A Visit from the goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Author : Jennifer Egan
Title : A Visit from the Goon Squad
Published : 2010
Publisher : Corsair 
pages : 368
Genre : Contemporary Fiction

     Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house.

     A Visit from the Goon Squad is a look into the lives of people who once spent there days living on the edge of life, pushing ever thing to the extremes. Now in their mid lives, the fires are running out and all that once gave them happiness is long gone. What happens when your dreams have to face reality. When the bills are mounting up and you have to take your kid to school on time each day. For some, this would simply be a matter of growing up and settling down. But when that old punk heart just won't quiet kick the bucket and all that once was is still swirling around in your head how do you find peace in this world.

     Egan showed me a pair of lives in many fragmented parts, desperate to form a whole. Both our heroes have had to face many adversities in the journey of becoming who they are today. It is hard to watch as they are pulled apart and smashed onto the rocks. For Sasha, things have never exactly been easy. When you grow up hard trying to find a place in this world can be a hard thing. Knowing who you can trust will always be difficult. A need to belong will make you pick some very bad options in a bad bunch. But that doesn't mean that you should forever be awash in the turbulent seas. For Bennie, he figures his best days are behind him. Those crazy days of doing whatever you want and skating by, by the skin of your teeth. How the thrill the punk scene bought him meant the feeling of invincibility shone brightly in him. But none of these challenges bare any mark on what it means to have to live an average life. How can you find that old spark in the nine to five? But also had do you not pass that jade view on to your kids. Is it possible to find something in all you have been through to show them that things are worth fighting for? 

     This book is a very hard thing to pin down in terms of plot. It shoots too and fro whilst showing me a greater scope on the lives of our two heroes. But it is also hard to firmly fix them down as the heroes of this book. To get a more full understanding of who they are, the author delves into side characters and people from there lives. It is in part a look into Bennie and Sasha, but also a view of the world around them how this shifting world pushed them into ever uncharted waters. It is a book that made me look back on my own life. Those heady days of youth and all the dreams and hopes I had. All the stupid things I did without giving a second thought to what might come next. Is it possible to take this then as a wake-up call to the reader? Can that fire still burn bright and find a new home. When you hear those people complain that they never do anything fun anymore. Is this just an excuse we tell our selves. Much like Bennie do we need a jolt to wake us. Or do we owe it to our old selves to let it stay there? How do we reflect on our lives at all? What may have seemed right back then now seems to disastrous. 

     As books go this is a deep thinker for me. In this collection of clipped and short stories, the world seems very chaotic and fast-paced. But I think maybe this is how our memories get delivered back to us. How much have we forgotten for better or worse? It is a hard thing to justify the way we have lived to anyone else. Much like these heroes we have for the most part done the best we could and just maybe, in the end, it will be enough.