Watching the Goon Squad

I just finished Jennifer Egan’s much lauded book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Many, many people recommended this book to me. The front of the book lists its many prizes (the Pulitzer!), its rave reviews . I’m confused. The book leaves me completely confused as to what great fiction is, what it’s supposed to do, what it’s supposed to give.

In this book, Egan describes the lives of a cast of characters loosely linked through a world of music. The writing is undeniably strong, characters are vital and compelling, commit wrongs that we readers see as wrong but cannot fault them for. The writing is airtight, sentence by sentence. But the tidiness of most characters' lifelines is suffocating. Mistakes made, potentially fatal mistakes, are neatly packed as memory, rage dissipating at every turn of the page. The engine to this book is nostalgia but without loss. The path 99% of characters take from desperation to success is never explored or detailed. We only know that a character turns out right because a few sentences somewhere in the book will clear doubt. Characters may buck their fictional edge but then the storyline alights elsewhere, characters' futures dropped into the plot like gossip, characters themselves evaporating before we can know them well. The story's web is silken, constructed with optimism, perfectly sewn, and unbelievable.

What does this book contribute as a novel? Anis Shivani wrote in the Huffington Post awhile ago about Franzen’s Freedom,”[r]ealism today can be successful only to the extent that it constantly seeks to go beyond realism: into the grotesque, the sensational and violent, the sentimental, or narrative defined by language…” We want to overcome or transcend the reality we understand too well from an information environment, Shivani writes. Is that what Egan is trying to do? By shedding a few sentences here and there, that her characters have turned out alright. Or in constructing a web where Past is multitudinous and therefore transcendent, hopeful? Is information itself the transcendent force, information about each of these characters, like data a reader can mine? Maybe appropriate in an information age, such purpose seems cynical somehow in the context of a novel (e.g., the clever use of slides as narrative device). I think I'd prefer to read how a character chugging down the single path towards ruin suddenly reverses course rather than being told that s/he turned out fine. Nostalgia seems most potent within a context of loss or gain, less compelling when offered in the steady and muted refrain of the past is past.

In one scene a character, Uncle Teddy, goes to Italy to find his runaway niece. "Uncle Teddy," she asks, "why are you here?" To look at art, he tells her and realizes that that's true. And that is what I felt in reading this book. To look at lives. To observe. Maybe even to feel the tremor of the truth, maybe shame, relief, in the admission of a character. But what makes this different from, say, a really great episode of Friday Night Lights (or another principled, optimistic, well-written television show)? I never felt like Uncle Teddy did looking on a statute of Orpheus and Eurydice, reading this book. I never felt "unspeakable knowledge." I felt the acute absence of that. And wondered what great fiction should do.