a satire like the Apes of God, although that book has colossal problems perhaps partly to do with alienation of reader sympathy. Only thing that can really put me off with characters is going 'oh ffs' a lot.

I'm not sure how much identification matters in a novel of many different equally weighted characters. Is there a lack of identification with all the characters? I mean, I'm genuinely not sure, it's not rhetorical disagreement. Sympathy is quite an important element in Good Squad, so I guess if there's no feeling for any of the characters then that could be a problem.

My feeling is that much of A is to do with alienation from those around you, usually because of a specific psychological detail - kleptomania, shame, Scotty's dissociative (is that the right word) perception, or indeed the anthropological stance in the African chapter. B feels like how you reconnect with those about you, but prob best leave that for the moment. Anyway, that alienation, that feels sympathetic to me, and interesting when perceived from different angles.

Not sure that D Mitchell isn't a bit of a red-herring tbh, Cloud Atlas had specifically nested narratives, these feel like looser connections, and so time has a slightly different, not so important element, that feels more to do with an aesthetic. Like with that foreshadowing that you felt was clumsy, I felt that was more like trying to include time in a picture, long perspective.

re: 'cool youth' i know what you mean in a way, although people forming bands happens quite a lot at school, they just don't have the success, but more importantly they're not happy and i thought this chapter really drew out teenage interaction really well, the internal envy and exclusion you are talking about feeling here.

Not sure any of this would count if I didn't like the style, but I do. Possibly for the same reasons that lead pinefox to call it plain. I like the easy way it included things like drugs and music, which are frequently, in fact in my limited experience always badly handled.

So, RJ's "I have a really hard time with band references in novels ... not sure why ... maybe it just feels like shorthand for characterization, or, like the author is trying to convince you that she is cool ... or that the book is trying too hard to appeal to people who want to consume fiction that reaffirms their own self-image of a person of xyz tastes" I disagree with I think. Or at least I definitely agree with it a lot of the time, but I think JE avoids it.

Sorry this is a bit long, I wanted to catch up a bit, but it's probably a bit cumbersome. Also need to have a shufti at the book again because I've only got vague impressions floating around at this remove.

xxpost i've been meaning to read that! so it was good?
Very good. I liked it so much that I immediately bought one book with a similar cover color scheme- I guess they are both Harper Perennials- but I couldn't get into the other one, which was What He's Poised To Do.

Ha, pinefox, I was thinking same thing whilst typing.

Oh

'His father had been an electrician; Bennie could light anything'.
Novelists seem to be keen on this kind of statement

completely otm.

Thanks Fizzles for your approval + for your interesting comments above.

But

people forming bands happens quite a lot at school

what school? not any school I ever went to.

Which goes back to the whole point about finding things exclusive - which doesn't make the writing bad, but does make it harder for me to like the story.

re Mitchell I believe I was specifically referring to Ghostwritten. But sure, I don't say that this novel is really much like that. As far as I can tell, JE is a much less gifted writer than DM (though not awful). It was just one relevant comparison that came to hand.

The 'btw this African tribesman 35 years later was an art dealer in NYC' thing I can understand working in the abstract -- I just don't think, somehow, that JE pulls it off in practice, hence 'clumsy'.

Actually, guess what? People do not necessarily inherit the skills and knowledge that their relatives have. Any one of us could say 'my mother was X, but I can't do xyz things that her job required'.

people forming bands happens quite a lot at school
what school? not any school I ever went to.

Bog standard comp, five form and sixth form I guess. It just seemed to be something people did. Not many of them performed in any meaningful way. Glee it wasn't.

As I say, I feel that exclusion is the whole deal with the first half of the book, although obviously that's not at all saying that if you feel excluded from the book, the characters' feelings of exclusion are going to feel at all sympathetic. They're not the same, clearly.

I thought Goon Squad did seem quite gifted really. I liked her easy way with the psychology of social interaction. The mechanics of how we get on with people. I feel I'm perhaps being a little critically naive tho. Is this what Alfred Lord Soto meant by it being a pop novel? As in pop psychology, or was that just to do with the music?

Now I'm hearing in my head Jerry Garcia and Christopher Walken harmonizing the words "upon all the living and dead." Must drive it out with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy27p86zjF4

Also will probably have to pay the $9.99 for the rest of the book to continue participating in thread.

I liked her easy way with the psychology of social interaction. The mechanics of how we get on with people

I think that this sounds like excellent subject matter for a book, or an excellent thing for a novelist to do well.

In the first 100pp or so, I don't think I've found JE doing it especially well.

All things considered, I've realized that I don't the first 120pp have been very good in any way at all.

But, there is a long way to go and I think that numerous things could change.

i like that optimism!

well, the book is more protean than most - if any book could improve radically halfway through, this one seems a candidate.