Jennifer Egan’s playful, fearlessly inventive novels have been prize winners and bestsellers in America. They are more penetrating than a shelf of Don DeLillos, argues Tim Martin, and her latest, A Visit from the Goon Squad, contains some of the fizziest prose of the year.
Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan’s new novel, her fourth, is playful in a serious way, complex in a straightforward way, more culturally penetrating than a shelf of Don DeLillos and contains some of the fizziest prose of the year. It’s a surprise that its author isn’t better known in Britain, although that may be about to change: A Visit from the Goon Squad, which was published in America last year, won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for fiction earlier this month and has arrived on these shores just in time to take up position on the Orange Prize long list.
Somewhere between a short story collection and a novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad is told in discontinuous chapters that skip back and forth through time, from the Seventies to the present and beyond to a startling, science-fictional American future. One chapter’s bit-part player becomes the protagonist of the next, and characters mentioned in passing in one account are pushed into the limelight for subsequent instalments. So from a first chapter introducing Sasha, glamorous kleptomaniac secretary to the rock-music magnate Benny Salazar, we graduate to the inmost thoughts of Benny himself, spraying pesticide in his armpits, guzzling gold leaf and racked with desperate lust; then on, via an excerpt from Benny’s punk adolescence, to the life of his dissipated mentor Lou, then Lou’s children. And so on down, sideways and back up through time.
No two of these vignettes are quite the same, but each manages to cover a surprising amount of emotional ground, with Egan unearthing human verisimilitude in the least likely settings. It’s one of several traits that her writing shares with that of the late David Foster Wallace: others include a profound interest in the metaphorical implications of technology, a startling degree of insight into obsessional and addictive behaviours, a juicy delight in precision vocabulary and a predisposition to near-farcical satire. None of that, though, stops Egan from offering a delicious send-up of the self-inspecting, endlessly footnoted Wallace style in one chapter, as a mentally unstable journalist bedevilled by his own interior monologue attempts hopelessly to interview a Hollywood starlet.
But Egan isn’t short of invention of her own. She writes excellently about the sensations of hearing and playing music, often the crucial aspect missing from rock’n’roll novels (one character memorably notes “people and instruments and beaten-looking equipment aligning abruptly into a single structure of sound, flexible and alive”), and she has an important knack of freshening the most elementary sensations with new language. Her novel also makes several bracing leaps into the weird: while most of it takes place in real-world locations (New York, San Francisco, Naples, Mombasa) between the Seventies and the present, the final chapter imagines a future in thrall to online communication, where people have got “tired of talking”, pre-verbal toddlers equipped with handsets have become the record industry’s main clients, and adults buzz each other baffled txtspk questions like “if thr r childrn, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?” An earlier passage takes place in the water-starved, solar-powered suburbs of a near-future America, and is told entirely in PowerPoint diagrams: but what in lesser authors would be a mere gimmick here attains a strange gravity of its own, thanks to the quiet perceptiveness that beams even through Egan’s most antic prose.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a work of imaginative energy and charm, and it deserves to win Egan many converts this side of the Atlantic. So much the better if those converts went on to explore some of the back catalogue, which takes in five books of great talent and surprising range.
Given the vigorous experimentation in the later work, the apparent traditionalism of Egan’s first two books is striking. She followed a hit-and-miss collection of short stories, Emerald City (1993), with the novel The Invisible Circus (1995), a coming-of-age story set at the tail-end of the Seventies that follows a young American girl who heads to Europe to investigate her sister’s death. But the Germany and Italy she dreams of are still in the grip of the Baader-Meinhof attacks and the Italian anni di piombo, and a quest that begins simply will end with some disturbing revelations. The Invisible Circus ends up delivering a disproportionate emotional charge, and Egan’s precise, calm, underwater prose is a persistent pleasure even as her protagonist slips further into trouble.
Egan’s next book, Look at Me, took five years to write, and marked a turning point in style and content. Borrowing from generic stylings — among them information-age satire, conspiracy thriller, teenage bildungsroman and Lynchian identity-drama — it worryingly anticipates many of the public and private social changes we now take for granted.
The premise is unsettling enough: a model has reconstructive surgery after a car crash and returns to New York unrecognisable to everyone she knows. But around that central axis Egan has built a potent and deeply peculiar fable of identity, technological mission creep, terrorism and the atrophy of personal relations in a virtual age.
Look at Me may well end up being remembered for sniffing the air early on home-grown terrorism — a central character is an Islamist sleeper plotting vengeance against the American way of life, musing that he could probably do better than the World Trade Centre attacks in 1993. (The book appeared in mid-September 2001.)
What really stands out is that, a year before even the first serious social networking website Friendster came online, Egan had already nailed the progressive shifts in usage and behaviour that the technology would bring about. The mealy mouthed IT entrepreneurs in Look at Me dream of creating a site called Ordinary People, in which people create microsites called “Personal Spaces” to bring their experiences to the attention of screenwriters and researchers. “I’m not especially interested in Joe Shmoe’s take on life,” explains the boss, “but if Joe Shmoe is an Ordinary Person, that means we’ve decided his story's worthwhile.” Slowly, his listener “begins to grasp not just his words, but the strange new world they described. Strange, yet familiar, too.”
All this, of course, seems rather less remote 10 years down the line. Sure enough, Egan returns to satirise the topic in A Visit from the Goon Squad, introducing a character to her imagined future America whose studies focus on language that “no longer has meaning outside quotation marks”:
English was full of these empty words — “friend” and “real” and “story” and “change” — words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity”, “search” and “cloud”, had clearly been drained of meaning by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex: how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?
The Keep (2006), a blend of Gothic novel and deconstructionist fantasy that skips between a haunted castle in eastern Europe and a creative-writing class in an American prison, made rather less profitable use of Egan’s fearlessly inventive talents. Fluid and satisfying on a sentence-to-sentence level, it was still a more sterile affair than its predecessors — a relatively common failing in novels whose plots are about the nature of plot itself, as dedicated followers of Paul Auster may have found out.
Both A Visit from the Goon Squad and Look at Me, though, pull off the elusive trick of being extremely funny and relentlessly about something at the same time. Ten years after its publication, Look at Me now appears almost indecently contemporary: a zeitgeist novel that has hardly aged seems something of a contradiction in terms. A Visit from the Goon Squad, which mixes the old-fashioned satisfactions of great dialogue and well-written character with a distinctly uncommon message of faith in the future, could well enjoy a similarly long life.
Several chapters pass before we understand the thinking behind its cryptic title, which eventually comes in an observation by one protagonist that “Time’s a goon. You gonna let that goon push you around?” But readers will by then have worked out that this is a book whose plot takes place in the cracks of time and memory, constructed in the gaps between chapters and in the distance between separate views of an event: and that its many breaks, false exits and attempted conclusions come to embody an obstinate, backhanded faith in continuance and renewal.
A Visit from the Goon Squad ends up being a sort of anti-jeremiad, a book written against the fashionable truisms of contemporary pessimism: the death of good music, the death of the printed word, the death of the environment and the omnipresent supposition that, as one character puts it, “we’re finished, all of us … the whole country, the f-----g world”. The fractured, asynchronous flow of Egan’s novel is a quiet demonstration that the goon squad may push everyone around, but not all at the same time. Or as another character says, consolingly, “Sure, everything is ending. But not yet.”
©telegraph.co.uk
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