A Visit From The Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan, 2010

(August 2012)

A nice book, that’s all I want. Not always, just once in a while. A nice book about nice people having a nice time because nice things are happening to them. But no. Literature has decided that all people in all books ever must be irrevocably damaged and irritating, because that’s art.

I know, The Pleasant Life of Happy McFluffles might lack for a bit of drama, but it can sometimes get very draining knowing that however much fun a lead character might be having in the early days of a story, it’s going to get whipped away at some point in the not too distant future. We must have drama, apparently.

I once saw a clip of Brad Bird talking about The Incredibles, specifically this scene. He said he just wanted to give us a taste of what they could achieve, but not too much, because something something I’m an artist you know. No! We’ve already had enough twists and stuff, just show us the heroes knocking the shit out of lots of baddies! It’s an animated kids movie, you’re not Marcel fucking Proust.

I’m sure Goon Squad has all sorts of interesting things to say about remembrance, the passage of time and the transience of the human condition, because it does indeed start with a quote from A La Recherché du Temps Perdue, so it must be clever. It also won a prize. It says so on the cover.

But the cover lies. It also says it’s ‘a novel,’ and it really isn’t. It’s a collection of interlinked short stories, each from a different character’s point of view. If I’m being a little pissy about the book, then it’s perhaps partly due to the fact I didn’t realize this until about one hundred pages in. If your characters are fundamentally damaged (as they all are here), then it’s hard enough work to make them sympathetic without jumping all over the place. Those hundred pages tripped past fairly quickly though; fortunately the style isn’t as arduous or as testing as the characters’ lives.

Given that it’s about the disconnect between hopes for the future and the reality of that future (among other things), there’s a certain irony in the fact that the last couple of stories set in the near future are the most poorly thought through. Maybe that’s a deliberate choice the author made to drive home her ideas. If so, it’s a very brave decision, but I can’t seriously imagine any writer would purposefully do a worse job just to make a point.

The attempts to link up social theory and hard science just don’t work, and for a work so grounded in reality that’s incredibly jarring. Take, for example, this:

“They were hurrying west, trying to reach the river before sunset. The warming-related “adjustments” to the earth’s orbit had shortened the winter days, so that now, in January, sunset was taking place at 4.23.”

It seems reasonable. I mean those ice-caps weigh a lot and so if they melt then they could throw off the earth’s orbit which would lead to shorter days in winter and longer in summer.

Apart from the fact that’s utter bollocks, of course. It’s like she heard someone mention Milankovitch cycles at a dinner party once and decided that was all she needed to know on the subject. Why the fuck is ‘adjustments’ in quote marks? Is that meant to suggest they were man-made? In which case that means that in the next 20 years or so we’ll have reached a stage of technological sophistication whereby we can successfully alter the tilt of the earth’s axis. Which would help with climate change because something something I'm an artist you know.

I realize it’s probably meant to be another metaphor for the shortening of all our days as we get older, or whatever, but seriously, the technological sophistication implied in that one throwaway line is more exciting and dramatic than the rest of the book put together. Certainly more so than an ageing punk putting on a successful concert.

And finally, a question for my American readers: is therapy really that big a deal in New York? Every single book or movie I know set in the city seems to have at least one major character seeing a therapist. This starts in a shrink’s office. So is it really that common, or is it just some kind of shorthand, like every movie set in Paris includes a shot of the Eiffel Tower, so every book set in New York has to feature therapy? I blame Woody Allen.