A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread 9780231547017

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A Vi s i t f ro m t h e Goon Squad Reread RE R EA DI N GS

REREADINGS EDITED BY NICHOLAS DAMES AND JENNY DAVIDSON

Short and accessible books by scholars, writers, and critics, each one revisiting a favorite post-1970 novel from the vantage point of the now. Taking a look at novels both celebrated and neglected, the series aims to display the full range of the possibilities of criticism, with books that experiment with form, voice, and method in an attempt to find different paths among scholarship, theory, and creative writing. Vineland Reread, Thomas Coviello

A Visit from the Goon Squad REREAD

I VAN KREIL KAM P

COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kreilkamp, Ivan, author. Title: A visit from the goon squad reread / Ivan Kreilkamp. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] | Series: Rereadings | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034843 (print) | LCCN 2020034844 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231187107 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231187114 (trade paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231547017 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Egan, Jennifer. Visit from the goon squad. | Rock music in literature. | Mass media and literature. | Time perception in literature. | Memory in literature. Classification: LCC PS3555.G292 V57357 2021 (print) | LCC PS3555.G292 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2020034843 LC ebook record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2020034844

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky Cover illustration: Jessica W. Schwartz

To S, C, & I, again

CONT ENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Intro/bonus track: When Art Dematerialized 1 Side A, track 1: Time’s a Goon: From A to B 11 Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation, Memory, Recording 39 Side B, track 3: Failure, Shame, Tragedy, Emptiness 71 Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity 108 Notes 139 Bibliography 155 Index 161

AC K N OWLED GMENTS

It’s exciting to be part of the new Rereadings series, and I am especially grateful to the series editors, Nicholas Dames and Jenny Davidson: first, for encouraging me to submit a proposal to the series and, then, for their amazingly attentive, encouraging, and insightful advice on the manuscript. Nick and Jenny’s copiously detailed responses, to more than one draft, were models of sympathetic and rigorous editorial attention; to benefit from such hands-on—in the best way—series editors is nothing to be taken for granted. I am also grateful to Florence Dore and to two other anonymous readers for the press for their detailed, generous commentary and advice. Thanks also to Jennifer Fleissner for an encouraging read of an early draft. All of these readers helped me immeasurably as I worked to sort out exactly what kind of book this would be: with this new series, an especially open-ended question. I am also very grateful to senior editor Philip Leventhal, editorial assistant Monique Briones, copyeditor Robert Fellman, and the rest of the team at Columbia University Press, who performed the final work of turning this into a book with patience and dedication, under extraordinary pandemic conditions. Thanks

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also to my graduate student Jordan Bunzel for some help preparing the manuscript. My thanks and appreciation to the College Arts and Humanities Institute and the New Frontiers in Arts and Humanities program, both at Indiana University, Bloomington, for two course releases that gave me time to write, and thanks also to the Global Popular Music symposium, part of the Mellon-funded Platform initiative at Indiana, for stimulating conversations about pop music as I completed this book. I’d also like to thank Sharon Marcus and Public Books for, starting almost a decade ago, giving me a space to explore the kind of public critical writing that this book also represents. And thanks once again to Sarah, Celie, and Iris for all of their support and good company.

A Vi s i t f ro m t h e Goon Squad Reread

Intro/bonus track W H E N A RT D EMAT ER I A LIZED

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rt used to possess weight, presence, gravity. You could touch it, hold it in your hands, feel its presence near you. For anyone of my generation—I was born in the late 1960s—books and records and film, writing and music, always took some particular physical form: paperbacks whose cover art conveyed coded signals and whose scuffs and marks were traces of previous owners; big, glossy vinyl LPs that could warp or scratch and that you had to carry home on the bus under your arm, place carefully on your turntable, and lower the needle onto before you heard the first note; film reels spinning— and occasionally catching or breaking—in hidden projection booths at the movie theater. These all were things in the (my, our) world: tangible, visible, present, vulnerable to accident, attached to specific locations in time and space; sensuous objects combining language, image, sound, touch in idiosyncratic ways; taken and marked up by audiences and consumers. When I think of my most meaningful teenage aesthetic experiences in the 1980s, I think of things (literally things) like the punk mixtape my friend George made me in 1983 (Minor Threat, Black Flag, Bad Brains)—I can picture the aggressive band names in his messy scrawl on the cassette’s label—books I took from my

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parents’ shelves or bought at the many used bookstores—all of which have now become either banks or imported-sneaker emporiums—lodged into cramped warrens in and around Harvard Square, bearing the inscriptions of previous owners and readers (specific copies are vivid in my mind: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer with a photobooth montage of a man’s head on the cover, a battered 1960s Penguin edition of Jane Eyre with my mother’s student notes in the margin); film experiences that, because we did not yet own a VCR, were always excursions into the shared spaces of theaters, each one—the Brattle, the Orson Welles, the Harvard Square Theater, the Coolidge Corner, and the bad, generic mall theaters, too—with its own specific atmosphere. We wanted to possess artworks, or at least metonymic tokens of them, not as commodities bearing economic value but as talismans, artifacts, proofs that we were there—like the ticket stubs from rock shows and baseball games at Fenway Park that I kept in a fragrant old cigar box. Now that art has become increasingly dematerialized, out there nowhere in servers and clouds, I can still remember the feeling of all of that predigital art: the pressure and presence and weight of it, the pleasure of touching and holding it. And from our vantage point after the data-compression revolution of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, I can also now recognize the profound losslessness of all of that art: its sheer, inefficient abundance of original, uncompressible data, unlost.1 And all of this was also true of criticism. My experiences of film and music (less true for me of literature until somewhat later) were always mediated, it seemed, by criticism and interpretation—also embodied in particular material forms. I’d devour Pauline Kael’s brash film commentary, somewhat incongruously housed in the slick pages of the New Yorker, filled with

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luxury ads for jewelry and perfume— copies of which piled up in the bathroom magazine rack until my parents would cart a year’s worth to my grandparents’ in Maine in August—those issues often to remain in the cabin for years until eventually used for kindling. And I used to visit the Cambridge Public Library to leaf through week-old copies of the Village Voice for Robert Christgau’s “Consumer Guide” columns and the rest of the pop music and arts coverage—the vividness of its profane, ridiculously insider debates inextricable from the thick layers of pulpy newsprint pages they spilled out of, the issues bloated by the NYC real estate and massage-parlor ads that subsidized them. (We never realized just how precariously an entire bohemian way of life rested upon an economic base of apartment ads until Craigslist laid waste to it all.) Later, in my early twenties, seeing my own first Village Voice record review in a copy I’d picked up at midnight on a corner newsstand in Manhattan— of an album by the indie band the Go-Betweens, named after L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel—probably remains my single most thrilling appearance in print. Amazing to see commuters on the subway holding and reading that very issue that week!—I was tempted to tap them on the shoulder to point out my byline, though I would surely have been disappointed to discover how few cared whatsoever about the obscure Australian band’s best-of. Well, as Hartley’s The Go-Between famously declares— the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Am I overstating and catastrophizing the difference between then—“life before phone,” as Madonna recently put it 2—and now? This all may sound, especially to anyone younger than I am, like the melodramatic lament of a sad Gen-Xer in midlife crisis. After all, did music coming out of my radio have a “physical” manifestation back then, any more than it does now when I listen to Spotify on my laptop speakers? How much does it

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really matter to my experience that, in movie theaters now— pre-pandemic, anyway—I am watching digital projections rather than actual film? (I probably can’t reliably tell the difference.) And although I own a Kindle, I still mostly read paper books. Granted—nostalgia and aging and fear of what is happening to the planet are all likely tipping the scales of my memories. But all of my LPs and CDs are boxed up in the basement, and something has surely changed as art has become increasingly untethered and released into the clouds and streams. I’m occasionally struck by a panicked sense that we’ve given up something important—too much—as we’ve allowed nearly all writing and art to be dissolved and compressed into what can feel like one enormous immaterial digital stream into which we all wade in and out at will.

= = = I love Jennifer Egan’s 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I see it as one of the quintessential early twenty-first-century works of American fiction, for the ways that it articulates and responds to this sense of loss—the ways it makes that loss, or the fear of it, the occasion for its own creative response.3 Egan’s fiction has long been preoccupied with a sense that, as a character in an earlier novel puts it, “the world of objects was gone”; things, “objects existing in time and space,” “lost their allure generations ago.”4 Goon Squad is a melancholy, elegiac, but also joyous meditation on fiction, art, and time, one that is preoccupied with the question of what has happened to aesthetic experience as art has shed its physical forms or rendered them always temporary and contingent, digitized and dematerialized them, shifted them into the algorithmic cloud. (And perhaps, among other things, the novel is also a late baby-boomer’s midlife lament:

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Egan was born a few years before I was, in the earlier 1960s, and she published the novel in her late forties.) The novel’s thirteen chapters are organized into an A- and a B-side; Egan has commented that this organization of the novel is an homage to a form that’s sadly gone—the LP, even the CD. Now we buy music in this atomized way which I find sad from the point of view of the musicians, because now they’re unable to conceive of large visions and have the general public engage with them on those visions. They can only sell their vision in defragmented form. Who sees the whole thing? I found that poignant, and since the book is so much about time and change, it’s a poignancy that seemed apt.5

The novel is suffused by a fear that aesthetic experience, as we used to know it, has been irrevocably transformed, downsized, rendered inauthentic and immaterial. We might even call the 2010 Goon Squad a “novel of the Spotify era”— after the service that, beginning in 2008, marked an epochal, final (so far) turn in the dematerialization of music, in the shift to streaming.6 The possibility of meaningful aesthetic experience and of realized “large visions” is most often sought, in Egan’s novel, in music, either recorded or live (but certainly not streaming), especially the rock or punk music that most of its characters listen to, create, or promote, which has the capacity to tap some zone of purely somatic response: “These sensations met with a faculty deeper . . . than judgment or even pleasure; they communed directly with his body, whose shivering, bursting reply made him dizzy.” 7 Music’s capacity for such overwhelmingly embodied effects is especially associated with the performances of one of the

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novel’s main characters, Scotty Hausmann. We’re first introduced to Scotty in chapter  3, narrated by his friend Rhea, describing a few eventful weeks in the lives of their group of teenage friends in San Francisco, where Egan also grew up, at the end of 1979. Scotty is an Orpheus figure, an artist whose transcendent music enthralls all listeners. The Orpheus legend, as told by Ovid, pits the “true harmony” of Orpheus’s voice and lyre against the “hideous discords” and noise of those who attack and kill him with spears and stones.8 The novel, however, projects this distinction between harmony and disharmony into two different kinds of performances by Scotty. Rhea’s chapter culminates with the altogether (and intentionally) disharmonious performance, at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens, of the Flaming Dildos, the amateurish punk band formed by Scotty and another friend, Bennie, with their friends Rhea and Jocelyn cowriting the songs: “People are slam-dancing hard, the kind of slam-dancing that’s basically fighting. . . . Then one of the garbage throwers tries to storm the stage, but Scotty kicks him in the chest with the flat of his boot—there’s a kind of gasp from the crowd as the guy flies back. Scotty’s smiling now, grinning like I almost never see him grin, with teeth flashing, and I realize that, out of all of us, Scotty is the truly angry one” (52). Part of what punk represents to Scotty and Rhea and their friends— and what it meant to me, too—is sheer irrefutable authenticity of emotion, whether positive or negative, felt bodily. But if Scotty’s anger is pure and potent, he can also, in a more Orphic mode, play beautifully: “On warm days, Scotty plays his guitar. Not the electric he uses for Flaming Dildo gigs, but a lap steel guitar that you hold a different way. Scotty actually built this instrument: bent the wood, glued it, painted on the shellac. Everyone gathers around, there’s no way not to when Scotty plays” (41). Whether in rage-filled discord or in

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pastoral harmony, Scotty’s music is always emphatically present, and it seems to embody a receding ideal of aesthetic authenticity within the novel: one that sometimes can (still) kick you right in the chest. What is particular to rock music, the novel implies— compared to other aesthetic forms such as sculpture, visual art, or literature—is the way it reveals an especially wide gap between a moment of live/embodied performance and the music’s recording in physical form. Egan turns to music in part, I think, for the possibility it offers, through live performance, of completely transcending a felt diminishment in contemporary art’s transformation into an object or artifact. But whereas Goon Squad is a novel about music, set largely in and around the late twentieth/early twenty-first-century rock music industry, its musical contexts serve an allegorical function, as well. The novel’s rock-music world also serves as an occasion for broader thinking about the role of art—and specifically the novel—in contemporary culture. Goon Squad often seems to be indirectly considering the state of the novel in its diminishment, in an age in which the form has long surrendered or lost much of the cultural authority it once possessed. Egan, who wrote an introduction for a recent edition of George Eliot’s monumental Middlemarch, commented in an interview in 2017 that “I’m obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can’t help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I’m not sure it is now.”9 Goon Squad seems to wonder whether, in any art form but certainly including the novel, “large visions,” received by a “general public” and graspable as powerful “wholes,” are still achievable. Or has art been entirely reduced, “compressed,” commodified, and sliced into small pieces for easier transmission and consumption? Egan, a well-informed student of the history of the novel as a form, seems to explore the question of whether prose fiction

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can maintain its long-time cultural role as the provider of an up-to-date history of the present. The novel once embodied the new and the news; today it is more often associated with a receding, predigital, print past. I read Goon Squad as a novel that is self-consciously about the late stage of the novel form, even if it may seem to displace much of that “aboutness” onto another art form, that of rock music. That displacement from fiction to music can be read as possessing multiple valences, some of them contradictory. The displacement could offer a kind of solace (the novel isn’t the only art form whose influence is waning!); it could imply envy (for the slightly more contemporary if also increasingly residual glamour of the music industry); it could be an attempt to feel a more collective elegiac mood or to think through the general conditions of artistic decline. But I do not think that one can properly understand what Egan is doing in this novel without grappling with this fundamental indirection or displacement. There’s a wonderful moment late in Goon Squad that can be read as making an oblique comment on the ways that we perceive both nature and art in a context of their diminishment and vulnerability. The scene occurs in a chapter set in a nearfuture New York City of the 2020s, one in which the last remnants of light and air are gradually being monetized as preserves for the ultrawealthy. This seems to be broadly true for the city as a whole but is particularly so for the modest apartment of Alex and Rebecca and their daughter, Cara-Ann: When [Alex] stood close to the middle window and looked straight up, he could see the top of the Empire State Building, lit tonight in red and gold. This wedge of view had been a selling point. . . . Alex and Rebecca had planned to sell the apartment when she got pregnant, then learned that the squat

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building their own overlooked had been bought by a developer who planned to raze it and build a skyscraper that would seal off their air and light. The apartment became impossible to sell.

This situation is, in one sense, an obvious disaster and an impoverishment. Yet Egan focuses on a curious effect of Alex’s loss: And now, two years later, the skyscraper had at last begun to rise, a fact that filled Alex with dread and doom but also a vertiginous sweetness— every instant of warm sunlight through their three east-facing windows felt delicious, and this sliver of sparkling night, which for years he’d watched from a cushion propped against the sill, often while smoking a joint, now appeared agonizingly beautiful, a mirage. ( 31 4)

I take this image as self-reflective on Egan’s part— as a commentary on aesthetic experience, even specifically on literary experience, which now acquires a particular “vertiginous sweetness” and sheer sensuous, “delicious,” beauty from a sense of diminishment and an awareness of possible imminent loss. This scene implies, I think, a perception of art as something that acquires a new valence in an “agonizing” perception of its endangerment and vulnerability: in this novel, both aesthetic and natural experience—both art and the natural world—seem precarious, very much at risk. As I’ve suggested, the myth of Orpheus and the story of his fateful journey, for love, into the Stygian underworld of the dead—very much a story about the loss or preservation of art— winds subtly through A Visit from the Goon Squad. I’ll now conclude these introductory remarks by pointing to a moment when

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Egan seems to draw again, in her next novel, on that myth, for a figure of aesthetic experience as a desire for possession—not in the economic sense but the more sensuous and tactile one that I’ve tried here to evoke and to remember: that is, a desire to experience the art object as a tangibly material thing or artifact, one with heft, weight, and solidity. In the novel Egan published after Goon Squad, Manhattan Beach (2018), a daughter has dived deep into the sea in search of her presumed-dead father and has returned bearing a relic, a treasured pocket watch of his. “Cupping her palm around its lozenge of weight gave Anna a surge of strength, of protection. It was a relic from an underworld she’d visited once, under perilous conditions, purely in order to retrieve it. She slept with it under her pillow.”10 Perhaps we can take Anna’s visit to this underworld as a metaphor for aesthetic experience and even as a model for criticism, as a manifestation of a desire to hold onto the artwork as it threatens to fall away from us or through our hands.11 A novel reader or critic is also a traveler who leaves behind her own world in order to “dive” headfirst into another, fictional one, a “foreign country.” We return from these pilgrimages back into our own world and selves, clutching treasured relics from the territories we’ve visited.

Side A, track 1 ~ 5 N  DŽl ǭ
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rose fiction is so flexible a literary form, definitionally loose and baggy, that it can seem silly to try to name any one consistent quality or focus throughout its endlessly varied history. But if pressed to choose a single preoccupation, one could do worse than to choose time: the sheer fact of movement forward, through temporality, that all fiction registers, represents, and sometimes resists. Fiction’s basic form is inescapably temporal, more so than other literary modes. A lyric poem might outline the thought of a single moment, whereas virtually any novel involves the representation of extended duration: at the typical minimum, as in Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway, a full day, but more often, years or generations. Order, duration, frequency; time passed and time regained; time’s forward march and memory’s backward loops: these are at least among the most constantly recurring preoccupations of prose fiction and of the novel, from its eighteenth-century origins to its twenty-first century. We often distinguish between a classic or more traditionally “realist” fictional mode, perfected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—as opposed to the more modernist or experimental (and eventually, postmodernist) approaches that began to emerge in the twentieth century— on

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the basis of different approaches to the aesthetic problem of the representation of time. Many of the most notable innovations in fiction in the past century or so have taken the form of a fracturing, scrambling, or restructuring of the familiar realist temporal orders. But whether in a more traditional or experimental mode, even the shortest of novellas calls attention to the reader’s own experience of time’s passing. And not just any time’s passing, but often the passing of specifically modern time: novels are ineluctably bound to the industrial and postindustrial age. The critic Christina Lupton memorably observes of the experience of reading a realist novel that “the pages of the book give materiality to the tick, tick, tick of modern life, with . . . one minute following the next” and “even the most personal life narrative occurring in regular, daily time.”1 The novel has long served (although it may no longer do so) as a crucial timekeeper for our sense of what constitutes the modern “everyday,” even the “real.” Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad draws on the legacy of prose fiction’s grappling with temporality in many ways, with a particular attentiveness to the question of whether and when fiction can resist temporality’s steady and linear forward motion—whether it can evade or halt or disrupt that “regular, daily time.” It does this, in part, via a sidewise adaptation and mediation of a range of rival media forms of our day, especially those associated with rock music. Rock and punk music provide Goon Squad ’s richest source of metaphors, images, and ideas regarding the passage of time and the many ways that human beings name it, think about it, evade it, memorialize it. Egan offers the rock song as an analogue for fiction, a comparable form for temporalizing human experience, and that many of the novel’s characters work in the youth-obsessed music industry imparts an additional layer of concern with time and aging.2

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Egan’s novel has received a lot of attention and posed some categorical challenges for its unusual form. Grouped by one critic into a twenty-first-century category of “multi-protagonist fictions,”3 Goon Squad takes the form of thirteen chapters (six on Side A, seven on Side B, like a classic album), each one focalized around a different character. Egan has explained that the novel began with the first chapter, “Found Objects,” published in the New Yorker as a story, narrating a single day’s experiences of a young woman, Sasha, who works as a music publicist for Bennie Salazar, only briefly alluded to in this first chapter/story. Initially, Egan says, she intended the references to Bennie in the story as no more than a humorous sketch about a neurotic record producer. . . . But then I found myself thinking who is Bennie Salazar? Why does he do that stuff? Which prompted me to write the next chapter. And the same thing happened again: a minor character would catch my eye, and I’d want to crack them open. I knew pretty early that it wasn’t a conventional novel, or a story collection—it didn’t fit into the standard literary genres that were available to me, so I thought, well, it’s a record album. The pieces all relate, they tell one big story, whereas often in a story collection— certainly collections of connected stories—there tends to be a sameness of tone and world, and I really didn’t want that.4

Neither Sasha nor Bennie focalize more than their allotted single chapter, but they do arguably serve as two dual protagonists for the novel as a whole: as other characters come and go, emerging temporarily at the center of one section only to fade into minor figures in other characters’ dramas, Bennie and Sasha recur, and their two interrelated life stories serve as

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primary through lines for the whole. Amid continual temporal and characterological leaps and jumps in the novel, we gradually can piece together a coherent narrative mostly centered around two primary character strands: first, there’s Bennie Salazar and his friends Scotty, Alice, Rhea, and Jocelyn, who first (temporally, although not diegetically) appear as teenage punk fans and musicians in San Francisco in the Bay Area in the late 1970s, where Bennie and Scotty form the short-lived Flaming Dildos; then there’s Sasha, who, after some tumultuous teenage years in which she runs away with a punk drummer to Tokyo and then moves alone to Naples, Italy, returns to attend NYU in her twenties and later becomes Bennie’s secretary, and then assistant, at Sow’s Ear Records, the successful Manhattan independent label that he founded. All of the other characters in the novel connect in some way to the “Bennie” or the “Sasha” strand, or to both; the novel’s final chapter is focalized by Alex, who makes a fleeting appearance in the book’s opening chapter when Sasha goes on a date with him and then has sex with him in her apartment; by the last chapter (when he is living with his wife and daughter in the apartment with the imperiled view of the Empire State Building), he is hired by Bennie to do PR for the comeback performance by Scotty that concludes the novel. The novel unfolds nonlinearly, continually twisting back on itself, but permitting an attentive reader to grasp the ways that all of the sections and characters ultimately do connect logically to one another to constitute a plausibly realist world (albeit one that eventually slides into science-fiction territory, in a 2020s grappling with extreme climate change). One could imagine Egan’s early thoughts for the novel having taken the form of something like “Proust, but set in the late 20th/early 21st-century pop music industry.”5 She has also acknowledged “a great debt to Quentin Tarantino [his 1994

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Pulp Fiction in particular], for the way Goon Squad plays with chronology and narrative,”6 as well as to David Chase’s The Sopranos. She commented about her aims in the novel, I thought about it . . . as a novel about time, and I did think carefully about who else has done that and what they did, Proust being Number One. I thought about other literary novels about time and I wanted to be a part of that conversation. . . . I think there’s a huge amount of tension around the issue of time, and especially chronology, in fiction, and we’ve been wrestling with that from minute one. Look at a book like  Tristram Shandy,  which is so crazily experimental in a way we still have yet to match. There’s such a desire not to just say: this happened and then this happened and then this happened. The tension is between the incremental and inexorable passage of time and the leaping, stuttering quality of consciousness. The two do not match up. One result of that is that time is passing gradually, but we experience its effect as very sudden. Our perception of time is full of all these gaps. That really interests me, and I think it informed the fragmented structure of the book. I wanted to capture as many shocking discoveries of time having passed as possible, which is difficult to do if you’re just moving forward in time. I also was just really interested in gaps. Things that happen when you’re not looking.7

“There’s such a desire not to just say: then this happened and then this happened” declares Egan’s disinclination to follow the path of what might be seen as a mainstream of realist Anglo-American fiction. But in pointing to Tristram Shandy as standing at the origin of an alternative path for experimental fiction, she signals a relative disinterest in the category of postmodern fiction, which

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she can seem to sidestep, even as she uses certain techniques often associated with it; Goon Squad has been aptly characterized by Cathleen Schine as “an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche.”8 Goon Squad begins with two epigraphs from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, including the following one from vol. 3, The Guermantes Way: “Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.” Proust identifies a fallacy—that to “enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth” will be to “recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago.” But such a recapture is impossible; it is “in ourselves that we should rather seek.” Speaking of “the garden where we played in our childhood,” Proust continues, “There is no need to travel in order to see it; we must dig down inwardly to discover it.”9 Proust, a peer of Freud’s, advises that an individual must travel into the unconscious realm of memory in order to attempt to recover the previous self, but he also demonstrated that the novel allows a kind of portal by which any reader can vicariously experience a similar journey, or at least a simulation or representation of one. Egan too seems to approach the form of the novel as a potential time-travel device, a means of supernatural “omnitemporality.”10 If we are, in our everyday lives, locked into time in its remorseless forward travel, fiction can serve as a magic carpet, a door into the past, a spell to halt or to reverse time’s arrow, if only temporarily. One great critic, Paul Ricoeur, had declared that the “modern novel . . . has constituted for at least three centuries now a

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prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of composition and the expression of time.”11 Such claims are notably true of Goon Squad, which is at once a “tale of time” and a “tale about time”—the latter Ricoeur’s phrase for a novel in which time’s passage does not simply (as in every novel) provide a basic structure for the narrative but one in which, in his words, it is “the very experience of time that is at stake.”12 Egan’s characters are often stunned by the passage of time, feeling taken unawares, unprepared for its effects. “How did you get so old?” a character, Jocelyn, wants to ask an older former lover, Lou, revisited after twenty years, who has been incapacitated by two strokes. “Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you?. . . Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?” (85). These questions remain, however, unvoiced; the fact of aging and its decay can be a source of embarrassment or even shame. Lou’s “second stroke really knocked him out— the first one wasn’t so bad, just one of his legs was a little shaky” (84). This series of Lou’s two strokes offers a mininarrative of time’s violence upon the body—a central preoccupation throughout the novel—its one-two punch that starts out not “so bad” but then becomes crippling. Egan’s characters, amazed at how fully time has overtaken and “ambushed” them, look back for clues about when it took its hold and about its duration— whether it occurred “all at once, in a day,” or “bit by bit.” And the novel itself operates as, among other things, a finely modulated device for measuring time and assessing its effects (in that, somewhat like a human body). The novel takes its title from another exchange, also revolving around a passage of twenty years—a temporal duration that seems to function in this novel a bit like a modernized and compressed version of Walter Scott’s “sixty years since” (the subtitle

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of his historical novel Waverley) or the forty-year span from which George Eliot looked back to 1830 in Middlemarch—that has left a formerly vital person decrepit and ill. Bosco is a former rock star, now a has-been, visited at home by his publicist Stephanie (Bennie’s wife) and her brother Jules. Bosco is proposing a concept album based around the fact of his own decline: “The album’s called A to B, right?” Bosco said. “And that’s the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck nobody cares about? Let’s not pretend it didn’t happen. . . . This is reality, right? You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?” Jules had drifted over from across the room. “I’ve never heard that,” he said. “ ‘Time is a goon’?” “Would you disagree?” Bosco asked, a little challengingly. There was a pause. “No,” Jules said.

(127)

The title phrase recurs when Bennie says to Scotty (another washed-up rock musician), “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty replies: “The goon won” (333). The word goon, in the United States, acquires the meaning in the late 1930s of a “person hired (esp. by racketeers) to terrorize workers; a thug,” and so a “goon squad” is an organized group of such thugs.13 Given the beginning of several of Goon Squad ’s primary character arcs at the end of 1979, when Bennie and Scotty’s band the Flaming Dildos play a gig at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens, it seems possible that Egan was thinking of Elvis Costello’s song “Goon Squad,” from his 1979

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album Armed Forces: “Goon squad / They’ve come to look you over and they’re giving you the eye / Goon squad / They want you to come out to play / You’d better say goodbye.”14 “Time’s a goon” is not, to my knowledge, an actual idiom, so if Egan did in fact invent it, it functions as a telling neologism in the novel, as if in this fictional world that is primarily, but not entirely, a plausibly realist representation of our own, the personification of time as a threateningly violent “goon” is one marker of a just slightly intensified cultural preoccupation with the tragic effects of time. Bosco’s proposed album serves, a bit like Lou’s two strokes, as a very compressed model of narrative sequence and order. One of the key theorists of fiction’s relationship to time, Gérard Genette, suggests that even the most complex narrative—such as a Homeric epic or Proust’s novel—can be viewed as an “amplification” or “development—monstrous, if you will” of a simple, “minimal” subject-verb sequence: “the Odyssey or the Recherche is only, in a certain way, an amplification (in the rhetorical sense) of statements such as Ulysses comes home to Ithaca or Marcel becomes a writer.”15 Bosco’s planned album presents itself as just that kind of “minimal” narrative; From A to B is a reduction or quintessence of narrative itself, minimized to the most basic one-two sequence. Egan plays with compression and amplification, as if to explore how long a duration of time can be condensed into a tiny phrase and—in the other direction—how much language can be spun out to describe crucial moments or bursts of time.16 The containment of Bosco’s album within Egan’s novel illustrates two extremes of compression/minimization (the album) and extension and amplification (the novel). The question of his own failure is one Bosco “want[s] to hit straight on,” even if Egan’s own text suggests the value of approaching such questions less directly and at far greater length. Egan often

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seems to be thinking on the page about the questions she raised in the interview about fiction’s representation of temporal progression. We can see her at times seeming intentionally to shift in and out of “minimal” or maximal modes, exploring different degrees or scales of amplification for different purposes, experimenting with very different scales of meaning. The endings of her chapters sometimes offer such occasions. For example, the first chapter, the story of Sasha and her shoplifting, concludes with Sasha’s anxious desire “to please” Coz, her therapist, “to say something like It was a turning point; everything feels different now . . . or just I’m changing I’m changing I’m changing: I’ve changed!” (18). Sasha sees herself and Coz as “collaborators” (like the members of the Flaming Dildos?), “writing a story whose ending had already been determined: she would get well” (6). This desired story would require forward movement, “turning points” and “change”; for it to be a successful story, Sasha feels, it cannot be static. “I’m changing I’m changing I’m changing: I’ve changed!” marks the difficulty of locating that exact “turning point” when “change” occurs (it would have to have occurred in the point in the sentence where the colon appears). The chapter ends with Sasha and Coz “in silence, the longest silence that had ever passed between them.” She lies on his couch, in the chapter’s final sentence, “claiming . . . these minutes of Coz’s time: another, then another, then one more” (18). As a conclusion to the chapter, this moment operates with notable self-awareness, as Egan invites consideration of the ways that different genres or kinds of stories (such as novels or the “story” of a therapeutic analysis) define themselves in relation to temporality. Sasha (and Egan) conclude here in a “minimal” mode; there may be “such a desire not to just say: this happened

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and then this happened,” but this in fact resembles how this part of Sasha’s “story” concludes. This moment seems to hint not yet at “progress” or “change” but at a self-acceptance on Sasha’s part that may be the prelude to eventual change. Sasha’s thefts can be interpreted as attempts to stop time; here, she achieves a kind of perhaps only momentary ability simply to be in time, allowing “another” minute, “then another, then one more” to pass without commentary or resistance. This is, in a sense, the exact opposite of “omnitemporality”—rather, an absolute acceptance of a single limited track of experienced time, one moment after another. This could be taken to be a capitulation to time as the “goon” (allowing time to “win”) but might also be viewed more as a form of stepping away from an adversarial relation to it. The subsequent chapter, dedicated to Sasha’s boss Bennie, also concludes in a manner that calls attention to temporality, sequence, and continuity. The depressed Bennie has jeopardized his working relationship with Sasha by making a romantic overture to her that she gently rebuffs. Looking at Sasha, Bennie realizes, “it was a girl’s face, but she’d stopped being a girl when he wasn’t watching” (38) (this is later echoed by Sasha’s uncle Ted: “She had grown up. . . . Ted experienced the change as instantaneous” [216]). Since the end of “Sasha’s” previous chapter, we too have, in a sense, stopped directly “watching” her, as Egan strikes a characteristic note, making us aware that the novel’s characters are developing and aging even as our attention has moved away from them. The chapter ends with Sasha saying something to Bennie through the car window that he initially misses. “As he struggled to open the door, Sasha said it once more, mouthing the words extra slowly: ‘See. You. Tomorrow’ ” (38).

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I read this as a subtle echo of the earlier “another, then another, then one more” (18). Once again, Egan ends a chapter with a reflection— one with a metafictional implication— on temporality, repetition, and continuity. There is an obvious irony to Sasha’s statement, in its insistence that what has happened will repeat and will occur again as it previously has— given that this marks the end of Bennie’s chapter and that the next time we hear about his relationship with Sasha in the novel it’s in the form of a reflection from years later about his subsequent firing of her for stealing. The world of Goon Squad is one in which continuous and repeating patterns are frequently disrupted; the novel’s discontinuities emphasize life’s potential to depart from any set pattern. Egan’s novel is designed as a kind of temporal puzzle, its various pieces thrown out of linear order, and it also reflects on the way its own characters, like its readers, must also “struggle to organize” their own memories: “It jarred Sasha to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that Alex would struggle to organize a year or two from now” (14). In this context, Sasha’s closing comment to Bennie is poignant— insisting on a state of steady equilibrium that is in fact illusory: we can never really know that we will see someone tomorrow. And in fact, one of the basic (and unusual) structural features of Goon Squad is that we are not guaranteed to “see” any given character again after the chapter in which they feature concludes. The novel emphasizes the minor tragedy of every individual’s impermanence: we are all doomed to become simply “a glint in the hazy memories” of others who may struggle even to recall us at all. To return now to Bosco, his sequence is pitched in a tragic key: how did he “go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck nobody cares about”? Or, in “minimal” form, perhaps something like: Bosco ages and fails. Time is essentially tragic and

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melancholy in this novel, such that a version of that sentence could apply to nearly every character, who will eventually find themselves with “nothing”—as in Danny’s questions to himself in The Keep: “How had he ended up with nothing? Did he always have nothing?”17 Goon Squad ’s characters struggle with the insight that time speeds everything toward decay and loss; Ted, an art historian exploring the streets of Naples, observes, “Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time” (215). These “forgotten coats of arms” are evidence of the frightening power of time to evacuate human symbols of meaning and value: to render what was once pressing and contemporary forgotten and discarded. The coats of arms also recall Alex’s comment, in the near future, about the current young generation’s turn against “piercings, tattoos, or scarifications” (317): “And who could blame them . . . after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?” (318). A “flaccid,” drooping tattoo on aging skin is, like the coats of arms, a kind of memento mori, a reminder that every human-made symbol or form is doomed to eventual decay. A perception that time’s passing represents a painful and even traumatic loss is nearly universal in the novel, which is preoccupied by time’s irreversibility—the fact that while in youth it may appear as if any bad decisions can be corrected, it soon becomes apparent that one’s choices and good or bad luck are permanently consequential. Ted’s wife, Susan, once declared to him, “let’s make sure it’s always like this” (231), but this is an impossible wish. A middle-aged Stephanie recalls her and her friends’ heedless twenties: “They were young and lucky and strong—what did they have to worry about? If they didn’t like

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the result, they could go back and start again. . . . Was this outcome a freak aberration from natural laws, or was it normal—a thing they should have seen coming?” (131– 32). Or Jocelyn remembering meeting Lou while hitchhiking at age seventeen: “in 1979, that could be the beginning of an exciting story, a story where anything might happen. Now it’s a punch line” (87). Egan’s characters—very much in the classic bildungsroman tradition— often associate youth, and its promise and illusion of infinite choice, with the large metropolis, specifically New York City, as with Danny in The Keep: “It was Danny’s nature to be new to the game of living in New York—he needed to be young or nothing about him made any sense and he was a failure, a loser, a guy who’d done nothing—all the things his pop said.”18 Stephanie’s hope also echoes a statement made in an early short story of Egan’s, “Why China?,” whose narrator tried to convince himself that he and his wife are still the same people who spent time working in Kenya in the Peace Corps years ago: “I always liked remembering that time, knowing the money and houses and trips we’d gotten our hands on hadn’t washed it all away. We’re still those people, I’d tell myself, who helped the Masai to repair their houses made of cow dung.”19 The potential Stephanie associates with youth—to “go back and start again” if one comes to an unsatisfactory outcome— may also seem to be a power of the artist or the novelist; to be an author is, in a sense, permanently to possess an enviable magical power of endless self-restoring youth, an ability to undo, halt, repair, or reverse time. (This is surely one reason we turn to novels and particularly why we reread them: to enter an aesthetic space miraculously exempt from time’s rule. Every time I begin Middlemarch, it is 1829, and Dorothea Brooke, Fred Vincy, and Will Ladislaw are naïve and hopeful again.) But the

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corollary of that insight is that this power is never available for any human being—including, of course, authors— outside of the world of art. Even if Egan, as novelist, can freely reverse time, the novel is essentially realist and nonfantastical in the sense it conveys that for the human beings depicted within it, time’s forward march is unstoppable. Bosco’s “From A to B” phrase also appears when the former teenage bandmates Bennie Salazar and Scotty Hausmann, who is now socially isolated and working intermittently as a school janitor, meet again, after over two decades, when Scotty comes across a reference in Spin magazine to Bennie’s thriving career and sends him a note. When Bennie asks Scotty what inspired him to reconnect, Scotty replies, “I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B. . . . A is when we were both in the band, chasing the same girl. B is now” (101). He also comments, in his own narration, “I’d said something literally, yes, but underneath that I’d said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I’m an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.” “From A to B” is at once a “minimal” sequence, a basic building block or abstraction of narrative, and also a summation of a career, of a given character’s success or failure over time. (It also recalls the process of flipping over the sides of a vinyl LP.) The philosophically inclined Scotty claims that he “understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp,” that “there was only an infinitesimal difference” (93) between Bennie’s luxurious and successful life and his own, “collecting litter in a park.” From his perspective as a clear loser in the lifesuccess sweepstakes, he suggests that the distinction between the “B” where he has landed and Bennie’s “B” is “a difference so small that it barely existed” (93). One of the virtues of a novel,

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like Goon Squad, that considers and depicts extended spans of time is that it allows an experimental consideration of how tiny decisions, turning points, or trajectories can make one person an “asswipe” and the other, from a similar background and perhaps no greater talents, a great success. “What happened to you?” or versions of that question recur throughout Egan’s work (this example cited from Look at Me; also from that novel: “But . . . how did you change from being like that, to now?”), 20 and Goon Squad ends with a final version of that question, as Alex and Bennie walk away from Sasha’s old apartment, where Alex halfhoped he would find her along with his old self: “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.” Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. “You grew up, Alex,” he said, “just like the rest of us.” ( 339 – 40)

In a contemporary world in which the outcomes of individual lives are not easily predicted from their starting point, fiction is one means of viewing a cluster of interrelated lives and careers in order to envision how and why they took the paths they did. When Scotty says that he contacted Bennie in order “to know what happened between A and B,” he is very much like a novel’s reader, also eager to track and better to understand, or at least to accept, the passing of time and its effects. Egan treats the novel as a finely tuned instrument for the “tracking” of the varying life paths of individuals, with a special interest in the moments when—sometimes only in retrospect— one can see a particular “career” cresting and turning downward: “nothing could halt the sensation of rapid, involuntary

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descent. . . . It took several more years before I was truly a catalogue girl with no prestige whatsoever. Just how many years I wasn’t sure, exactly, because at that point, the point at which my acceleration began to reverse, time started running together.”21 Goon Squad ’s interest in the extended life paths of characters and especially the process by which certain characters travel from rags to riches or vice versa is one quality that links it back to those classic nineteenth-century novels whose “power and agility” Egan has said she envies. Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge comes to mind, for instance, in its devastating portrait of the downward path or “decline” of its protagonist, depicted almost as if a result of a natural force such as gravity: “Henchard formed at this moment much the same picture as he had presented when entering Casterbridge for the first time nearly a quarter of a century before; except, to be sure, that the serious addition to his years had considerably lessened the spring to his stride, that his state of hopelessness had weakened him, and imparted to his shoulders, as weighted by the basket, a perceptible bend.”22 For Hardy, the form of the realist novel allowed a long and panoramic view of human character as it evolves, rises, or falls through the passage of time. Influenced by the work of Charles Darwin, Hardy created his texts as experimental considerations of how character and environment interact: with some unstable combination of inherent attributes, environmental conditions, and sheer chance leading some individuals from similar backgrounds to thrive while others slide into “hopelessness” and eventual death. Goon Squad, too, can be viewed as a “workshop for experiments”—an updated workshop for new experiments, of course—relating to the effect of time’s passing on a range of characters, loosely and sometimes accidentally related by both

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strong and weak or happenstance links. A classic nineteenthcentury bildungsroman, or “novel of development,” tracking a character from youth to maturity, balances youth (in its openendedness and indefinition, “nothing decided”) and age (with its certainty and completion or “decision”); a given example of the form might seem to value or favor one more than the other, although the distinction of the form lies in the way it balances both. Egan’s novel combines, in a sense, the traditional form of the bildungsroman (focusing on a single protagonist’s path to maturity) with that of a Victorian multiplot novel, like Middlemarch or Bleak House. But if a Dickens or a George Eliot novel at once offers a wide-ranging and panoramic vision of a whole “society” in the form of a range of representative characters (of various classes and social positions) but also narrows its focus to a much smaller handful of major characters or protagonists, Egan employs an arguably more democratic form that grants virtually every character an at least potentially similar or comparable degree of meaningfulness.23 Although we follow the story of certain characters (especially Sasha and Bennie) more consistently from youth to middle age than that of others, who come and go more fleetingly (for example, Lou’s anthropology PhD student girlfriend Mindy in 1973, whose perspective focalizes chapter 4, “Safari,” but who does not appear outside of that chapter), Egan holds strictly to a self-imposed rule that each of the novel’s thirteen chapters features a different protagonist (who is sometimes also the narrator). One effect of this form, as it relates to temporality, is to emphasize a common problem or dilemma in the path from youth to adulthood. In various ways, Egan can seem to pose the question, in varying degrees of explicitness: what does it mean to mature, to grow older, to age in the contemporary and near-future world (from the 1970s to the 2020s)? Are the

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familiar old novelistic forms—the bildungsroman, the multiplot novel—with their particular conceptions and representations of youth, adulthood, and aging, still applicable or workable? Is the novel itself still as helpful and illuminating as it once was as a form with which to think through these topics? Or— and this worry seems to cast a shade over the novel—is the traditional form of the novel more like those “soiled, forgotten coats of arms” that Ted encountered in Naples— once a “universal, defining symbol,” now “made meaningless by nothing more than time” (215)? How should we interpret the pervasive mood of melancholic loss—albeit sometimes leavened by the waving of the prose magician’s wand that can temporarily halt or reverse time’s arrow—that suffuses the novel? One possible answer relates to Egan’s own sense of her position as a novelist in a twenty-firstcentury media landscape in which nongenre or “literary” fiction—let’s say, novels with slim prospects for large-budget movie adaptations—have become an increasingly niche or minority taste. The critic Jonathan Arac argued in 2009: I think that, at least in the United States, there was an age of the novel, and it has passed, even though many novels are still written and are still worth reading. In that age of the novel in the United States, say from about the time of Moby-Dick and Uncle Tom’s Cabin to that of Invisible Man and Lolita, the novel had a special relationship to what we now call the national imaginary, and that special relationship has now passed from print, in particular the novel, to other media forms.24

Citing a comment by Marshall McLuhan about the way the novel has given way to film as the aesthetic form best suited to

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speak to and to represent the nation as a whole, Arac observes that although “this understanding is very widely shared,” it still remains to be fully considered in criticism and scholarship. “To work out this claim in detail,” he suggests, would require “a melancholic novel lover.”25 We could do worse than “a melancholic novel lover” as a phrase to describe Egan herself or the implied version of the author suggested by Goon Squad. (And perhaps some others of us might also feel comfortable claiming that identity? Reader, if you’ve come this far, you may be one yourself.) If the novel is suffused by a melancholic sense of the violence wreaked by time on its characters, it also suggests a mood of resigned, belated sadness about the fate and status of its own form. As already mentioned, Egan has pointed to the HBO serial drama The Sopranos as, along with Proust, a key influence on the novel— “some of the things that I ended up trying to do in Goon Squad were things that I decided I wanted to try to do while watching that show”26 —and this dyad of two major influences defines its own “From A to B” narrative. That is, from classic nineteenthcentury and modernist fiction, A, to late twentieth-century television and filmic drama, B, and from a world in which the novel possesses “a special relationship to the national imaginary” to one in which the once-major form has become sidelined and minoritized.27 It is difficult to imagine a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the 1950s or 1960s—say, William Faulkner— citing a recent TV drama such as Gunsmoke or Father Knows Best as a primary inspiration for his prizewinning novel. Yet when Egan cites The Sopranos, it is far from clear that the literary author is slumming; she may, in fact, be attaching her own work to a more obviously prestigious and culturally influential one. (A Visit from the Goon Squad was in fact initially

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optioned for production as a TV series by HBO, but the project was never made and was eventually dropped by the channel.)28 An implied narrative of the novel’s decline maps onto a parallel cultural shift, namely, the transition from the analog or material recording of music on vinyl albums to digital forms. As we’ve seen, Egan has commented that her organization of the novel into two “sides” was intended as an homage to “a form that’s sadly gone—the LP, even the CD”; 29 given her “obsession” with the novel in its nineteenth-century heyday, she also seems concerned that her own form is “sadly gone” or at least very much diminished. But if that sense of the novel, like the vinyl album conceived as a whole work of art, as “finished” and obsolete is floated as one possibility, Goon Squad does also offer a countervailing, more positive or at least consoling, sense of the remaining and sustaining possibilities of fiction. One of the recurring, often pleasurable, effects Goon Squad achieves is a two-part insight: first, that time’s forward movement is inescapable—“time’s a goon” that mercilessly strips away meaning, value, and beauty from people and symbols that seemed untouchable—but also that art and narrative can at least seem to arrest time, to preserve and protect memories, and to allow for dizzying feats of expansion, dilation, and temporal hopping, effects otherwise perhaps achievable only through intoxication, as when Ricky in Look at Me skateboards while high: “He was stoned, which made everything loop around and curlicue until he was skating through time—kings, knights on horseback waving lances.”30 In one of the novel’s most dazzling moments of temporal expansion, for example, we leap from a scene of an unhappy, wealthy American family’s African safari in 1973 to the twentyfirst century, traveling through a temporal wormhole opened by

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a dagger that becomes a treasured artifact. A Samburu African warrior smiles at Charlie, the family’s teenaged daughter, and Egan tells us that after his death, thirty-five years from “now” (that is, in 2008, so perhaps at or closely before the moment of Egan’s writing this scene), one of his sixty-three grandchildren, “a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger now hanging at his side” (61–62). Joe becomes an engineer, “an expert in visual robotic technology,” and marries an American named Lulu (who will also feature in the novel’s final chapter); “He and Lulu will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfather’s hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglas, directly under a skylight” (62). This moment is a bravura playing with timescales of a kind that gives the often-melancholy novel a giddily vertiginous flavor, as Egan seems to revel in prose fiction’s capacity to boldly predict the future and to mix or conflate times, to produce in writing what Genette calls “omnitemporality” or “temporal omnipresence.”31 “It is in ourselves,” Proust writes in Egan’s epigraph, “that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years”: places are “fixed,” but that fixity can be loosened such that memories can be peeled away from their original location and moved around at will. The entire inner action of the genre of the novel may be “nothing but a struggle against the power of time,” but even if time is a goon who cannot finally be defeated, his power can be temporarily flouted and disobeyed within fiction. The looping, recursive, Möbius-strip structure of the novel at once documents time’s losses and also offers the possibility that art might offer a reversal or cessation of time’s linear march (albeit an imaginary one). In the final pages of the novel, Alex, looking at a building where he had a one-night stand with

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Sasha, “imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there—his young self . . . with nothing decided yet” (339, my italics). This is, of course, precisely the fallacy described in Egan’s epigraph from Proust: the fantasy that by reentering a particular building, one could find the self one had been when last in it. And also the young Stephanie’s fallacy: “If they didn’t like the result, they could go back and start again” (131). Egan’s novel simultaneously shows us the tragedy of a world (the actual world: our own) in which both of these are impossible— the goon always wins— and also the consolation of an alternative world of art (a novel, a rock record) in which the goon’s visit might be deferred or even denied and nothing need be finally decided. Fiction can act as a universal solvent, “unfixing” and freeing those decisions and life paths that are in reality immutable. Ted thinks of his wife: “Her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape” (210). Ted’s observation offers a hint about how fiction may help us grapple with and achieve some consolation for the impossibility of arresting time. In her Proustian fixations, Egan participates in a Romantic tradition that understands art as a means of arresting and escaping time.32 But when Alex imagines encountering “his young self . . . with nothing decided yet,” we can read this slightly differently: yes, perhaps Alex wishes for a reality in which he could return to this moment, but Ted’s observation implies that the value of an artwork is that it allows us to engage in this kind of imaginary time travel, but always within a reality in which time’s arrow can never reverse, our lives always given “shape” by the knowledge of death. We imagine that we would prefer to escape

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this state. But perhaps the truer insight is that we long for an art object that can resist time, but always from the perspective of an organic being inescapably thrown into a temporal world of death and loss. Alex’s imagination of his younger self as a character with “nothing decided yet” is poignant, but the force of that poignancy derives from his own perspective from a later position in which particular decisions have been made, certain paths taken. This moment in the novel stages a scene of reflection on a past state in which a variety (even seemingly an infinity) of future paths lay ahead, as yet unchosen—but, crucially, viewed from far down one necessarily particular path of a lived life.33 I’ve already cited, in the introduction, Alex’s experience of the view still visible from his apartment window, as a new skyscraper arises, soon to block it— a passage that I’ve suggested we might read as implying that beauty acquires a particular value not just in spite of but because of its fragility and vulnerability. For Alex, what had been primarily “a selling point,” an attractive feature in a market economy—the view from the apartment—seems to transform into something that is “agonizingly beautiful” because it is, in a sense, an ephemeral “mirage.” It may be that Alex, in order fully or truly to appreciate the beauty of the vision, had to lose it, both as a commodity and otherwise. Egan also suggests an implicit environmental or ecological insight here: that only “now” (whether that is when she wrote the book, or the novel’s 2020s, or our own now), as we begin to grasp the enormity of our ecological loss, can we fully or truly appreciate the beauty or meaning of those losses. When natural beauty seemed infinitely renewable or otherwise taken for granted, we somehow could not see it— or could not recognize its value without quickly trying to convert it into economic value.

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A similar point about the “sweetness” of a recognition of the inescapability of temporal loss—and an even more explicit environmentalist insight—is conveyed by Sasha’s daughter Alison in a sequence of her PowerPoint slide presentation. After Alison’s parents have a fight, Alison takes a long walk with her father into the desert surrounding their home, farther than she has ever walked before, into a long series of solar panels. • • • • • • • • •

I’ve never walked this far. The panels go on for miles. It’s like finding a city or another planet. They look evil. Like angled oily black things. But they’re actually mending the earth. There were protests when they were built, years ago. Their shade made a lot of desert creatures homeless. But at least they can live where all the lawns and golf courses used to be.

(291)

We might recall Jocelyn’s questions for Lou: “How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit?” (85). Egan here seems to be expanding the scale of such questions, from the human being or body to the earth itself— registering her and our surprised recognition that what had seemed youthful and healthy is now aging and ill. The solar panels are frightening, but they also offer some promise of “mending the earth”—not reversing time’s effects but mitigating it. As Alison and her father walk home, she suddenly feels “scared” and offers a PowerPoint slide entitled “What I’m Afraid Of ” (fig. 1.1):

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• • • • • • • •

That the solar panels were a time machine. That I’m a grown-up woman coming back to this place after many years. That my parents are gone, and our house isn’t ours anymore. It’s a broken-down ruin with no one in it. Living here all together was so sweet. Even when we fought. It felt like it would never end. I’ll always miss it. (299)

Subsequently, she enters their house: “Inside there’s a light. Familiar things fall over me like the softest, oldest blanket. I start to cry” (300). This scene initially appears to be a nightmare version of the Proustian fantasy of Alex’s vision of returning to find his younger self, but instead, here the impossible temporal leap occurs in the other direction, sending Alison into the future— perhaps twenty years, “From A to B,” finding that the life she knows has vanished entirely. Egan has commented that “I wanted to capture as many shocking discoveries of time having passed as possible”; Alison’s fleeting nightmare offers another “optative” experience, one resembling the famous scenes in A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life in which the protagonist is granted a magical vision of a disturbing possible future that (as it turns out) can still be forestalled.34 Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say that Alison is granted a version of a future she cannot forestall— one in which she has grown up and her family has been dispersed—but in such a way that allows her to appreciate the time she still has left in that family as a child. If time is a goon, does “the goon” in fact finally win in Goon Squad? Egan’s novel at certain moments revels in its function as

From Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

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a time-defying device, a means by which aesthetically to stop, reverse, struggle against, or step entirely outside of time. Ultimately, though, Egan returns us to a sense of time’s inescapability, with a renewed or confirmed sense that even in its melancholy declined state, prose fiction is still irreplaceable: for the illumination it offers both of our embeddedness in temporality and our longing to transcend that embeddedness.

Side A, track 2 STORAGE, PRESERVATION, M E MORY, R ECOR D I NG

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J

ules had been wandering the loft, eyeing the framed gold and platinum Conduit albums paving the walls, the few guitars Bosco hadn’t sold off, and his collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, which he hoarded in pristine glass cases and refused to sell” (126). These artifacts, “hoarded” by a washed-up rock star, emblematize Goon Squad ’s interest in the ways that its characters remember, memorialize, and otherwise preserve tokens of history and of the past. For Egan, the entering of a home or other private space offers a potential accounting or “eyeing” of individual memorial practices; here, Bosco’s publicist Stephanie and her brother Jules have visited Bosco for a pro forma check-in on his moribund career. (Stephanie’s husband, Bennie, has only released Bosco’s recent albums out of loyalty to a teenage friend.) In this visit, Egan suggests how personal memories and tokens of the past are often stored and displayed, both with intention and less purposefully, on walls and in homes. Archaeological layers can often be observed by a visitor, sometimes in the form of strata of different categories of memories and memorials: the “official,” preferred, or selfchosen story interlayered with less sanctioned or embraced versions of the story; purely private or personal artifacts mixed

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with more public ones or with objects that in some way represent or symbolize aspects of history or culture. Memorializing, storing, and collecting, all ways of preserving the past or maintaining signs of it in the present, are activities prone to obsessive or otherwise excessive forms. To “hoard,” as Bosco does here (in Jules’s estimation), is to store and preserve too much or to do so in inappropriate or perverse ways: to preserve what should be disposed, to keep what should be let go. Bosco preserves too much, often of the wrong things, and this also seems to apply to his body. Jules observes a “black leather recliner where Bosco spent the bulk of his time . . . positioned by a dusty window through which the Hudson River and even a bit of Hoboken were visible.” Bosco, who has become “huge— from medications, he claimed” (125), although his trash also nearly always contains an empty gallon container of ice cream, not only “spent the bulk of his time” in this recliner but has himself become “bulk,” excessive, weighted down by his own history and unable to move forward with purpose or optimism into the future.1 Bosco’s home has become cut off from the world and nature (the river), now viewable only through “dust” that represents an unhygienic and depressive relationship to preservation. (When objects become “dusty,” it suggests that they have become too static, or abandoned by those who should bring activity and movement to the object.) When he sits in his “recliner,” he begins “a juddering immersion into his chair, which suctioned around him in a gelatinous grip” (126). Egan likes, and uses elsewhere, the unusual adjective “juddering”; 2 to “judder” means “esp. of something mechanical or motor-driven: to shake or vibrate rapidly, forcefully, and often noisily.” 3 “Juddering” seems a more mechanical analogue of “fibrillation” (“a quivering movement in the fibrils of a muscle or nerve, esp. the muscles of the heart”4 — a word that plays a

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significant role in a key passage later in the novel [72]); that Bosco “judders” here implies that he has become thing-like, almost mechanical. His own “bulk” or “huge[ness]” signals his own depressive and passive relation to a material world that seems literally to overwhelm and engulf him. Bosco’s fatness, ill health, and depression—“he’d been too sick to do much of anything for the last two albums” (128)— sink him into a bulky, immovable stasis. In the context of his morbidly depressive state, “the framed gold and platinum Conduit albums paving the walls” and “the few guitars Bosco hadn’t sold off” function as signs of a better past, tokens of a less depressed and more successful, agential existence, when Bosco acted effectively in the world rather than gorging on rocky road ice cream and being swallowed up by his recliner like a rodent inside a boa constrictor. Gold, in the form of Bennie’s homeopathic gold flakes, is a symbol of success and potency in the novel—but a particularly illusory, self-deluding form of these. Bennie swallows gold flakes in a compulsive and pathetic bid to restore a lost joy and sense of engagement in the world. And as Bosco’s framed albums suggest, in this musicindustry novel, gold also has a special symbolic meaning as a public marker of success and renown. “Success” can be amorphous, subjective, fleeting, etc., but a framed gold album is a crystallization of success, a material symbolization that promises to freeze a peak moment in time. Framed gold records are a prerequisite for a successful music executive: “Lou is a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally. There were gold and silver albums on his walls and a thousand electric guitars” (43). As far downward as Bosco spirals, his framed albums prove that at least he once operated at a very high level. Gold operates to freeze time, to arrest entropy, to mark off a “career” at a peak, before it must—for most— decline.

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Bosco’s albums are also interesting in their ambiguous relationship to objecthood. The Recording Industry Association of America, in 1958, formalized an ongoing practice of record labels awarding certificates to high-selling records by their own artists. These new RIAA “gold records,” eventually awarded on the basis of 500,000 copies sold, were later supplemented by the categories of “platinum” (for a million sold) and then “multi-platinum.” But are these gold or platinum records actual records or symbols of such recordings? And are they themselves valuable—“gold”— or do they only “represent” real value? Official gold or platinum status leads to the issuing of an “official RIAA trademarked seal and a certificate . . . manufactured from a high quality self-adhesive gold and silver foil,”5 which have been typically affixed to a vinyl record— or, more recently, to a CD—for display in a plaque. But the gold is only adhesive foil, and the record in the plaque need not be an actual copy of the record in question; “trimmed and plated metal ‘masters’, ‘mothers’, or ‘stampers’ (metal parts used for pressing records out of vinyl) were initially used” for this purpose in the place of a copy of the actual recording.6 In other words, a framed gold record may be both an authentic recording and a symbol of one or simply a symbolic representation; it may be both metonymic— containing a piece of the original object—and metaphorical or simply metaphorical (only symbolizing that object). That which is memorialized, the music and the experiences and creativity and emotions that went into it, is in one sense “preserved” (if an actual copy is in the plaque) but, in another, simply referenced or symbolized. (Gold records are similar to coins, in these respects—which once contained the precious metals that they now merely symbolize.) These ambiguities suggest some of the problems or pitfalls in memorializing. To memorialize can be to preserve and not to

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allow something valued to disappear forgotten—but it can also seem to open up an ironic rift or gap between the present day and the remembered object, in that once something is rendered into a memorial, it likely is definitely gone or vanished or dead. And it is normal to memorialize and document happy or successful moments, but if those memorials seem to occupy too much of your present day, it is a likely sign that you may have no new moments worth memorializing or remembering. Egan (and Bosco) group these tokens of long-past musicindustry success with a very different kind of memento: “his collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, which he hoarded in pristine glass cases.” The addition of this new kind of “cultural” artifact invites us to consider his gold records and guitars as analogous or similar to such ancient historical/cultural artifacts. Such a comparison can be “positive”—Bosco’s personal memorials are meaningful, at least to him, just as pre-Columbian artifacts indisputably are— or more satirical or undermining: we could see Bosco as akin to ancient peoples whose era of purposeful activity is long since concluded and can now only be accessed via such memorials. “Gold record” plaques or certificates can, indeed, become somewhat melancholy documents over time. One gold-record collector quoted in an article in Billboard comments that he often rescues “plaques from a grim demise at the bottom of a dumpster”: “Where I get my awards, somebody in the business who has got them has moved, has lost interest, doesn’t have any more room on the walls.”7 Pop music history moves forward at an especially rapid pace, swiftly redefining today’s hit or success as tomorrow’s forgotten and discarded “relic.” To dwell too long, too permanently, on gold records of the past can mark one’s own obsolescence. The fact of the framing of the records and the “pristine glass cases” of the artifacts calls attention to the way these various

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artifacts have been presented as objects of aesthetic admiration. These items are at once cultural artifact and aesthetic artwork, although each category suggests a somewhat different, if parallel, interpretive lens. Viewed positively, these are treasured objects of aesthetic contemplation. Bosco keeps the framed records and the guitars because these objects have a relationship to the art and the aesthetic experience in which he participated and that meant so much to him. He “hoards” all of these objects in aesthetic frames and cases to preserve them and to mark them out as special. But as we’ve already seen, another more jaundiced perspective is possible here too: Bosco aestheticizes and preserves in order to mark out the absence of the passion and joy that once fed his aesthetic experience. What was once living art is now kept under glass, not to be touched, in effect dead and static—not an object saved from time’s decay but one that has stopped living. And to add one more consideration here, these items also have a similarly bifurcated or ambivalent status as commodities. The guitars on display are the “few . . . Bosco hadn’t sold off,” and he “refused to sell” the pre-Columbian artifacts (although he could certainly use the money). In our culture and the world of this novel, what one refuses to sell may be especially valuable, but it also may exist in a perverse, depressive, or irrational relation to a market. One senses Egan’s reflections here regarding her own relationship to a marketplace and to the unavoidable status of her own writing as at once artwork and commodity to be sold. Egan has worked regularly as a magazine journalist, and she defines this work as “an additional job” beyond her work as a novelist.8 Like many writers today with artistic ambitions, she seems to feel torn between a desire to produce a noncommodified artwork that could ignore or even refuse the marketplace and a recognition that her writing must also be a “job” that

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earns her income. Bosco is an artist who has fallen on hard times, whose work no longer has much active value in a presentday market; cause and effect can be slightly difficult to untangle here, since in the world of Goon Squad (and perhaps our own as well), it seems that those who operate too “purely,” who refuse to take practical steps to make their products operate as saleable commodities (whatever other values those products may also possess), tend eventually to be punished, at least in the short and medium term, by being in effect banished absolutely from any market—akin to having one’s eBay or Amazon seller status revoked. Bosco has been left with very little to show for his career aside from a small number of artifacts that may or may not have some residual market value but that he has taken pains to secure entirely from the possibility of sale, literally or figuratively preserved “under glass.” Bosco’s artifacts are not the first such personal collection of mementos that we’ve seen in the novel. Occupying more fictional space is a collection by Sasha that does some comparable things in the novel. The story of this collection and of Sasha’s “collecting” (stealing) in fact winds through the novel, offering one of its most prominent through lines. Goon Squad begins with Sasha’s collecting; the novel’s first words, “it began the usual way,” signals that what follows will be part of a repetitive sequence or dynamic, as Sasha spies an open handbag left on the floor of a restaurant women’s room while its owner is in the toilet stall and steals the “fat, tender wallet” (4) she finds inside it. In fact, we soon come to realize that Sasha is in the grips of a compulsion or (as her therapist labels it) “condition” (5), one that she is working to free herself from. Egan gives us a list of “the things she’d lifted over the past year”: “five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five

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pens. . . . Sasha no longer took anything from stores—their cold, inert goods didn’t tempt her. Only from people” (4). We can again see a tension between the object as commodity versus the object as privately held, cut off from a marketplace and economic value. Sasha does not steal things either for the sake of “use” or “exchange value”—for their value in practical use or economic value in exchange— or even for “exhibition value” (to be shown for informational or aesthetic purposes, as in a museum) but to generate, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a kind of personal “cult value.” Sasha is a perverse personal archivist, stealing physical objects that do not, in most cases, even have any particular preexisting emotional resonance but that simply speak to her or draw her to them and that she feels compelled to add to a secret archive possessing quasi-mystical properties. As a plumber crawls under her bathtub, she spies “a beautiful screwdriver” in his tool belt lying by her feet: “Sasha felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite; she needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute” (7). Sasha “contracts around” the tool (and then steals it) almost in the way Bosco’s recliner “suctioned around him in a gelatinous grip.” Egan is interested in the ways people define themselves in relation to objects—and especially in perverse, unhealthy, or compulsive such relations in which “usual” human-object practices seem to break down or warp. In fact, Sasha’s “whole apartment,” which “six years ago had seemed a way station to some better place,” now appears to her to have, in a sense, “contracted around” her: it “had ended up solidifying around Sasha, gathering mass and weight, until she felt . . . mired in it” and unable to “move on” (14). Much like Bosco, she is depressively “stuck,” static, “mired” in objects and memories, accumulating objects that seem to stand in for memories in an unhealthy manner.9

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Sasha feels especially guilty about stealing that screwdriver; she feels sorry for the plumber, who needed and presumably treasured it. If her “collecting” practices always remove objects from any “use value,” to place them in a zone of personal “cult value,” in this case the screwdriver is not losing any abstract or general use value but a very particular “use” by a hard-working, working-class man who is trying to fix her bathtub. It is notable that the tool is so emphatically (and somewhat unexpectedly) defined as an aesthetic object of notable beauty: “she saw the plumber’s tool belt lying on the floor at her feet. It had a beautiful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle gleaming like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted, sparkling” (7). For Sasha, the screwdriver functions both as an alluring aesthetic object and as something like an addictive drug that hits her limbic system like an opiate: “once the screwdriver was in her hand, she felt instant relief from the pain of having an old soft-backed man snuffling under her tub, and then something more than relief: a blessed indifference, as if the very idea of having pain over such a thing were baffling” (8). Very quickly, however, once the plumber leaves, the screwdriver loses its magical glow and now looks “normal,” “not special anymore” (8). Adding it to her collection seems to serve as a way to memorialize the fleeting, “special” allure it once possessed for her. When she brings her date Alex home from the restaurant after the incident with the wallet, he sees her collection, including the screwdriver: “It looked like the work of a miniature beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Sasha’s eye, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves. . . . It contained years of her life compressed” (15). Her therapist later asks her, “how did you feel, standing

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with Alex in front of all those things you’d stolen?” “She didn’t want to explain to Coz the mix of feelings she’d had, standing there with Alex: the pride she took in these objects, a tenderness that was only heightened by the shame of their acquisition. She’d risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life” (15). The collection possesses a memorial quality in that its items not only serve as reminders of the moments when Sasha took them from their owners but as testaments to the feeling of “blessed indifference” and freedom from pain that a theft quite briefly induces. It is a little bit as if Sasha maintained a collection of the paraphernalia used to shoot heroin: items—also somewhat like a framed gold record—that memorialize and represent a now-past moment of peak experience. Her life is “compressed” into these objects, suggesting both “successful” memorialization—the collection manages this work of compression effectively—and also a sense of melancholy loss: “years of life” have been in effect shrunk or reduced into this “heap” of “illegible” objects. The items Sasha steals acquire a kind of intense, if transitory, sensory value, a “sparkling” and vivid beauty resembling that of an artwork. That Egan raises the question of the “legibility” of the collection also points to another possible analogy— not to visual art but to writing or literature. The objects Sasha steals seem to operate according to the logic of the art object as that which best resists time.10 Sasha, who works as a music publicist for a record label, lies on one side of the divide that runs through this novel and its characters between art and commerce/publicity—although, as we’ll eventually see, she does later become an amateur artist. Her collection may be best understood as not only a record of personal neurotic compulsion and even sickness but as a kind of conceptual art assemblage— and in this also perhaps as one analogy or countermodel for

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Egan’s own novel. Sasha can be seen to resemble a writer attempting to memorialize, to symbolize, and to represent her experience in some lasting form. Because the dopamine hit from her stolen objects always quickly fades, she is trapped in a compulsively repetitive series, documented in her collection, one that is difficult for outsiders to “read.” Sasha (and Egan) quite self-consciously frames her experience and her “condition” in terms of a novelistic narrative process: “She and Coz [her therapist] were collaborators, writing a story whose ending had already been determined: she would get well” (6). The novel’s opening words, “it began the usual way,” define a kind of familiarly redundant story—the story of Sasha’s thefts—that she and her therapist work together to re-script. Sasha, like Bosco, is “mired” in her memories such that she cannot progress or move forward. The collection, the “raw, warped core of her life,” embodies one form of memorialization, one that is at once very effective and also painful and, Sasha has come to feel, self-destructive. To return now to Bosco and his collection and memorials: somewhat like Sasha’s attempt to re-script her story, Bosco makes a surprising proposal for an attempt at career revitalization— albeit one that would also represent a final devitalization. He surprises Stephanie and Jules by proposing a bold plan for his new record: “I want interviews, features, you name it. . . . Fill up my life with that shit. Let’s document every fucking humiliation” (127). Egan has a long-standing interest in the parallels between fiction and various “reality”-based forms of contemporary narrative, including both reality television and Facebook and other social media. She offered an early and amazingly prescient satirical depiction of a Facebook-like social media platform called “Ordinary People” in her 2001 novel Look at Me, published two years before Mark Zuckerberg created the

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earliest version of Facebook (but two years after the launch of LiveJournal, perhaps her immediate referent here): “It’s not a magazine—it’s a database. . . . What I’m doing is, I’m optioning the rights to people’s stories, just ordinary Americans. . . . Each one of these folks will have their own home page—we call it a PersonalSpace™— devoted exclusively to their lives.”11 Here Bosco proposes a kind of personal reality show, featuring neartotal documentation of every aspect of his life, including the most shameful or private moments (“you can watch me take a shit if you want to” [127]), as publicity for his new album, prompting Stephanie to object that “no one cares that your life has gone to hell, Bosco”; she points out that he isn’t a rock star anymore but instead “a relic” (127). That is, he is something like his gold records and guitars on the wall—merely referencing a now-lost aesthetic power of the past rather than embodying it as any active force. Bosco now reveals the key twist in his concept: the point of the album, the documentation, and the tour will be to build suspense for his own suicide. “I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art. . . . Reality TV, hell—it doesn’t get any realer than this. Suicide is a weapon; that we all know. But what about an art?” (129). “I want out of this mess,” he comments; we can now see that he is fully aware of the poignancy and futility that surrounds his various career artifacts, so much so that he proposes a two-stage process of total documentation followed by spectacular suicide, one that would transform his life and career from a collection of valueless artifacts to a powerful work of conceptual art. One response to the paradoxes of aesthetic preservation we’ve considered is to go one step further than a mere retreat from the marketplace— all the way to autodestruction and final refusal of art’s objecthood and memorialization, a kind of burning or explosion of

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the accumulated “hoard”—as if Sasha were to destroy both herself and her collection in one public display. Bosco here seems to play out, to a radical extreme, a logic of the contemporary art world: the artist, as part of the necessary process of selfcommodifying for a marketplace, is eventually pushed to a more and more thorough “documentation,” as audiences demand more and more “relics” and mementos of the artist and her art. One way out of this logic would be suicide, turning one’s life and art into one final, conclusive “spectacle” that at once fully “satisfies” and “refuses” the market in a single paradoxical gesture.12 Bosco’s proposed “Suicide Tour” may also offer an implicit commentary on the fate of the contemporary artist more broadly, including the novelist. Egan has claimed not only that she does not draw directly on herself, family members, or close friends as models for characters but that she is not even “capable” of writing about “myself or people I know” in fiction.13 She takes pains to emphasize the difference between her fictional art and her actual life—to render her work as distant as possible from “autofiction” or from any fictionalized “archive” of “her own story.” The contemporary novelist faces a marketplace in which the author’s biographical self or “story” is often what seems to fetch the highest price or to attract the most attention. (See, for example, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Roberto Bolaño, or Elena Ferrante.) Sasha and Bosco both suggest the risk of becoming “mired” in self-reflective self-collecting/storage and self-presentation, perhaps also offering a cautionary model for the novelist who would transform her own narrative into a public artwork. The links the novel suggests between memorials, art, and death are most striking when Sasha’s uncle Ted, the art historian, travels to Naples on a mission (recollecting both Henry James’s The Ambassadors and Egan’s own first novel, The Invisible

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Circus) to find and retrieve the college-aged Sasha, who has run away with the drummer of a punk band and ended up in Italy, having cut off ties with her mother, Ted’s sister. Ted visits “the ruins of Pompeii, observing early Roman wall paintings and small, prone bodies scattered like Easter eggs among the columned courtyards” (208). He is “alert to lingering reverberations of screams, of sliding ash. How could so much devastation have been silenced?” (210). Egan (and Ted) seem drawn to Pompeii in part as a vivid and extreme instance of art and culture as, in effect, preserved mummifications of the life of the past. Ted is haunted by the irony of “so much devastation” having been “silenced,” extremes of suffering or feeling rendered completely mute by history. Although her collection looks to an outside observer like a group of inert objects, to Sasha, “it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves” (my italics); similarly here, the attuned observer can feel or almost hear in the objects and mummies “scattered” in the courtyards “lingering reverberations,” an apt phrase for the way the art, culture, and life of the past can be at once dead—“ruins,” relics, silenced—yet still echo or vibrate in the present. Depending on perspective, these ruins can occasion either wonder that “so much” of the past has been silenced or surprise that what has been silenced can still “reverberate,” that art and culture allow for a continued sounding of the inert and vanished. Ted’s broodings over the paintings and mummies of Pompeii also bring to mind the novel’s motif of scars and scarring. Scars, somewhat like tattoos, are marks, often violent, left by the past on the present, proof (or mementos) that organic bodies have moved through and been damaged or inscribed by time. They also bring to mind the inscriptions of music on vinyl albums— and of writing. If Pompeii’s mummies are dead bodies that have been preserved (albeit in nonliving form) in the present, a

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scarred body is one that still lives but whose surface reveals time’s marks. The topic of scarring represents a long-standing interest of Egan’s. She published a 1997 New York Times Magazine article about cutting and self-scarring on the part of teenage girls, one of whom she quotes on the ways such cutting can function as a substitute for language: “I had so much anxiety, I couldn’t concentrate on anything until I somehow let that out, and not being able to let it out in words, I took the razor and started cutting my leg and I got excited about seeing my blood. It felt good to see the blood coming out, like that was my other pain leaving, too.”14 Cutting plays a central role in Egan’s early story, “Sacred Heart,” in which the narrator recalls an erotically charged episode in a school bathroom, in which she agreed to use a sharp pin to cut a classmate’s arm: “I took her wrist and held it. I scraped the pin hard this time. . . . I did not look once at Amanda until I had finished an A like the one she’d carved on the pew.”15 Here, the scarring is quite literally a form of writing, turning the body’s skin into a surface for an inscription. And in The Keep, Danny stands before a full-length mirror so he can “see the dregs of the many IDs he’d tried on,” including tattoos and “a cigarette burn on his left hand,” “a gash on the forehead,” and “grease burns on one forearm.”16 When Ted finds Sasha in Naples, he notices that her forearms “were scarred and scuffed like furniture” (225); she also appears to him as “a girl whose feathery bones did not quite heal” (217). Although Ted draws the obvious conclusion that she has attempted suicide (a marking by the self), the scars also suggest a broader sense that this still-young body has been heavily marked by experience, from the outside. Egan is interested in the way the human body is “imprinted” by time and experience—for example, Sasha’s observation about Alex that

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she “could tell he was in excellent shape, not from going to the gym but from being young enough that his body was still imprinted with whatever sports he’d played in high school and college” (6). Scarring represents a radical version of the usual “imprinting” of experience on bodies. This imprinting can take a literal, physical form, although sometimes the “scars” of memory are psychological and simply feel physical: “God, it hurt him to think of this now—hurt him physically, as if the memory were raking over him and leaving gashes” (31). Scars are most prominent in the novel in the story of the disastrous New Year’s party organized by the publicist La Doll (Dolly), during which “translucent trays of oil and water” were “suspended beneath small brightly colored spotlights” intended to “make the opposing liquids twist and bubble and swirl” (141). Unfortunately, the trays melt under the heat of the lamps, “sending scalding oil onto the heads of every glamorous person in the country and some other countries, too. They were burned, scarred, maimed in the sense that tear-shaped droplets of scar tissue on the forehead of a movie star or generally fabulous person constitute maiming” (142). Among other things, this is a scene of a failed aesthetic production, an attempt to create visual beauty and glamour that ends disastrously. Egan is interested in what precisely constitutes “maiming”: for an ordinary person, it’s implied, a small “tear-shaped droplet of scar tissue on the forehead” would simply be a scar, part of the usual “scuffing” life leaves on a body, but for a celebrity who relies on physical glamour, this “constitute[s] maiming.” If scars represent one form of the memory of an organic body, evidence of its path through the material world, then a “maimed” body is one that has crossed a line to become irrevocably changed and damaged. These are yet more central concerns of Egan’s earlier novel Look at Me, whose protagonist Charlotte is a model whose face

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is dramatically transformed by a serious car accident and subsequent reconstructive surgery, such that even close friends sometimes do not recognize her. Look at Me in fact reads, in some respects, as a more literal take on some of the concerns that Egan later went on to work through in somewhat less direct ways in Goon Squad. Consider, for example, the scene in which a visiting journalist (later revealed to actually be a cultural studies professor engaged in research) lays out why she was eager to interview Charlotte: “A model whose appearance has changed drastically is a perfect vehicle, I think, for examining the relationship among image, perception, and identity.”17 Charlotte is a test case for a radical experience of having one’s skin so “marked” and scarred as to seem fundamentally to alter one’s identity in the eyes of others. A scars motif also runs through Look at Me, in which Charlotte is not the only character to feature distinctive scars. She comments of a friend, for example, that “Oscar had begun his life as someone else, but who that was seemed impolite to ask, when Oscar had taken such pains to efface him. The only clues I had were two thick scars on his left forearm [and] a tinge of a Caribbean accent.”18 Scars, like an accent, can also linger as a trace of an identity that one has otherwise “effaced” or moved beyond. In a contemporary context in which identity is always subject to revision and effacement, scars historicize, marking a body and potentially affixing it to a certain identity, time, and place, in a manner that some wish to evade: “Accents were history: an accent declared I come from someplace else. But for Michael West, the past was gone, pulverized into grains of memory too fine to decipher.”19 The distinction between marks or scars made by oneself (as in a suicide attempt) and those that come from outside (as from Charlotte’s accidental injury) becomes blurry when Dolly

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discovers, to her shock, that some of those who were not present at her now-infamous party have taken to self-scarring in order to claim attendance. When Dolly notices scars on the movie star (in decline) Kitty’s arms, Kitty admits, “I made them myself. . . . You can’t find a person who wasn’t at that party. . . . And they’ve got proof. We’ve all got proof—who’s going to say we’re lying?” (150). A scar is a memento and can function as an authenticating mark. We’ve seen that to “hoard” is to store and preserve too much and that both Bosco’s apartment and his body are marked by evidence of “hoarding” or saving to excess (as in his fatness); scars are a means by which bodies “save” evidence of their experiences, turn the body into a storage medium. In this novel so concerned with the shift from analog or physical media forms (for example, vinyl records) to digital (MP3s), scars seem to represent an ineluctable physicality possessing, for better or worse, an unquestionable authenticity— even if, as Kitty reveals, this authenticating effect can itself be subject to falsification. If gold albums can mark a “high point” in a career that later declines, scars can, similarly, mark a low point or simply a point of intensity or eventfulness in a body’s career through the world: “proof ” of a particular moment or event. Kitty’s self-made scars acquire some additional irony in a subsequent chapter, which takes place years earlier, when Kitty was still a very young and famous starlet near the beginning of her career. The chapter is written in the form of a gonzo magazine’s celebrity profile of Kitty by Stephanie’s brother Jules, whose breakdown and assault on Kitty is gradually revealed in the course of the chapter. Jules fixates specifically on Kitty’s skin as a marker of her miraculous youth, beauty, and fame, suggesting a vision of the human body as a writing surface inscribed by time: “Because Kitty is so young and well nourished, so sheltered from the gratuitous cruelty of others, so

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unaware as yet that she will reach middle age and eventually die (possibly alone), because she has not yet disappointed herself . . . Kitty’s skin—that smooth, plump, sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion—is perfect” (180). Jules sees Kitty as miraculously “unscuffed” by life, as far from “maimed” as one could be. In his metaphor of life as “scrawl[ing] the record” of our failures on our skin, Jules defines the body as a storage medium, a page on which time and history leave a record. Beauty and youth are seen as the absence of such marks—but to live in time is inevitably to begin to acquire them (and the Kitty we meet some years later has certainly done so). The flow of time and history are impossible to resist, but individuals can achieve some agency in their choice of what, when, and how to record and memorialize personal and public history. This dynamic relates to art and aesthetics in the function of artistic works as one form of such memorializing. An artwork is always strongly associated with the moment of its production and can serve as a means to preserve or even to seem to stop time. Egan is especially fascinated by the paradoxical ways that a given artwork or artifact can at once firmly mark a particular moment in time but also offer an expansive access to a long historical sweep. She seems especially interested in the ways such special objects can seem both more firmly affixed to particular moments and more freely untethered to temporality than objects normally are. In “framing,” aestheticizing, or preserving special artifacts, we both preserve the past, which can seem “compressed” into or encapsulated into the artifact, but also permit striking leaps of temporality. Indeed, Egan seems to aim for this effect for her own novel, as in what I’ve described as a temporal wormhole that Egan opens via the Samburu dagger that,

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she tells us, will become a treasured artifact preserved for its cultural, aesthetic, and familial memories and resonances. Joe and Lulu’s dagger, “displayed inside a cube of Plexiglass” in a Tribeca loft, strongly resembles some other “artifacts” we’ve considered—Bosco’s pre-Columbian artifacts. As we’ve already seen, acts of personal museum-like curating can be viewed at once as a positive preservation of something valued, stored so that it will not decay or be harmed, and as a potentially more negative or excessive “hoarding” of fragments from the past. This second example also underlines a slightly different aspect of this dynamic: the meanings of cross-cultural exchange, collecting, and the possibilities of cultural appropriation, condescension, or fetishizing of the “primitive” or “premodern.” When contemporary Western cultures preserve pre- or nonmodern artifacts, these memorializations always reveal complex motivations and effects. Modern yearning for the simplicity or “purity” of earlier cultures often is a form of patronizing bad faith, even if it may also be motivated by genuine admiration. (See, for example, modernist uses of forms from African aesthetics, as in Picasso’s paintings.) Of course, a Samburu hunting dagger on display in a Manhattan loft has a somewhat different meaning when its owner is a descendent of the previous owner. If Sasha stole (“appropriated”) the plumber’s screwdriver and so forcibly negated its “use value,” its function as a useful tool for a worker, and if a washed-up rock star’s veneration for Indigenous American cultures also seems potentially appropriative, Joe memorializes the dagger’s earlier functions for his own grandfather, arguably in an altogether respectful manner. Egan tends to reserve judgment, in any case, and simply emphasizes the sheer multiplicity and force of the human drive to memorialize and preserve the past in the form of artifacts and the fascinating ways that these memorializations change and transform those artifacts— often

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shifting them from a “use” function to a different one, such as exhibition or “cult” value. She implies that human beings possess an endlessly renewing drive to preserve and commemorate and to tell stories and rescript old stories based on those acts. We are constantly creating new narratives, often reusing old ones, and re-scripting new roles for objects and artifacts. The novel is, of course, especially interested in one particular category of aesthetic/cultural “storage”: the preservation of music. The novel charts a shift from vinyl records, and the massively profitable pop music business of the 1970s and 1980s based around the marketing of those records, to the much-diminished early twenty-first-century version of that industry adjusting to a new reality of digitization, compression, and dematerialization. As we’ve seen in Egan’s remark on the way the form of Goon Squad pays homage to the form of the long-playing album, Egan values the ability of an artist to “conceive of large visions,” to create substantial and coherent artworks with the knowledge that an audience exists that is prepared to grapple with them.20 She seems to write Goon Squad with a somewhat diminished and belated sense that the age of such aesthetic “large visions” may have passed. In those 2010 comments just referenced, Egan’s focus is primarily on form and order, on the ways the “album” as a complete artwork has been broken up or “defragmented” into pieces, as consumers can easily buy or listen to individual songs and ignore those songs’ placement and order in a coherent album. Another aspect of the transformation of pop music and the album, though, relates less to order and sequence than to the storage medium used: as pop music has gone from inscription in vinyl records and cassettes to immaterial or digital code in CDs, MP3s, and finally streaming, which historically began to take off in 2008 with the founding of Spotify.

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The novel’s concern with “digitization” and dematerialization as a loss is most visible in the scene where Bennie, driving to pick up his son after school, broods about his own diminished sex drive, which to him seems linked to a diminishment in the power of music and his own ability to find pleasure in it. As he plays old punk music by “the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he’d grown up with” (22)—and that Egan also grew up with—Bennie “listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape— everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out” (22). In this humorously selfdisgusted piece of free indirect discourse, Bennie strains to find traces of the “actual” in musical recordings, suggesting that any such indexical traces are now nothing more than “analogue signaling,” “bloodless constructions,” abstract and unreal. To Bennie and, indeed, to many of those of us who have lived through these transitions, the shift from vinyl to MP3s and streaming can feel like a fundamental transformation and loss— of the “sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room,” of a conjured presence whose material inscription grants it an aesthetic force and presence that we once took for granted.21 As one scholar of the digital puts it, in terms that jibe with Bennie’s, “our culture chooses the digital” because it is “very efficient, predictable, transportable, ubiquitous.” But the digital achieves these effects through abstraction, which is in fact “the basis of the digital’s power”; “abstraction is the digital’s glorious motor, but also its tragic deficit.”22 Bennie continues to think that he “knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection: the problem was digitization,

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which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud” (23). Bennie’s midlife-crisis brooding, which Egan wittily marks out as interior thoughts of the kind that could not be uttered, lands in an over-the-top denunciation of the digitization of aesthetic experience as deadly, a “holocaust” of art. (A term that acquires particular resonances in this novel so focused on the destruction of 9/11, also analogized to the “screams” and “sliding ash” of the fire of Pompeii.) Bennie views pop music as having been downsized, compressed, and also devitalized and disembodied. His thinking somewhat resembles Moose’s musings, in Look at Me, about a “world remade by circuitry,” one “without history or context or meaning . . . certainly headed toward death.”23 Part of what seems to concern Egan about the fate of art in a digital era is the way the digital offers a promise (even if perhaps illusory) of complete forgetting or erasure. In this passage from The Keep, for example, a character first defines digital erasure as absolute or total but then slightly adjusts that claim: “Danny had advanced skills when it came to not thinking: he would picture himself deleting things, disconnecting them from his brain so they disappeared the way digital stuff disappears— without a memory. But sometimes he still felt them, the disappeared things, hanging around him like shadows.”24 Digital recording seems “bloodless,” disembodied, yet it produces new kinds of half-erased, half-present memories or remnants that can acquire a somewhat ghostly or Gothic quality—as The Keep suggests. Bennie’s musings about music are intertwined with his reflections on the “disappearance” of his “lust” or desire, and he seems to associate the materiality or physicality of the music

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with which he grew up with that erotic desire. “The deep thrill of these old songs lay, for Bennie, in the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness they induced” (23); it is as if, for Bennie, music both used to have material form and induced desire, in a manner strongly linked to “actual bodies in a room,” we could say. We should not simply conflate Bennie’s very masculine perspective with Egan’s, but even as she subjects him to a degree of satire, she also evinces clear sympathy with his somewhat catastrophizing vision of a world that has rendered aesthetic experience diminished and desire free and that has “sucked the life out of ” art by abstracting and dematerializing it. Goon Squad contemplates the fate of art in an age of downsizing, when the bulky materials of aesthetic creations are so routinely transformed into more-efficiently rendered information. Claude Shannon’s insights into data compression from the 1940s have by now revolutionized our experience of nearly all media and information forms. As James Gleick summed up this transformation, “Satellite television channels, pocket music players, efficient cameras and telephones and countless other modern appurtenances depend on coding algorithms to compress numbers—sequences of bits.”25 Film and music, once experienced via such gloriously inefficient and data-rich media forms as 35 mm film and vinyl records, are now usually radically compressed in digital forms that are fundamentally “lossy”: where “lossless” compression records all original data, “lossy” compression—as in a MP3 or JPEG—permanently deletes data for the sake of greater compression and efficiency. When you listen to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” (or the Dead Kennedys) as an MP3 or streaming on Spotify or watch North by Northwest streaming on Amazon, much of the original aural and visual material has been jettisoned in order to render the final product more easily transmissible.26 (We choose the digital because it is

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efficient.) This means that a very literal form of “loss” is endemic to much contemporary aesthetic experience—a sense of diminishment that seems to haunt Egan’s novel. One could certainly pose counterarguments to Bennie’s, and perhaps Egan’s, take on digitization and compression. Debates over the relative value of “originals” and “copies” go back, of course, through Walter Benjamin in the early twentieth century all the way to Plato. It would be fair to point out that the digitization and dematerialization of art does not necessarily represent only loss, diminishment, and forgetting. On the contrary, some might object that when art is digitized, it can be rendered more accessible, widely distributed, and preserved (or remembered). Spotify’s library is, on the one hand, compressed and of diminished audio quality—but on the other hand, and more positively, it has also put an unimaginably huge musical archive into all of our pockets. While such questions, at once pragmatic and philosophical, are endlessly debatable, Egan’s novel is suffused by a sense that as we digitize our artworks, we do experience not just technical “lossiness” but also a broader and deeper sense of diminishment. The dematerialization of art, its “abstraction” from materiality, feels like disappearance, she suggests—so it inevitably suggests forgetting. The disappearance of objects prefigures to us our own disappearance. For Bennie, the sounds carved into actual vinyl discs are ineluctably linked to his teenage self that listened to those sounds in a particular room. (And it is in fact the case that “lossless” audio formats are defined in part by a fidelity to the space of the original recording.)27 Even if some version of the songs are now easily accessible on Bennie’s smartphone, that specific nexus of sound, materiality, and self from 1979, and its sense of replete fullness, is forever vanished. As we conclude this section, it’s worth thinking further about the way these reflections about memory and storage and

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documentation on Egan’s part manifest themselves in the novel’s self-awareness of prose fiction as one of many means by which we preserve, organize, archive, and “display” artifacts of the past. Behind Egan’s depiction of this history, as I’ve suggested, can be glimpsed a less explicit, implied history of fiction, the novel, and the publishing industry, which has grappled with its own version of the crisis of the music industry and the broader cultural shift toward digital storage. That is, we can read Egan as using a “music-industry narrative” as a way to raise selfreflexive questions about a kind of shadow or implicit parallel “fiction-industry narrative.” Whatever is said about music and pop songs in the novel asks to be considered as also applying, at least potentially or in part, to fiction. Even if the traditional predigital forms of fiction (print novels on paper) have survived far more successfully, thus far, than vinyl albums—e-books have, so far, failed to disrupt the publishing industry anywhere near as thoroughly as MP3s and then streaming did the music industry, and the language of fiction is arguably immune to some forms of digital “compression”—Bennie’s denunciations of the dematerialization and compression of art also speak to Egan’s own medium. It’s also worth remembering, too, that for a year, while an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1980s, Egan dated a young Steve Jobs as he was bringing the first Apple computers to market—giving her an unusually inside view of an earlier crucial turning point in the modern history of computing. Jobs viewed the technological revolution he helped inaugurate as one that would displace the printed book completely; he was even a skeptic about Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers, on the grounds that “it doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”28 Egan became, through her relationship with Jobs,

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an extremely early adopter of the Mac: “When they met, he was inventing the Mac; he delivered one to her mother’s apartment, which Egan took East to write her papers on.”29 Since then, thinking about the fate of the printed word and of reading in a world transformed by personal computers and smartphones has been prominent in her fiction. Egan is interested in the question of which writing we choose to preserve in embodied form—and which we either do not preserve or choose only to keep in digital form. In Look at Me, the narrator, Charlotte, mentions, as one of the “few things I’d brought with me when I first drove to New York,” “my grandparents’ letters to each other from the summer my grandmother spent in New York before they married, letters full of wit and play, her confidence in the safety of writing by the lamplight at 135th  and Riverside.”30 “But I’d lost them during one move or another,” she goes on to say: “and now all I remembered was the sepia tone of their ink and my grandmother’s neat, ruled penmanship. I felt a thud of regret. Oh, for God’s sake. . . . Weren’t keepsakes a wee bit quaint in a world where you could . . . call Bangladesh from a pay phone at the beach?” This personal memory evokes a broader concern with the loss of writing itself in its material form and an entire culture of literacy associated with it— one associated not just with physical qualities, such as “the sepia tone of . . . ink” and “ruled penmanship,” but also with such values as “wit and play.” Egan’s later Twitter story “Black Box”—written and published after Goon Squad—represents an extended experiment with the possibilities of a purely online composition and publication; described by one critic as considering “the reconceptualization of the body as information,”31 “Black Box” suggests a (dystopian) radicalization of a tendency Egan seems to observe as writing becomes increasingly digitized and cut off from its

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material history and grounding. In a world where you can “call Bangladesh from a pay phone at the beach,” the spatial and temporal specificity of writing by hand becomes old-fashioned or “quaint,” residual. It is interesting to realize, however, that Egan wrote the epigrammatic fragments of “Black Box,” which were later published in the form of tweets and then “collected” in the form of a New Yorker story, “by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page”; 32 her own writing practice, that is, remained fully embedded in “residual” paper-based methods—she has said that she always writes in longhand 33— even as she composed a seemingly dematerialized and purely digital fiction. Egan’s self-awareness about the application of questions of “storage medium” is especially evident in Goon Squad ’s penultimate chapter 12, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” written entirely in the form of a PowerPoint slide presentation created by Sasha’s twelve-year-old daughter, Alison, in the near future. Perhaps the section of the novel most often commented upon, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” shares with “Black Box” an overt interest in considering how the traditional forms of prose fiction might adapt to or draw from new twenty-first-century technologies, forms, and formats. The PowerPoint chapter is especially striking, perhaps, because of that presentation software’s reputation for corporate banality. While it’s become conventional for authors to incorporate email, texting, and various social-media forms within their fictions, Egan’s use of PowerPoint stands out because this software is so widely loathed, often seen as the ne plus ultra of blandly stultifying business speak. In mimicking or reproducing PowerPoint’s distinctly ugly cascades of blocks, bubbles, and circles and triangles of text, sometimes crudely connected via arrows or lines, Egan seems among other things to be showing off her own— and the form

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of the novel’s— capacity to assimilate and make use of virtually any medium, any format or mode of inscription and preservation, to render compelling and meaningful the most dull or banal form of language. James Wood comments that the “novelist’s job is to become, to impersonate what he describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring” (33); the corporate discourse of PowerPoint allows Egan a bravura display of the potential of even the most degraded and soulless idiolect or format, in the right hands, to reveal unforeseen depths of feeling and meaning.34 The chapter is a documentation, a recording of ideas and experience in a particular form and medium, and it is also preoccupied with the drive to document and to record. Now, very movingly, we reencounter a middle-aged Sasha who is no longer the teenage runaway in Naples (chapter 11), or the NYU student in her early twenties (chapter 10), or the New York City musicindustry employee in her twenties and early thirties (chapters 1, 2, and 6), but an older married mother living in the California desert with two children. Having apparently eventually been fired by Bennie for her shoplifting, Sasha has overcome that compulsion, but she is still a collector and a personal archivist, albeit in what seems a healthier and a less obsessive mode. Sasha has quietly crossed over the line that runs through the novel between art and publicity, art makers and art promoters, by becoming an amateur artist. Alison documents “Mom, in the doorway”; “She’s holding a handful of the little papers she makes into collages after we’re asleep (Annoying Habit #22)”; “She collages in her Writing Chair, in the living room. . . . I don’t know why she loves junk so much. . . .‘Not junk,’ Mom will say. . . .‘Tiny pieces of our lives’ ” (264). Now, in a slide entitled “Mom’s ‘Art,’ ” Alison collages examples of the “little papers”— shopping lists, flight confirmation numbers, reminders, and the

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like—that her mother uses, along with explanations of how she renders these household ephemera into art: “She uses ‘found objects.’ . . . They come from our house and our lives. . . . She says they’re precious because they’re casual and meaningless. . . .‘But they tell the whole story if you really look.’ . . . She glues them onto boards and shellacs them. . . . I look when she’s not there” (265). These “found objects” recall, of course, our first introduction to Sasha in the novel’s introductory chapter, “Found Objects.” The repetition of that phrase invites a consideration of the evolution of Sasha’s collecting practices. She continues to collect scraps of material objects, which acquire a private “cult value” when taken from their original contexts and placed in the new context of a collection or artwork. But where she once acquired objects only by stealing them from others, she now archives “tiny pieces” of her own family’s life and experience. And now Sasha’s daughter in effect re-collects that collection and practice and re-presents it in her own collection/assemblage/text (the PowerPoint slide, itself a collection of the many text boxes). Sasha’s “found objects” follow a metonymic logic: they are no more than fragments, seemingly “meaningless,” but “they tell the whole story if you really look.” In this sense, these artworks are not “lossy”: they resemble data-compressing MP3s or JPEGs less than “lossless” media forms that preserve all the original data, such that they “tell the whole story.” For Sasha to “get well” (or “heal”) required turning a dangerous and shameful form of collecting or hoarding into a more positive one: shellacking grocery lists and appointment reminders for posterity is somewhat eccentric behavior but far safer than pickpocketing wallets from purses. Sasha is arguably still a “hoarder,” still someone with a compulsion to collect and to preserve what would normally be thrown away and forgotten. Yet part of what seems to distinguish her middle-aged

From Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

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collection from her youthful one is a new willingness to accept the limits of preservation and instead to allow what she has collected eventually to decay. “Mom makes sculptures in the desert out of trash and our old toys”; “Eventually her sculptures fall apart, which is ‘part of the process’ ” (242). These sculptures are a little like the mummified bodies of Pompeii, capsules of the past—but whereas those mummies have lasted for thousands of years, Sasha’s sculptures are designed for no more than a brief preservation. If the ideal Romantic artwork is an object that never ages, the mature Sasha has shifted to a new aesthetic practice— one that accepts time’s decay and the eventual inevitable failure of preservation.

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oon Squad is preoccupied with a cluster of ideas and images that it defines as closely related: personal failure or tragedy (vocational, sexual, cultural), the experience of trauma or shame (following tragedy or disaster, and otherwise), and a sense of meaninglessness.1 The novel is pervaded by a sense of literal and figurative loss, a fear that we (both the novel’s characters and the culture more broadly) have somehow, without realizing it, abandoned or destroyed something essential to our being: “Sasha wished that she could turn and peer in the mirror again, as if something about herself might at last be revealed—some lost thing” (11). (Sasha is herself defined by her uncle Ted as fundamentally “lost” [214].) This sense of loss is frequently associated in the novel with a recurring image of “emptiness” that is at once a figure and a nonfigure (or the absence of one).2

SHAME Goon Squad often associates shame with a sudden coming into view of what was, or should be, private or secret. After Sasha,

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on a blind date with Alex, has impulsively stolen a wallet from a woman’s handbag left sitting on the restroom floor, she is overcome with shame, which produces a fantasy of the stolen wallet suddenly becoming visible: “She had Xanax in her purse, but she couldn’t open her purse. Even with it zipped, she feared that the wallet would blurt into view in some way that she couldn’t control, unleashing a cascade of horrors: arrest, shame, poverty, death” (10). Her fear that the wallet might “blurt into view” employs a variant on the more predictable “burst into view,” as if the wallet’s emergence might take the verbal form of a slip of the tongue. Sasha’s own “shame” is echoed shortly thereafter, when she and Alex return to her apartment. After sex, as Alex takes a bath, Sasha rifles through his wallet. A scrap of binder paper dropped into Sasha’s lap. It looked very old, the edges torn, the pale blue lines rubbed almost away. Sasha unfolded it and saw written, in blunt pencil, I BELIEVE IN YOU. She froze, staring at the words. They seemed to tunnel toward her from their meager scrap, bringing a flush of embarrassment for Alex, who’d kept this disintegrating tribute in his disintegrating wallet, and then shame at herself for having looked at it. (17)

She then compounds this shame by failing to return it to Alex’s wallet—stealing it, possibly to add it to her shameful collection of pilfered items. (The chapter ends with her silence in response to her therapist’s question about whether she returned the note to Alex.) Sasha and Egan mark a distinction here between Sasha’s “embarrassment” for Alex and her own “shame.” Embarrassment is a more minor or run-of-the-mill emotion

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associated with the unwanted revelation of private matters— whereas shame implies, of course, a stronger moral judgment. Alex’s note is especially interesting as a producer of shame in its status as a piece of writing; it could, in fact, even be considered an instance of a “minimal” literary work, something like Ulysses comes home to Ithaca or Marcel becomes a writer. The note, “I BELIEVE IN YOU,” is a very concise “scrap” of writing that, despite its unprepossessing simplicity (“written in blunt pencil”), is quite powerful, its words seeming “to tunnel toward” the reader. Of course, what makes this not a work of literature is, among other things, its status as a text intended for only one single reader—which is also why it produces shame in Sasha, who has pilfered a purely personal note and inserted herself into what must have been intended to be a private communication. We never learn more about the note, which we can imagine might have been written by one of Alex’s parents, or a girlfriend, on some unknown occasion (perhaps his leaving for college or the like). Although it could be considered to be a form of “hoarding” of a memento from the past, Alex’s preservation of this note does not have any of the hallmarks of the forms of “unhealthy” hoarding we’ve considered; instead, what seems problematic or even pathological is Sasha’s unmotivated theft of it. Throughout the history of fiction, from Clarissa to The Moonstone and Dracula and beyond, the novel has had a close relation to a variety of other forms, genres, and types of private writing—most prominently diaries and letters but also related forms such as telegrams and other “messages”—which it regularly “remediates,” represents, and processes as part of its own materials. That is to say, the novel as a form is crucially defined by a practice of seizing what is ostensibly private, or contained within a writerreader circuit of two, and rendering it more visible and legibly

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public. Egan has observed, “Writing, for me, is like peeking into windows and going inside houses and finding out what the people there are like, what they think. I invade privacy imaginatively.”3 Egan does this here, in a way that emphasizes the links between certain forms of writing and the most privately held zones of the self: in depicting Sasha’s theft, Egan is also, in a sense, participating in her unauthorized publicity of the secret note. In doing so, she joins a long tradition of novels that capitalize on a reader’s voyeuristic curiosity to gain access to proscribed or concealed writing. Alex’s note has some qualities in common with Charlotte’s grandparents’ lost letters in “sepia . . . ink” in Look at Me—as an anachronistic and/but deeply meaningful reminder of the power of writing on paper to preserve memory, to convey emotion, to communicate. If we consider Alex’s note as a contrasting analogue to the novel, it is also noteworthy that his memento represents a kind of pure or radical sincerity or earnestness of feeling. As we will consider in more detail later, Egan is interested in the unstable distinction between “pure” feelings and language and their opposites (for example, language or feelings that are insincere, fake, commodified, etc.). “I BELIEVE IN YOU” is a quintessence of sincere feeling and expression, one that could potentially seem ersatz or insincere in its simplicity— like a greeting-card slogan—but that is marked out, partly by its age and tattered condition, as genuine. Alex’s scrap of radically sincere or earnest writing can also be read in the context of debates in contemporary twenty-firstcentury fiction regarding a supposed “new sincerity” or antiironic fictional mode, often associated with the magazines The Believer and McSweeney’s and the novelist David Foster Wallace—whose 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” is now viewed as an early manifesto of a turn away

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from the “snark” and irony of 1980s and 1990s postmodernism (and whose prose style seems one likely model for Egan’s chapter narrated by Jules from prison).4 As Lee Konstantinou smartly diagnoses in his book Cool Characters, twenty-first-century novelists seem required to position themselves in shifting ways on a continuum from irony to sincerity, with “irony” often associated with postmodern “difficulty” and “sincerity” always at risk of being viewed as sheer “middlebrow” audience gratification.5 The continuum can be clearly gendered, as well: notwithstanding Wallace’s centrality to the “new sincerity,” the distinction between postmodern rigor and irony and a postpostmodern sincerity can easily fall into familiar long-standing distinctions between (often male-coded) aesthetic innovation and difficulty and (often female-coded) middlebrow sentimentality and wish fulfillment. In this context, “I BELIEVE IN YOU” can imply reference to the dilemmas of a contemporary novelist who may desire to gratify, to some degree, an audience’s longing for earnest or authentic “feeling” without sacrificing the complexity of challenging literary modes— and without having her work labeled as simply middlebrow or as “chick lit.” Sasha’s pilfering of Alex’s note thus can seem overdetermined in relation to Egan’s own authorial practice: Sasha and Egan are both those who feel compelled to “steal” private language for their own purposes, perhaps “taking advantage of ” or getting the benefit of its purity and sincerity without entirely taking it on as their own words. Putting the radically sincere phrase in the form of a piece of anonymously authored writing, Egan includes that language in her novel but keeps it slightly at a distance, as someone else’s words and feeling. A shared familiarity with shame is also one link connecting Sasha with her boss Bennie, who confronts the diminishment of both his own ability to experience sexual desire and pleasure

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in music: in both areas, where he once felt life-giving passion, he now feels almost nothing. Egan treats Bennie’s anguished sense of loss of the ability to feel pleasure—“He was clobbered by loss so severe that it took physical effort not to howl. He’d had it, he’d had it. But where had it gone?” (33)— as at once a slightly risible instance of cliché alpha-male midlife crisis and as a genuine problem that the novel takes seriously. We first learned of Bennie as a “character” in “Sasha’s admittedly over-handled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous for founding the Sow’s Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee— as an aphrodisiac, she suspected— and sprayed pesticide in his armpits” (5). Alex’s note, “the edges torn, the pale blue lines rubbed almost away,” could also be described as (more literally) “over-handled.” The adjective raises larger questions: how much or often should a “tale” be told, and for how long? How much “handling” can a narrative bear? Does a story wear down under excessive use? And who has the right to “handle” or to retell others’ stories? We’ve already considered some of the symbolic meanings of gold in this novel, especially as linked to the gold records that serve as memorials for Bosco’s music career. Bennie’s gold is genuine—not just foil coated, as Bosco’s gold albums are—but that authenticity only renders it the more absurd as a homeopathic remedy for what Bennie experiences as his pervasive experience of “loss” (he had “begun this regimen two months ago, after reading in a book on Aztec medicine that gold and coffee together were believed to ensure sexual potency” [21]). There’s an amusingly ludicrous literalism to Bennie’s home cure, which attempts to restore the lost luster of his career and life via an ingestion of the most familiar symbol for value—and one with especially strong resonances in the pop music world.

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Egan begins Bennie’s chapter with shame, in a manner that produces a kind of rhyming parallel between his daily experience and the chapter itself: “The shame memories began early that day for Bennie, during the morning meeting” (19). “The shame memories” begin early both for Bennie and for us as we read the chapter; they are narratively foundational. (Could it even be the case that for Egan, shame produces or leads to fiction? That we turn to fiction as a means to process or narrate shame?) Bennie’s shame is initially triggered here by what could be categorized as a problem of aging, of the kind we often encounter in the novel. He had signed “a three-record deal a couple of years back” for an indie “sister band” called Stop/Go that “had seemed like an excellent bet” at the time, partly because “the sisters were young and adorable.” Now, however, in what Bennie misremembers as a span of only two years later (although Sasha soon reminds him that it was actually five years), “the sisters were pushing thirty . . . and no longer credible as recent high school grads, especially since one of them had a nine-year-old daughter” (19), and one of his colleagues is arguing for “pulling the plug” (19) on the contract, a vivid metaphor that conflates career and biological death— almost as if the sisters, by aging several years, have leaped all the way from adorable childhood to end-of-life hospice care. The story of Stop/Go can function as an allegory of aging in a neoliberal society more broadly, with the pop-music-career context intensifying a more usual process of individual decline and loss of value in a marketplace. And it is easy to imagine some reflection here on Egan’s part, too, about the way “bets” are often placed on young authors in the publishing industry; she has commented in an interview that she was lucky that she was never “a hot, young writer” but instead “had a steady build” in her career.6 To have a “steady build” suggests an enviable

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consistency and continuity in career path— one lacking the abrupt, sometimes mysterious crises or failures that upend so many of the book’s characters’ life paths, and also one that more resembles a “classic” nineteenth-century novel than a modernist or postmodernist one. Egan seems to be thinking through a range of different life paths and narrative modes or genres, those marked by steady progression versus others characterized by abrupt shifts and declines. Bennie’s shame is triggered less by Stop/Go than by an association the conversation produces for him, which brings him back to a long-ago “pure” aesthetic (musical) experience: “It was then that the memory overcame Bennie (had the word ‘sisters’ brought it on?): himself, squatting behind a nunnery in Westchester at sunrise after a night of partying—twenty years ago was it? More? Hearing waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound waft into the paling sky” (20). Benny remembers a time when he had happened by chance to overhear the sunrise Mass sung by a group of “cloistered nuns who saw no one but one another, who’d taken vows of silence. . . . Even now, Bennie could hear the unearthly sweetness of those nuns’ voices echoing deep in his ears.” The memory stands out as a peak aesthetic experience that might conceivably have had the potential to become a career highlight for Bennie as well; Egan may have been thinking here, for example, of a surprise pop music phenomenon along the lines of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, the recordings by the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir that became an unexpected, massive international “world music” hit in 1986.7 As very powerful aesthetic experiences—as well as traumatic experiences—tend to do in Goon Squad, these “waves of pure . . . sound” echo in his ears, “even now,” refusing to subside or fade but persisting as part of the present. Bennie met with the mother

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superior and worked out a recording deal “in a manner of minutes.” But he subsequently destroyed the deal by terribly offending the mother superior in a perverse, inexplicable act: he lurched across the sill and kissed her on the mouth: velvety skin-fuzz, an intimate, baby powder smell in the half second before the nun cried out and jerked away. Then pulling back, grinning through his dread, seeing her appalled, injured face. . . . Bennie was caught in a loop from twenty years ago: lunging over the sill toward the Mother Superior like some haywire figure on a clock, again. Again. Again. “No,” he groaned. (20 – 21)

Bennie’s shame seems to have two major components: first, an erotic violation and misdirection—also an invasion of another’s privacy and personal dignity, especially striking with a cloistered nun—and a traumatically “loop[ing]” memory of that initial violation. “He felt shaken, soiled. Bennie dropped artists all the time, sometimes three in a week, but now his own shame tinged the Stop/Go sisters’ failure, as if he were to blame” (21). His humiliation makes him “stick” in time, unable to move forward properly, “caught in a loop,” his shameful recollection in effect infecting and “soil[ing]” his present experience. “Again. Again” describes a state of tortuous repetition, of a memory that Bennie cannot “get past.” Very different from, for example, Sasha’s comments to Bennie through the car window: “ ‘See. You. Tomorrow’ ” (38), which promises a comforting reassurance of continuity in time, or from the “still echoing” beauty of the nuns’ song. One could ask whether the caught-in-a-loop quality of Bennie’s shame links it to or instead distinguishes it

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from the narrative methods of Goon Squad. After all, Egan’s novel refuses normal linear temporal progression, marking surprising loops and returns back and forth in time. Could a case be made that Goon Squad is itself “caught in a loop” in this manner— even that Goon Squad ’s method depends on a “shameful” or shame-produced temporality? Goon Squad never, however, seems “stuck” or “caught in a loop” at any particular point in time. Rather, Egan’s method seems fundamentally unstuck, able to range freely through time and the characters’ histories. That said, I do think that Egan’s method has a particular connection to shame and to shame memories or experiences, which often seem to exert a significant pull or influence on the novel’s own temporality. One way to think about the dynamic might be to see the novel as considering two paths for repetition: one, a “positive” sense of aesthetic, often sensory experiences as “echoing” or persisting, and second, a more negative model of compulsive or shameful repetition that can become damaging. As the day progresses, Bennie’s mind returns to what seems to be a personal greatest-hits—a gold record?— of his own humiliations, most of which share, with his mother superior memory, an erotic and embodied component. There’s the time at an awards ceremony “where he’d tried to introduce a jazz pianist”—whom he had “cherished a rash dream of getting . . . into bed”—“as ‘incomparable’ and ended up calling her ‘incompetent’ before an audience of twenty-five hundred” (23). Here the shame is both in the “blurting out” (to use Sasha’s phrase) of the wrong word and in Bennie’s embarrassingly inappropriate desire. There’s also an implication here about the unstable line dividing aesthetic triumph and success—the “incomparable”— from failure, the “incompetent.” Bennie has accidentally misspoken and substituted the wrong term, but the slip also hints at

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broader concerns about whether these two opposed terms can ever be firmly distinguished, of whether the successful/accomplished is ever “safe” from failure. Part of what made Bennie’s desire for the blond, Harvardeducated pianist “rash,” it seems, is his own difference from an ideal of prosperous and often “blond” wealth that dominates the upscale New York suburban world in which he now moves: “He was driving aimlessly among the Crandale mansions . . . every one of which seemed to have four or five blond children in Ralph Lauren playing out front. Seeing these kids, it was clearer than ever to Bennie that he hadn’t had a chance of lasting in this place, swarthy and unkempt-looking as he was even when freshly showered and shaved” (26). Bennie (Salazar) experiences his own “ethnic” physical being as inherently shameful or at least as often shame producing. (This topic also comes up, about a teenage Bennie, in chapter 3: “Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes . . . Rhea, Bennie’s a cholo. Isn’t that obvious?. . . Rich girls won’t go with cholos” [40, 42].) He perceives his own ethnicity or “swarthiness” as nearly uncanny, prone to “blurt out” at inopportune moments. We can see this, too, in a painful shame memory that suddenly enters his mind, interrupting another moment of peak aesthetic experience (as he is briefly enthralled and even sexually aroused by the Stop/Go sisters’ performance for him, along with Sasha’s physical proximity): And from this zenith of lusty, devouring joy, he recalled opening an email he’d been inadvertently copied on between two colleagues and finding himself referred to as a “hairball.” God, what a pool of liquid shame had pooled in Bennie when he’d read that word. He hadn’t been sure what it meant: That he was hairy? (True.) Unclean? (False!) Or was it literal, as in: he

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clogged peoples’ throats and made them gag, the way Stephanie’s cat, Sylph, occasionally vomited hair onto the carpet? ( 30)

Here again we see Egan updating certain long-standing novelistic conventions. That she is doing this with self-awareness is made clear by this observation by Bennie about Sasha from the previous paragraph: she “had been too near Bennie all these years for him to really see her, like in those nineteenth-century novels he’d read in secret because only girls were supposed to like them” (30). Bennie here is (much like Sasha reading Alex’s note) very much like a character from a Victorian novel who reads a note not intended for her—for example, Amelia in the final chapter of Vanity Fair, reading the note sent from George to Becky Sharp—interrupting the intended communicative circuit and, in this case, coming face to face with a sense of contempt directed at him. Part of the charge in such moments resides from our own sense, as novel readers, that we are prying into private materials. About yet another shame memory linked to the body (when his barber points out lice in his son’s hair), Bennie thinks, “God, it hurt him to think of this now—hurt him physically, as if the memory were raking over him and leaving gashes. He hid his face in his hands” (31). The shame memories culminate in a final one of a party from Bennie’s earliest days in New York City. He had been chasing “some delicious blond—Abby, was it?” but, having done several lines of coke, had “been stricken with a severe instantaneous need to empty his bowels”: “He’d been relieving himself on the can in what must have been (although Bennie’s brain ached to recall this) a miasma of annihilating stink, when the unlockable bathroom door had jumped open, and there was Abby, staring down at him. There’d been a horrible, bottomless instant when

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their eyes met; then she’d shut the door” (32). Once again, Bennie’s “shame” is linked to his sense of his own bodily excess and capacity to disgust, a quality that possesses an uncanny potential to make public what should have been private. (When he first heard the nuns’ singing, he was “squatting. . . . [w]et grass under his knees” [20], perhaps vomiting?) As with the image of himself as a “hairball” vomited up by a cat, Bennie’s shame is linked to a visceral sense of others’ appalled sensory disgust at his physical presence—a disgust that has class and racial elements in relation to his own sense of himself as an ethnic outsider in a realm of wealthy WASP/blond privilege—perhaps with a psychological subtext implying that his body is the “uncanny” thing that ought to have been repressed. With the mother superior, Bennie was the one who transgressed a physical boundary in “lurch[ing] across the sill” to kiss her; with Abby, the object of his desire opens the door to invade Bennie’s private space. But in both cases, he claims the shame as his own. Along with Bennie, the novel’s other most prominent “shamed” character is Dolly, or La Doll, the disgraced publicist whom we first encounter as she is in the midst of a challenging assignment running a PR campaign for a “genocidal dictator” (139). It soon becomes clear that Dolly once had a high-profile career, although it is not immediately apparent what led to her decline: “The general and his team were under the impression that she was the top publicist in New York, a woman whose fax machine would be in a corner office with a panoramic view of New York City (as indeed it had been for many years), not ten inches away from the foldout sofa where she slept” (138). In this world of rarefied Manhattan elites and those struggling to maintain a foothold among them, one of the clearest proofs of high status is access to a “panoramic view” (remember Alex’s

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loss of his). Within a novel that is so interested in shifting perspective and point of view, access to such a clear and far-seeing “view” is somewhat formally overdetermined—as if the economically privileged are granted a power akin to that of a nearly omniscient narrator or novelist, whereas the impoverished or unlucky must inhabit a strictly “limited” point of view. With her makeshift bed less than a foot from a noisy fax machine, the once-glamorous Dolly has been “downsized” into humiliatingly restricted circumstances—from near-omniscience, seeing all, to a very limited view. Goon Squad again offers a sociology of character, showing how and why certain characters take a wrong turn and find themselves in hopeless circumstances— somewhat like Hardy’s Michael Henchard, whose “state of hopelessness had weakened him, and imparted to his shoulders, as weighted by the basket, a perceptible bend.”8 We might also think of a passage from an earlier Egan novel, The Keep, in which the protagonist ponders “that thing that happened to people when they lost confidence and got phony, anxious, weird,” a “thing” he and his friends name “the worm”: “it crawled inside a person and started to eat until everything collapsed, their whole lives.”9 Egan often homes in on the moment when a character’s shame or self-doubt in effect “eats away at” their sense of self “until everything collapsed” and “A” slides quickly toward “B.” Jules wonders, from jail: “At what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying theretofore, cant infinitesimally to the left or the right and then embark on the trajectory that ultimately delivered you to your present whereabouts?” (173). Whether the cause of such a “tipping” is labeled as “shame” or “the worm,” Egan defines it as at once psychological and physical or embodied, felt “inside a person” but affecting the public and social self.

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Egan carries over from nineteenth-century fiction a sense of “character” as in some sense destiny; her characters’ personal qualities, decisions, and actions intersect with environments to lead, eventually, to radically varying outcomes, with seemingly minor differences in initial trajectory, a “tip” or “cant” in one direction versus another, eventually leading to huge variations (“we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I’m an asswipe, why?”). After several pages narrating Dolly’s communications with a representative of the genocidal dictator, we finally learn the backstory of her sudden decline: “La Doll had met with ruin on New Year’s Eve two years ago” (141). “Two years” is a frequently used timeframe in Goon Squad. Bennie misremembers the five years that have in fact passed since he signed Stop/Go as two years; Stephanie is overcome by fear that Bennie may be having an affair “despite Bennie’s promise two years ago, when he turned forty” (123); the young Sasha in Naples tells herself that she “was better now, hadn’t stolen anything in two years” (194) and that she’d “done more in two years” than her uncle Ted “had done in twenty” (224). This pattern may be coincidental— two years is hardly an unusual span of time—but a case can be made that it functions within the novel as a particularly ambiguous length of time: long enough to mark significant changes but short enough to seem located within the same era or period of life and, perhaps for these reasons, a span especially susceptible to misperceptions or psychological wishful thinking, along the lines of Bennie’s false memory. Two years is long enough for great changes to occur but too little for aging to be immediately or obviously perceived.10 When we encounter Dolly, then, she is still within striking distance of the moment when she “met” her “ruin,” her moment of downward career plunge. Sufficient time has passed that she feels fully “in” a new life stage, but the

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memories of the previous period—and of the “ruin”—remain painfully vivid. Those vivid memories affect Dolly much as Bennie’s shame memories torture him, in thoroughly embodied ways. Bennie’s memory dwells on moments of physical humiliation that are perceived in the body as much as in the mind. Dolly, too, “tried to soothe herself at night when memories of her demise plowed through her like a hot poker, causing her to writhe in her sofa bed and swill brandy from the bottle” (141). “Demise” is now often used synonymously with “death,” but in its etymology, the word originally concerned the “conveyance or transfer of an estate by will or lease” and especially the “transference or devolution of sovereignty, as by the death or deposition of the sovereign.”11 Egan seems to be using the word in something closer to that original sense: as a kind of social death that is also an abdication and a giving up of Dolly’s former power. We’ve already considered the spectacular scene in which Dolly’s makeshift light system for her A-list party (“The Party”) collapses to disastrous effect, scalding and burning the celebrities below. “Something shut down in La Doll as she stood there”: “She gaped in frozen disbelief as her guests shrieked and staggered and covered their heads, tore hot, soaked garments from their flesh and crawled over the floor like people in medieval altar paintings whose earthly luxuries have consigned them to hell” (142). Once again we see shame connected to a violation of others’ bodily integrity. Although Egan plays this scene partly for outrageous laughs, it is also the case that the origins of Dolly’s shame lie in her negligence and bad planning—“she’d thought that because she could do something very, very well (namely, get the best people into one room at one time), she could do other things well, too” (141)—that leads to her guests

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being “burned, scarred, maimed.” There is a fittingly Dantean, medieval contrapasso logic to the way “memories of her demise plowed through her like a hot poker”; it is in some sense a logical punishment for having burned her guests that she herself is now tortured by memories that sear painfully. This scene is hilariously grotesque, and it is notable as another instance of Egan’s interest in contrasting or overlapping temporalities and timescales in relation to aesthetic form. She encourages us, in effect, to see, through the form of an early twenty-first-century novel, a radically different and antithetical form: that of medieval altar paintings and the orthodox Catholic ideology they embody. Egan shows us a comparable temporal contrast in her description of the “vaguely threatening youth” of Naples “who slunk around the decrepit palazzi where their fifteenth-century forebears had lived in splendor” (213). In such scenes, Egan stages an aesthetic confrontation with a fundamentally and deeply different order of time— although in this case, also one that invites consideration of parallels. In producing this parallel or “rhyme,” she invites broader consideration of the implications of this parallel: for example, are the wealthy celebrities of pre-9/11 New York City indeed akin, in some sense, to sinners “whose earthly luxuries” have doomed them to terrible punishment? Egan presents her own novel as an aesthetic form—like a medieval altar painting or the “early Roman wall paintings” (208) of Pompeii—that is positioned in one particular historical moment but that inevitably comments both upon that moment and what preceded and will follow it. The powerful artwork, somewhat like a major tragedy or other event, both marks a particular time and defines a division between what precedes and follows it. She implies that art is a means by and through which to grapple with ideology, belief,

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and judgment as they change over time, especially at moments of crisis or sudden change. By invoking a much older aesthetic form, she encourages us to think flexibly about historical parallels, gaps, overlaps, and divergences.

TRAGEDY Goon Squad, published in 2010, is distinctly a post-9/11 novel; references to 9/11 and to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers recur throughout the novel. These references can be considered in relation to a few different concepts or functions in the novel, including dating and the specificity of a moment in time, as a reflection on cultural response to tragedy more broadly, and in relation to a more formal interest in gaps or absences— that is, an interest in what “gaps” do within fiction or other art forms. September 11, 2001, operates in Goon Squad as one of a limited number of precise and irrefutable historical anchors or reference points in the novel. Each of the novel’s 9/11 references helps nail down the larger chronologies of the chapters in which they occur, and therefore of the novel as a whole, revealing an internal temporal logic in what could potentially be a confusingly nonlinear narrative. Other references perform this work as well, but few do so as precisely. Consider this outburst by Stephanie’s brother Jules, who has been staying with Stephanie and Bennie after five years in Attica Correctional Facility, charged with the kidnapping and aggravated assault of the starlet Kitty Jackson: “I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down. . . . Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone’s office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole

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time they’re talking to you” (123). Jules is, like Egan, a literary worker, a writer/editor/journalist; in prison, Jules “edited a weekly prison newspaper, and his coverage of the impact of 9/11 on the lives on inmates won him a special citation from the PEN Prison Writing Program” (119). (A little joke here, perhaps, about the pervasiveness of the prize/reward system in publishing—in a novel that would go on to win Egan the Pulitzer Prize: a very “special citation.”) Jules’s rant to his sister at once clarifies the chronology of the events we’re reading and articulates a point that the novel seems to endorse: that 9/11 was transformative, turning American life and culture “upside down” in ways that constitute part of the book’s subject matter. The question posed earlier in terms of an individual life—“At what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying theretofore . . . ?” (173)—is one that is more easily answered in relation to U.S. society at the turn of the century; 9/11 is clearly the “precise moment” at which the “relatively normal” status quo was profoundly disrupted (although those of us who have lived through 2020 may now feel that it marks another such moment). In Jules’s telling, “Buildings are missing” is an uncanny observation, even bringing to mind the manipulations of Photoshopped photographs or a Philip K. Dick story in which certain altered details signal that something is wrong in the world. Goon Squad defines itself as a “report” on a massive disruption and realignment, one with some of the lasting impact of the destruction of Pompeii (and one that also dovetails with the novel’s depiction of the threats of climate change). Another such moment occurs when Bennie is discussing the band he’s signed, Stop/Go, with Sasha. In a discussion of how “awful” and “unlistenable” they now seem to have become (although minutes earlier, Bennie had listened to them

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ecstatically), he reiterates his earlier claim that he signed them just two years earlier: “Two years ago they sounded . . . different.” Sasha gave him a quizzical look. “It wasn’t two years,” she said. “It was five.” “Why so sure?” “Because last time, I came to their house after a meeting at Windows on the World.” It took Bennie a minute to contemplate this. “Oh,” he finally said. “How close to—” “Four days.” “Wow. I never knew that.”

( 33– 34)

That Bennie “never knew that” could be interpreted as another minor piece of evidence for his narcissistic, masculinemidlife-crisis-beset self-involvement and the degree to which he takes Sasha for granted. (Although it is also simply a reminder that each individual human being is locked into his or her own life narrative and preoccupations, producing inevitable blind spots in terms of recognition of others.) Perhaps for this reason—but also because she is trying to shake Bennie out of his depressed passivity—when Bennie continues, “Still, two years, five years—” Sasha angrily snaps at him, “Who am I talking to?. . . This is the music business. ‘Five years is five hundred years’—your words’ ” (34). The most obvious denotation of this equation is that in the world of pop music, five years (say, from 1979 to 1984, from postpunk to the height of the MTV era) is not a modest time span but an entire era during which careers will rise and fall, stars will decline, new styles and genres will

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emerge, etc. A further implication, however, relates to an overweening grandiosity of this world, in which the normal earthly rules of temporality and history are thought to be malleable or simply not to apply—as if in an overweening form of fictional “omnitemporality.” Indeed, this novel seems to suggest the insight that pop music (and perhaps fiction as well) defines a realm or a world where worldly laws of temporality can seem not to apply—but ultimately in fact do. In a context in which the realist novel’s long-standing cultural task of telling a history of the present day can seem to have become difficult, if not impossible, partly because of the extremely rapid shift in fashion and styles, 9/11 defines a moment with a precision otherwise difficult to achieve.12 Much like the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the shooting of JFK, “9/11” becomes a touchstone and a synecdoche, an irrefutable temporal anchor. A 9/11 reference also frames Goon Squad ’s final scenes. In the novel’s last chapter, set in the near future, Alex and his wife and daughter are heading to what is now called “the Footprint,” the former site of the Twin Towers, for the concert by Scotty Hausmann that concludes the novel. “The Footprint” is an interesting term, semiotically, in that a footprint is a “sign” that is also, in a sense, a nonsign: a mark, but one that is defined here in terms of absence— of the buildings that once stood in this spot—rather than presence: Before them, the new buildings spiraled gorgeously against the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only seen in pictures), more like sculptures than buildings, because they were empty. . . . The weight of what had happened more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint. He perceived it as

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a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar. ( 331)

Egan, a long-time Brooklyn resident, writing this scene perhaps seven or eight years after the fall of the Twin Towers—in the period between the beginning of construction of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in 2006 and its dedication and opening to the public in 2011— counterfactually imagines her own vision of the future of this site, now rendered a partially aesthetic space (the aesthetic as “mending the earth”?). Alex feels the “weight of what had happened more than twenty years ago” here, “the vibration of an old disturbance.” The imagery also recalls Ted’s visit to “the ruins of Pompeii,” where he is “alert to lingering reverberations of screams, of sliding ash. How could so much devastation have been silenced?” (210). Egan has designed Goon Squad at once as a kind of layered fictional recording device, preserving evidence and experiences from different historical eras, and as a self-reflective consideration of the ways that we record, preserve, and re-narrate the past. 9/11 and the destruction of the Twin Towers function as a centering absence in the novel, both an irrefutable temporal marker and a haunting, reverberating reminder of a past disaster. One slightly troubling implication of Egan’s language of “lingering reverberations” is that the power of art has quite a bit in common with the power of shame or disaster: both operate as transhistorical “vibration” or “lingering” or “echoing,” a continuation forward in time, a potentially uncanny refusal to conclude or cease. This alliance is signaled here by the odd fact that Alex perceives the new monument as “more like sculptures than buildings.” Pompeii serves as an obvious analogue or

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prototype for 9/11, a massive “silencing” by heat or fire, “sliding ash,” that actually does not silence but instead in effect strikes a note that will continue to “reverberate” far into the future (if subliminally). Egan also suggests that an event like 9/11 resembles, on a larger and transindividual scale, a personal shameful memory of the kind that pierces Sasha, Bennie, or Dolly like a hot poker: a memory that cannot be filed away or rendered inoperative, one that becomes a pivot point, bisecting the past and future into two eras. “Shame,” “disaster,” “ruin,” etc. are all different terms that can apply, albeit in different ways, both to an individual and to a culture. The novel as a form has always had a particular interest in aligning, and thinking about in relation, the fates of individuals and of collectivities; Egan offers what can be understood as an updating of the achievement of a novel like Middlemarch or The Mayor of Casterbridge in its attempt to offer a “mapping” of individual rises and falls, successes and disasters— seen as always occurring in a dialectical relationship to a society that is also experiencing its own trajectories.

EMPTINESS Goon Squad is, as we’ve seen, preoccupied with the distinction between a sense of “full” completeness or repletion and a very different perception of emptiness or hollowness—and a “meaninglessness” often linked to that emptiness, sometimes associated with digital “lossiness” or forgetting. This distinction between fullness and emptiness appears at several different levels in the novel, operating both as a thematic concern (as in a sense of life or experience feeling “empty”) and more formally, in a more literal interest in emptiness or in empty shapes or

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spaces, as in the “missing” buildings that disturb Jules after his release from prison. Both after Sasha has sex with Alex and in the immediate aftermath of her shaming theft of the woman’s wallet, for example, “All her excitement had seeped away, leaving behind a terrible sadness, an emptiness that felt violent, as if she’d been gouged” (16). This language resembles Dolly’s “memories of her demise plow[ing] through her like a hot poker” in its viscerally somatic representation of an emotion. To be in a state in which memories can “plow through” one suggests an inner emptiness, a lack of resistance to the outside, with what had made one feel “full” “seeped away.” Sasha’s sudden experience of “emptiness” is part of a pattern of what could be called “downsizing” or reduction in the novel, when characters experience a previously full, meaningful, or replete existence as suddenly feeling drastically “reduced” or “emptied.” The implication often seems to be that time possesses a fundamentally tragic power to hollow out meaning— as well as that contemporary experience possesses anhedonic tendencies that make strong passions or desires difficult to maintain. A character in an early Egan story articulates this especially clearly: “I’ve become a smaller version of myself, distilled from an earlier abundance I was not even aware of.”13 Emptiness is often associated with the dispossessions or losses of the passing of time, as when Jocelyn visits a now aged and sick Lou, the record company executive who seduced her as a teenager: “So this is it—what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty” (87). The image of the empty house also recurs, implicitly, in the Proustian moment in the final pages when Alex stares at Sasha’s old apartment and “imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there” (339). The poignancy of Egan’s

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image—as well as of Proust’s original one—lies in the noncorrespondence of time and space: one can return to a location but not to a location in time; what one looks for (one’s younger self or experiences) is inevitably “missing,” producing an effect of “emptiness.” Desire and aesthetic experience are two occasions for the possibility either of a sense of fullness and repletion or their absence. We’ve already seen Bennie confronting the diminishment of his “lust”: At times Bennie didn’t even mind its disappearance; it was sort of a relief not to be constantly wanting to fuck someone. The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen. . . . And now: Sasha’s breasts in a thin yellow sweater, and Bennie felt nothing. Not a shiver of harmless excitement. (22)

He experiences this diminishment as an emptiness, “nothing,” a state of lifelessness akin to the aesthetic crisis of digitization Bennie goes on to brood over. The fear is of a pervasive lifelessness, what had been repletion or fullness emptying or hollowing out or shrinking. We see similar language in Ted’s consideration of his partially strategic “reduction” of the sexual desire he once felt for his wife: Many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half. . . . Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so

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that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. (210)

As with Bennie, the downsizing or diminishment of Ted’s erotic desire seems strongly linked with his aesthetic desire or interest. Both men feel that they have, with varying degrees of intentionality, “dismantled a perilous apparatus” by cutting off the sources of their longing, thereby producing a more placid but also less meaningful existence that feels like an empty or seriously diminished space, one in which one “hardly feels.” Ted’s act of “folding” his desire recalls the “the foldout sofa” where Dolly slept after her “ruin.” What is “folded in half ” is intentionally miniaturized, shrunk down for the sake of convenience, to avoid taking up too much space. That something (an object, feeling, or experience) can be so divided also suggests a kind of nonintegrity; something that was powerfully whole would presumably not be subject to such splitting in half. That Ted’s desire is “so small in the end that [he] could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it” figures it as something akin to an iPod or thumb drive, as Egan implies another possible parallel between the downsizing of erotic and aesthetic experience—the latter strongly affected by technological changes and especially the shift to digitization, perceived as a loss, or virtualization, of material substance.14 Recall also that shortly after publishing Goon Squad Egan wrote a short story that was initially published in the form of tweets from the New Yorker Twitter account, brief epigrammatic fragments that she

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had first, however, written “by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page.” She seems often to be thinking through the question of how much space an aesthetic work takes up and about the difference between language that exists “virtually” versus that which takes tangible material form on paper or in a notebook. The character Moose, a historian, in Look at Me “again and again . . . spoke . . . of things, watermelons and grain and cattle. . . . Objects existing in time and space. But things had lost their allure generations ago,” replaced by “information,” which was “the inversion of a thing” (368); “the world of objects was gone” (498).15 The length of Goon Squad itself, as an extended prose narrative, perhaps attests to a desire to hold off this fate, to retain the “tactile wholeness” of a novel “as an object,”16 not just as bits of information, even as Egan also experiments (as in her Twitter short story and her PowerPoint chapter—a full-color version of which, including audio clips, exists on Egan’s author website)17 with fiction that exists, at least in part, in entirely virtual form. Egan dwells on the fate of art in a context in which it becomes so radically shrunk, downsized, or compressed that one can easily “slip it inside . . . a pocket and forget about it.” Language itself also threatens not just to diminish or downsize but to empty of meaning; in the novel’s final chapter, set in the near future of the 2020s, an academic, Rebecca, Alex’s wife, makes her reputation on the study of “word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had 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” (323). Egan employs her usual light touch to offer a critique of a “postmodern” evacuation of meaning: “Some, like ‘identity,’ ‘search,’ and ‘cloud,’ had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage.

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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?” (324). As an author, Egan is presumably invested in a quest to produce meaning, to choose and arrange words in a manner that will seem “full” rather than “empty” or meaningless. Throughout the novel, she seems to think about the ways that this quest can fail or come up short— about the ways significations can “seep away” or be “drained” or “shucked of ” their content, “made meaningless by nothing more than time” (215). Egan, who has always maintained what she describes as “an additional job” as a magazine journalist,18 depicts a range of different kinds of professional writing, including publicity or PR work, and the magazine celebrity-profile form that Jules at once produces and satirizes by turning into a criminal confession. (In Look at Me, “the rationalization of human beings through marketing, public relations, image consulting and spin” plays an even more central role.)19 About the texts or pieces of writing depicted in Goon Squad, we can ask the related, if not identical, questions: how sincere are they (with how much authentic meaning does the author invest them), and how much meaning do they contain (a question that does not depend only on the intentions or the sincerity of the author or speaker)? Dolly, who “was a publicist” but “left the business” and now “lives upstate” (318), can be viewed as someone who has finally rebelled against a deeply compromised and, in her case, even corrupt relationship to language and signification. Having been reduced to crafting PR for a “genocidal dictator,” she retreats entirely from both the heart of metropolitan publicity, New York City, and from language manipulation as a career: she opens “a small gourmet shop on Main Street, where she sold fine produce and unusual cheese, artfully displayed and lit by a system of small spotlights

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Dolly designed herself ” (165). (It’s noticeable, however, that even as she escapes from the manipulation of language, she continues to use her skills—far less damagingly!—in the “artful” management of image or presentation.) Think once again of the note in Alex’s wallet, its message written “in blunt pencil.” As we’ve considered, it can be taken to represent an apex or “zenith” of absolutely, even embarrassingly sincere “meaning”: loaded with emotion and so individually targeted that the message becomes shameful for any other person to read. The note’s meaning is deictic, highly dependent on context—it would be a strange misreading, for example, for Sasha to take its statement as applying to her. The full emotional power of the note, when read by its intended addressee, may be, by definition, unavailable to an artist crafting a text designed to be delivered to many thousands of readers around the world. So the note’s meaning, which might be revived every time Alex looks at it, “drains away” in Sasha’s unauthorized reading of it. Such shifts in meaningfulness are, of course, inherent to language and messages, which will mean different things, and amounts, for different audiences. But Rebecca studies, and has named, a more particular version of this process, by which, it is implied, words have become meaningless “outside quotation marks,” through intensified new pressures. Terms like “identity” and “friend,” Egan implies, have been hijacked by the internet and particularly by social media. She has commented in an interview that “almost an obsession” throughout her work has been “a question of how mass media invites a particular sort of self-consciousness, or self-objectification.”20 Here she seems to consider the possibility that not just the form of the novel but language itself is being worn out, lossified, perhaps “overhandled,” like the “tales of Bennie Salazar” that are part of Sasha’s repertoire. An analogy also seems possible between

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these “husks” of language and the various physical “ruins” of the novel: “the ruins of Pompeii,” with their “prone bodies scattered like Easter eggs among the columned courtyards” (208), and the “missing buildings” where the Twin Towers once were—both of which serve in different ways as displaced representations of 9/11 in the novel. Perhaps the novel’s most memorable figuration of “emptiness” or of empty space, however, comes in the PowerPoint chapter, in Sasha’s daughter Alison’s consideration of her autistic brother’s obsession with “Great Rock and Roll Pauses”: that is, of intentional gaps of silence within pop recordings. Alison explains, about her brother Lincoln, that “right now, he’s obsessed with rock songs that have pauses in them”; “A ‘full rest’ is four beats long, a ‘half rest’ is two beats; He knows more than grown-ups about certain things” (243). In a slide entitled “Songs with Lincoln’s Comments,” Alison transcribes Lincoln’s commentary on several “excellent early pause[s]” from classic rock and pop from the 1960s and 1970s: “Bernadette,” by the Four Tops; “Foxey Lady,” by Jimi Hendrix; “Young Americans,” by David Bowie.21 In Alison’s rendition, Lincoln’s hobby of collecting, recording, and commenting on these “Great Rock and Roll Pauses”—he creates recordings in which he “loops the pause in each song so it lasts for minutes” (246) and offers elaborate commentary on each one—offers a window into the psychological and relational dynamics of the family as a whole. Egan shows us the affectionate patience and attention of Alison and Sasha, the occasional incomprehension and worry on the part of Sasha’s husband, Drew, and the stress placed on the family as a whole by the demands of Drew’s job as a doctor running a medical clinic that treats illegal immigrants. Drew’s vocation also suggests a larger tension throughout the novel between actions or life paths that “injure” or “damage” (135) others versus those that are

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reparative or that aim for “mending.” It’s implied that Drew’s altruism may be inspired, in part, by his lingering guilt over his passive role in the death of his and Sasha’s college friend Rob. The novel frequently returns to the questions of which wounds or damage can, or cannot, be mended or healed; the young Sasha looks to her uncle like “a girl whose feathery bones did not quite heal” (217). In a slide titled “Lincoln Wants to Say/Ends up Saying,” the “unsaid” statement that Alison believes Lincoln “wants to say”—“I love you, dad”—is “translated” by his cognitive process through a series of thoughts—“Dad is from Wisconsin,” “Steve Miller is from Wisconsin,” etc.—to Lincoln’s observation: “Hey Dad, there’s a partial silence at the end of ‘Fly Like an Eagle,’ with a sort of rushing sound in the background that I think is supposed to be the wind, or maybe time rushing past!” (249). We have been primed to recognize this as more than just another obsessive insight about a pause in a song. It is also a rather profound observation about the aesthetic representation of the passing of time, one of the novel’s own central preoccupations. Egan, who has observed that in writing Goon Squad she was “really interested in gaps. Things that happen when you’re not looking,”22 could even have been thinking here of Proust’s famous commentary on Flaubert’s deployment of the technique of narrative “silence”: “The finest thing, to my mind, in the whole of Education sentimentale, is to be found, not in words at all, but in a passage where there is a sudden moment of silence,” an “implied ‘silence’ of vast duration.”23 Egan is, as we’ve seen, a well-informed student of Proust, and Lincoln’s rock and roll pauses can be plausibly read as a repurposing of Proust’s own deployment of ellipsis. We might also remember the way the first chapter ends, with Sasha and her therapist in “the longest silence that had ever passed between them,” Sasha “claiming . . .

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these minutes of Coz’s time: another, then another, then one more” (18). Just as Proust declares that the finest passage of Flaubert is to be found in a moment of entirely nonverbal “silence,” so Lincoln homes in on and treasures the signifying potential of “sudden moment[s] of silence” or gaps in pop songs, which can evoke “time rushing past!” and other effects. I have in this chapter been focusing primarily on more “negative” aspects of emptiness in Goon Squad: its links to shame or failure or tragedy and specifically to the empty space of the former World Trade Center footprint. But Alison’s account of Lincoln’s “pauses” also begins to offer a more “recuperative” or positive account of the formal qualities of empty space or emptiness. As so much visual art and sculpture of the past century (Giacometti, Serra) and literature (Beckett) has explored, gaps or negative space can produce meaning no less than “present” marks or objects or words do. (Think of Ted listening to the “crazy, empty silence” [208] at the ruins of Pompeii.) Alison comments that “if my friends are around, I ignore Lincoln’s music” (246) but that “when it’s just us, the pauses are my favorite. . . . They sound like this: [image of a bubble].” (Her comment also stresses the social construction of art perception; one reads or listens differently in the presence of one person or a group.) Drew has trouble viewing his son’s interest as anything other than a worryingly compulsive fixation. He more broadly, in Allison’s view, “can’t understand Lincoln” (248) and cannot make any sense of Lincoln’s pauses, which presumably sound to him simply like emptiness or a vacancy. His response to Lincoln’s effusion about Steve Miller—which, recall, Alison tells us actually translates to “I love you, Dad”—is a rather curt “Good to know, Linc” (250), treating a (covertly) highly affective communication as a dry piece of pointless trivia. Alison and

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her mother, however, are able to enter into the topic with more understanding and empathy, as Alison demonstrates in a slide titled “What I Notice During the Looped Pauses”: • • • •

A whisper of orange on the horizon. A thousand black turbines. Miles of solar panels like a black ocean I’ve never seen close up. You can’t get used to the stars, no matter how long you live here. (251)

Lincoln collects the pauses from the recordings and in effect repurposes them, or turns them into his own creative assemblages: the “Looped Pauses.” The pauses are themselves a creation, then, as well as an invitation to a listener (or a reader): a gap into which one’s own perceptions can be projected. This critical/creative act in turn allows a listener—here, Alison—to respond with her own interpretive act of listening in order to generate a series of reflective images of the uncanny natural surroundings of their home in the climate-changed California deserts of the 2020s. It further becomes clear, when Alison and Drew take an evening walk, that the aural pauses have a specific relation— at least in Alison’s perception—to this futuristic landscape: • • • •

The desert is quiet and busy. I hear faint clicks like the scratchy pause in “Bernadette.” There is a hum like the pause in “Closing Time” by Semisonic. The whole desert is a pause. (287)

From Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

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The concept of a “pause” broadens during the course of the chapter from the seemingly trivial pop music obsession of an autistic teenager to become a much more widely resonant figure for both art and nature. “The whole desert is a pause” offers illuminating insight into the natural (and unnatural) world and our human perception of it, implying that absence can be understood not simply as “nothing” but rather as a space for creativity and imagination, just as a “footprint” at the site of a tragic disaster is not merely an empty space but instead one of potentially intense, albeit open-ended, meaningfulness— one into which each individual viewer or interpreter will project her own meaning. Danny in The Keep asks himself: “How had he ended up with nothing? Did he always have nothing?”24 But Goon Squad moves toward a nearly Buddhist acceptance of the nonpossession, or dispossession, of “nothing” as an opportunity for different forms of meaning rather than loss.25 The chapter ends, movingly, in what can on a first reading appear to be a surprisingly or crudely “literal” manner. First, Alison gives us a sequence of two different visual images for silence or “pause.” In “What I Hear as I’m Falling Asleep,” Drew asks Lincoln to stand by the window to “listen with me. What does that sound like to you?” (301). Next, we see a large, page-sized outline filled entirely in black, followed by what is presumably Lincoln’s comment, also on a black page, as he understands his father’s intended meaning that the silence outside the window sounds like one of his pauses: “Okay. I know.” Then, Alison provides a second PowerPoint visualization of silence, emptiness, or absence—an empty gray circle fringed by four smaller overlapping ones—that might have provided an appropriate final slide for the chapter as a whole. The chapter actually concludes, however, with a final series of four “charts”: “Relationship of Pause-Length to Haunting Power,” “Proof of

From Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

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the Necessity of Pauses,” “Discoveries About Pause Timing (in Bubble Form),” and finally, “The Persistence of Pauses Over Time.” These, with their comically precise graphs of various data points related to Lincoln’s obsession, may initially seem better suited to serve as an appendix than as the concluding pages of the chapter. But the real implication of these charts emerges only when one remembers an earlier exchange between Alison and Drew, after he had, frustrated by what he perceived to be Lincoln’s compulsive fixation on song pauses, snapped at him and made him cry. “I’ve got to do better with Lincoln,” Alison reports her father as saying, followed by this exchange: Me: “He needs help graphing the pauses. “But will you really?” “He’s been asking me, but I’m terrible at graphing.”

Dad: “I could do that.” “If I say I will, I will.” “I might have to brush up a little . . .” (288)

When we remember this exchange, we recognize the actual emotional content of those final four graphs, which are in effect the father’s gesture of recompense and apology to his son and an attempt at better communication and understanding. Drew finally has come to recognize and accept the “necessity,” “persistence,” and “haunting power” of pauses, gaps, silence, and empty space. These graphs also finally ask to be considered as another analogue for Goon Squad itself: as a formal means of organizing, making sense of, and trying to face up to the passing of time.

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oon Squad, itself of course an artwork, also takes the experience of art as a central theme and subject matter: the possibility of joy and transcendence that aesthetic experience can produce, the disappointment when art fails to deliver the hoped-for effects, and the different ways that an artwork defines itself as at once parallel to and distinct from actual lived experience. A character in an early Egan story watches films by Hitchcock, the subject of her dissertation: “Diana often felt weirdly nostalgic as she watched, as if her own life had been like that once— dreamy, Technicolor—but had lost those qualities through some misstep of her own.”1 (Egan often prominently features scholars as characters: among others, Lou’s anthropology PhD student girlfriend Mindy in chapter 4 of Goon Squad, “Safari”; Rebecca, an “academic star” (perhaps a linguist), in chapter 13, “Pure Language”; Moose, the historian, and Irene the cultural studies scholar, in Look at Me.)2 Like Diana, the lapsed Hitchcock scholar, Charlotte in Look at Me also has the habit of envisioning her own experience as akin to a filmed spectacle: “As children, Grace and I liked to pretend our life was a movie projected onto a giant screen before an audience who watched, rapt.”3 As these examples suggest,

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Egan figures the aesthetic realm as offering possibilities for escape from or transcendence of actual experience. Life is in fact never really “dreamy, Technicolor,” but in retrospect, especially from a “point B” that one had not anticipated or desired, one’s own past experience can acquire an aesthetic glamour, suggesting unfulfilled possibilities—such as a life in which one is an adored object of admiration and desire. (In Charlotte’s case, however—as a professional fashion model—this fantasy did, to a degree, come true— albeit temporarily.) Art experiences can disrupt or pressure temporality, in part because every artwork defines a particular relation to time, potentially at odds with everyday experience. When Mindy, on a safari in Africa with her older music executive lover Lou in 1973, enjoys the then-novel experience of listening to music in a car on headphones—this is several years before the introduction of the Walkman; Lou had “rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earpieces to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes”—the music produces an effect of a temporal displacement and an aestheticization of perception for Mindy, as for Charlotte in the passage just cited: “the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back . . . with Lou from some distant future” (65). Part of what seems so to move Mindy is the unexpected, and historically innovative, privacy of this musical experience. This is another moment of Egan taking particular note of the repercussions, especially for the experience of art, of a moment of technological/medial change. Some of the novel’s most intensively depicted scenes of aesthetic experience are those involving Sasha’s uncle Ted, the art historian who travels to Naples on a Jamesian quest to locate and

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bring home his wayward niece. Ted is swiftly distracted from his assigned task by the art and culture of Naples; even as he vows to himself that he will in fact start his search for Sasha in earnest the next day, “he was reaffirming a contradictory plan to visit the Museo Nazionale, home of an Orpheus and Eurydice he’d admired for years: a Roman marble relief copied from a Greek original. He had always wanted to see it” (209). That Ted’s brotherin-law is “footing the bill” for Ted’s trip gives a guiltily illicit charge to his art experiences in Naples, as Egan perhaps makes an implicit joke about the subsidy of art by commerce. Ted’s brother-in-law’s questions “boiled down to one very simple question: Am I getting my money’s worth?” (209). The desired artwork exerts a “contradictory” pull on Ted that seems to run athwart of both explicit intention or will and of any instrumental purposes. We’ve already considered Egan’s description of the process by which Ted has “folded . . . in half ” his desire for his wife, Susan, to the point that “his desire was so small . . . that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it” (210). Ted, also, like Dolly, has been both spatially and temporally “downsized” such that he has a perilously tiny space and little time to pursue his dedication to art and art history: Ideally, he should have been thinking and writing about art at all times, but a confluence of factors made such thinking and writing both unnecessary (he was tenured at a third-rate college with little pressure to publish) and impossible. . . . The site of his thinking and writing was a small office wedged in one corner of his shaggy house, on whose door he’d installed a lock to keep his sons out. . . . He would sit in his office, listening to the movements of his boys, imagining that he felt their hot, curious breath. I will not let them in, he would tell

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himself. I will sit and think about art. But he found, to his despair, that often he couldn’t think about art. He thought about nothing at all. (212)

Like Dolly, whose fax machine is “ten inches away from the foldout sofa where she slept” (138), Ted must work in uncongenial and “compressed” quarters, with his time similarly pressured. But when Ted arrives at the Museo Nazionale, he undergoes one of the novel’s most thrilled, and thrilling, scenes of aesthetic experience and appreciation. For Ted as for Bennie, intense aesthetic experience produced “a physical quickening”: He drifted among dusty busts of Hadrian and the various Caesars, experiencing a physical quickening in the presence of so much marble that verged on the erotic. He sensed the proximity of the Orpheus and the Eurydice before he saw it, felt its cool weight across the room but prolonged the time before he faced it, reminding himself of the events leading up to the moment it described. . . . Ted stepped toward the relief. He felt as if he’d walked inside it, so completely did it enclose and affect him. . . . Ted stared at the relief, transfixed, for thirty minutes. He walked away and returned. He left the room and came back. Each time, the sensation awaited him: a fibrillating excitement such as he hadn’t felt for years in response to a work of art, compounded by further excitement that such excitement was still possible. He spent the rest of the day upstairs among the Pompeiian mosaics, but his mind never left the Orpheus and Eurydice.

(21 4– 15)

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Ted’s experience “verge[s] on the erotic” partly because it involves desire but also because it is somatic, multisensory, involving the “sens[ing]” of proximity and the feeling of “cool weight.” Not just a cognitive or a purely visual experiencing (of “fac[ing]” the artwork)—although it is also those things—this is an experience of sensory intimacy and closeness. The artwork seems to reach outward to him, creating a three-dimensional effect, such that he seems to enter it, “so completely did it enclose and affect him.” Most of all, Ted’s response is a “sensation,” described in almost medical terms as a “fibrillating excitement.” Egan suggests a slight paradox in the play of presence and absence in the artwork’s effects on Ted. It is insistently present, something he can feel and that draws him “in” from across the room—but part of its power derives from its mental persistence even in absence: “his mind never left the Orpheus and Eurydice” even when he moves physically away from it; it “gradually relaxed its hold” (215) on him only as he walks through Naples hours later in the day. For Ted, the artwork seems, miraculously, to allow a rejuvenating inhabitation akin to Proust’s fantasy of reentering a house and finding one’s younger self: he once again “enters” an aesthetic space that allows him to regain a sensation “he hadn’t felt for years.” Ted’s “fibrillating excitement” about the relief stands in contrast to Bennie’s intense disappointment and frustration with the “bloodless constructions” of the contemporary pop music that he promotes and sells. To fibrillate is to make a quivering movement in a muscle, especially in the heart—and so “fibrillating excitement” seems almost the precise opposite of bloodlessness. Again, Proust’s “home” seems to hover as a figure for an impossible desire that time might correspond with space, such that one could “return” to the fullness or the satisfactions of youth associated with a particular place. For Bennie, the

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“actual room” in which “real” music is performed has disappeared or become a virtual simulacrum; whereas Ted’s excitement is, in part, a realization that art does still have the potential, for him, of reversing time, of restoring or replenishing his capacity to respond to it, in part by defining a “space” in which he can enter to reexperience the feelings he had not believed were “still possible.” It is as if Ted has found a door that opens to a kind of intense aesthetic experience that he thought was lost to him, one that involves a sense of presence and being with the artwork as an object. He had felt that in suppressing his erotic desire, he had “dismantled a perilous apparatus” (210); now it is as if he had found a “perilous apparatus” restored: art returned to its (dangerous, risky—because bodily) full power. The physical “hold” of the relief on Ted, which draws him to it, makes its presence felt from a distance, and defines a space into which he can step in and out, also contrasts with certain art or collecting practices we’ve already considered in the novel— those that “preserve” an item either literally or figuratively under glass: Bosco’s collection of artifacts, “which he hoarded in pristine glass cases and refused to sell” (126); Sasha’s collection of stolen items, which “contained years of her life compressed”; and Joe and Lulu’s Samburu dagger, “displayed inside a cube of Plexiglass.” One could also point to certain parallels between some of these artifacts and Ted’s Orpheus and Eurydice relief— but the latter seems very different in the way it makes itself available and open, in a dynamic and nonstatic manner, to an observer’s experience. If the artifact “hoarded in . . . glass cases” seems akin to the “bloodless constructions” of the contemporary pop recordings that Bennie despises, the relief offers an opportunity for a far more vital experience of art, one that is made available to a beholder and not shut up, “compressed,” or privatized. Ted’s ecstatic experience, which he gains with the

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modest price of entrance to the museum (if it charges any fee) and which involves neither possession nor sale, also hints at an alternative to a contemporary neoliberal art system in which the question “Am I getting my money’s worth?” (209) dominates any question of value. That bodily “hold” that the artwork exerts on Ted can also be read as figuring an aesthetic effect that Egan desires for fiction. We’ve already considered Egan’s various hints and comments, both inside and outside of her fiction, about her love for the great British nineteenth-century novelists. In 1840, William Thackeray summed up the power of Dickens’s writing in these terms: the “power of the writer is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive, and must follow him.”4 The popular and somewhat disreputable Victorian subgenre of “sensation fiction” (typically concerning crime, secret identities, and the like) was notorious for its overt and powerful appeal to the reader’s body and “nerves.” But as Thackeray’s comment suggests, even more respectable novelists, such as Dickens and George Eliot, relied no less on the power of narrative to captivate the reader, with a nearly physical grasp, and this quality remains for many contemporary readers, I think, one of the primary appeals of classic, premodernist fiction. We have seen Egan’s preoccupation with the effects of the dematerialization, digitization, and “compression” of art. The scene of Ted in the museum stages a scene of what seems to be a strong desideratum on Egan’s part for an aesthetic effect that “encloses” a reader/viewer or takes him in its “hold” with an effect that is more sensory than cognitive. Such effects of what Rita Felski calls “aesthetic enchantment”—in which “you are sucked in, swept up, spirited away. . . . hypnotized, possessed”5—seem to be among those that Egan worries have been attenuated in contemporary art and literature. Egan appears to view the scope

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or size of a work and its hold on a reader as linked in nineteenthcentury fiction, which was often at once ambitiously “large” and compellingly gripping in its effects. As a brief aside, it is interesting to compare Goon Squad to the next novel Egan published, Manhattan Beach, a more conventional work of illusory realism— one that aims for a consistently “immersive” sense of an alternative fictional “world,” in this case, that of World War II–era New York City—without any of the breaks or gaps that characterize Goon Squad. Many of the reviews of Manhattan Beach, some of them perhaps implicitly referencing the novel’s depiction of deep-sea diving, emphasize precisely that effect of illusory realist “immersion”: “Manhattan Beach is the kind of book you can immerse yourself in happily” (San Francisco Chronicle); “Egan’s first foray into historical fiction makes you forget you’re reading historical fiction at all” (Elle); “Egan’s prose . . . draws absolutely no attention to itself . . . it’s immersive and compelling” (Vox); the novel “will transport . . . every reader” (Booklist).6 In Goon Squad, however, Egan balances the realist technique of illusory immersion in a fully fledged, plausibly depicted fictional world— one positioned in a single, linearly developing span of time—with a habit of breaking or shifting worlds and making temporal leaps, possibly prompted in part by doubt that one can ever fully leave one’s own “world” for another. Part of the particular pleasure of Goon Squad, I would argue, emerges from a dialectical tension that plays out between a drive toward “immersion”—in other worlds and in other minds—and a contrasting recognition that any true escape into such alterity or difference can only be temporary. A comment from Jules in his magazine profile of Kitty Jackson—although it also refers specifically to the gulf between a famous celebrity and an ordinary person— captures this broader ambivalence: “I would like nothing more than to understand the strangeness of Kitty’s

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world—to burrow inside that strangeness never to emerge. But the best I can hope for is to conceal from Kitty Jackson the bald impossibility of any real communion between us” (174). Ted’s movement in and out of the orbit of the museum relief can even be read as allegorizing the intended effects of Goon Squad, which “encloses” a reader in a fully fleshed-out realist world but then allows or compels her to “walk away,” producing an effect that is more strobing or flickering than simply immersive and that does not “let you forget” that you are reading a work of fiction. The reader in effect “visits” Goon Squad ’s worlds, but always as a temporary visitor.7 Aesthetic experience in Goon Squad is often defined and discussed in relation to the concepts of authenticity and purity, values at once ironized yet also, in some respects, treated as meaningful. The evaluation of the relative “authenticity” of an artwork or an art experience is presented as sometimes superficial or rote yet also as deriving from a genuine desire to find in art something beyond commodified or virtual values. One purpose served by the novel’s pop-music-industry context is to offer a vision, parallel to an only implicitly referenced world of the publishing industry, of a realm in which art’s value is insistently judged in relation to these concepts (often in conflict with others such as marketability or commercial viability). Rock and especially punk music are freighted in Goon Squad, in sometimes contradictory ways, with the possibility or promise of “authenticity,” of a “pure” experience free of co-opted compromise, as well as with the disappointment of the failure to achieve such aims—and the possibility of faking or simulating them or of exploiting or corrupting them. Egan depicts marketing and publicity as—in this respect, like scholarship or criticism— defining a parallel, alternative discourse of and approach to art. If a more “pure” aesthetic

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experience, like Ted’s, exists outside of commerce and financial value, then “marketing, public relations, image consulting and spin”8 treat art as sheer commodity, with no meaningful value beyond the economic. What arguably keeps Egan’s depiction of such marketing from seeming like predictable or cheap potshots is a sense that this more disenchanted or cynical vision of art is true: art really has become, substantially and almost overwhelmingly, a commodity, more so, and in new ways, in the twenty-first century—a reality that Goon Squad grapples with in several registers. Egan is well aware that a novelist is a culture worker within an art system that aims to monetize and commodify all values as efficiently as possible. Her novels often circle around the question of whether this contemporary art system does still allow pockets of “authentic,” noncommodified or at least less completely commodified experience— or whether “authenticity” or “purity” are now little more than marketing angles within a fully commodified experience. Bennie’s trajectory from passionate teenage punk rock fan and musician to disenchanted middle-aged music executive promoting music he despises represents one prototypical “from A to B” narrative in the novel, as if the booby prize for achieving only limited success in an artistic field is inevitably to move to selling that art. The anecdote about his attempt to sign up the “cloistered nuns” (20) offers one vivid instance of the novel’s interest in what could be described as dramas of selling out (or refusing to do so). The nuns’ singing, “waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound,” is so haunting partly in the context of their “vows of silence.” Beyond its inherent beauty, the singing acquires particularly “pure” resonances because the nuns’ voices are normally “cloistered,” even somewhat taboo. And this in turn makes Bennie’s subsequent violation, when he “lunges” to kiss the mother superior, especially noteworthy. Bennie’s perverse gesture can be

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taken as an unconscious performance of his own ambivalence about the ways his work as a music executive is based on the monetization—or even violation—of that which best conveys purity and authenticity. (Remember, too, that a key selling point for the band Stop/Go was their appealing youth.) The novel’s linkage of punk rock to ideals of “authenticity” is firmly established in the third chapter, narrated by Rhea, telling the story of the formation and first public performance of the Flaming Dildos. Some of the novel’s most explicit considerations of authenticity come from Rhea, who reflects on her attempts to decipher what she perceives as a somewhat opaque authenticity code governing punk. (Egan has discussed her own comparable teenage attempts at decoding such subcultural codes, suggesting that Rhea’s perspective is based on her own in that period.)9 Every weekend after the Flaming Dildos practice, the friends go to the Mabuhay Gardens, an actual North Beach punk club that closed in 1986 and that we can guess Egan may have attended as a teenager. We go to the Mab every Saturday night, after practice. We’ve heard Crime, the Avengers, the Germs, and a trillion other bands. . . . In the Mab’s graffiti-splattered bathroom we eavesdrop: Ricky Sleeper fell off the stage at a gig, Joe Rees of Target Video is making an entire movie of punk rock, two sisters we always see at the club have started turning tricks to pay for heroin. Knowing all this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened? (45– 46)

Rhea resembles a more ingenuous version of Mindy, the Berkeley anthropology student who wittily dissects her experience,

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with her powerful lover on a safari with his children, according to such theoretical categories as “Structural Resentment,” “Structural Affection,” “Structural Incompatibility,” and “Structural Desire” (64–65). Mindy, who worries about “whether her insights on the link between social structure and emotional response could amount to more than a rehash of Lévi-Strauss,” is one of many of Egan’s characters who worry about their own originality, about whether their “insights” or creativity are more than simply a “rehash” of others’ ideas. Rhea too is a (nascent) cultural analyst, one who, although she has not yet developed a full-blown analytical theory at the level of Mindy’s taxonomy, is similarly confronting a cultural code and attempting to analyze and make sense of it. That Rhea and Jocelyn “eavesdrop” in a bathroom underlines that they are not fully part of the discourse they are trying to understand; they are positioned as marginal, listening in on those more fully immersed in the subcultural world that fascinates them. The gossip and information they take in is, in fact, plausibly extradiegetically “authentic”: the bands named did perform at the Mabuhay Gardens, and “Ricky Sleeper” presumably refers to a legend of the Bay Area punk scene, Ricky Williams, who was the singer for both Flipper and the Sleepers (and who later died at age thirty-six in the early 1990s).10 Egan thus deploys discourses of authenticity at multiple levels, folding in actual details from punk history as part of her characters’ puzzling over authenticity as an aesthetic value. Part of the problem with punk’s relationship to authenticity, as Rhea partially grasps, is that it can seem futile or misguided to try to locate any stable authentic core in a movement that is, at least in its Sex Pistols/Malcolm McLaren lineage, fundamentally a Warholian exercise in extravagant posing, self-styling, and pop identity construction. Rhea’s test case of a Mohawk

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suggests the problem: a “fake” Mohawk hairstyle would presumably be one acquired by a suburban poseur who has decided to become a punk without having committed fully to the movement. But given that the hairstyle is itself an appropriation or repurposing of a hairstyle associated with the Mohawk nation, any search among American teenagers for “a real Mohawk” seems, as Rhea hints, ironic. Even the most authentic punk rocker’s Mohawk is, at some level, fake; the most authentic punk might simply be the one most committed to his pose, like Bennie, who “irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record” (42). Rhea returns to questions of authenticity and style or fashion after school at the home of Alice, another friend (and a romantic rival to Rhea, as the object of desire for Bennie, whom Rhea pines for), after Jocelyn has run away with the much older Lou. A thematic pattern runs through the chapter regarding clothing and uniforms, introduced in the chapter’s opening scene: The first time we went to Sea Cliff, where Alice lives, she pointed up a hill at fog sneaking through the eucalyptus trees and said her old school was up there: an all-girls school where her little sisters go now. K through six you wear a green plaid jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and white sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Scotty goes, Can we see them? and Alice goes, My uniforms? But Scott goes, No, your alleged sisters. ( 39)

That the chapter’s final sentence returns to Alice’s younger sisters and their outfits—“They turn to us, laughing in their green uniforms” (58)—hints at the uniforms’ symbolic resonances. The uniforms seem to relate to Rhea’s struggle with

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adolescence and the confusing and sometimes frightening process of the shift from childhood innocence to adult experience: “Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes” (43). In a novel so concerned with the passage of time and with memory and nostalgia, clothing operates as a visible signifier of life stages as well as a vehicle for creative self-styling. When the teenage friends enter Alice’s sister’s bedroom, Rhea thinks, “I’m afraid they’ll wake up and be scared of us in our dog collars and safety pins and shredded t-shirts.” Rhea subsequently observes, “Alice wears ripped jeans and drippy black eye makeup, but her hair is long and gold. She isn’t a real punk, either” (47). A green uniform emblematizes childhood, defined in part as an “innocent” phase—both erotically and semiotically— in which one simply wears the “uniform” assigned to you by parents or authority figures. Rhea narrates the chapter from within adolescence and the challenges of a later life stage, when one must choose one’s own style and mode of self-representation. Punk fashion, with its deliberately ugly and abrasive signifiers, is at once an externalization of adolescent turmoil and a complex engagement with a shifting target of an impossible “authenticity” (impossible in part because to be an adolescent is to feel the ground of one’s identity continually shifting). Part of the challenge for Rhea, who feels ugly and unattractive, it seems, is the difficulty of navigating desire and specifically female codes of eroticism. Alice flaunts punk signifiers but also has “long and gold” hair, and she, unlike Rhea, finds erotic satisfaction (with Scotty) in the course of the chapter. When Alice asks, “Who wants to wear a uniform?” Rhea answers, “I would” (47); wearing a prescribed uniform has become a perquisite of pre-erotic (“green”) childhood innocence, as if it would offer the

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opportunity to dial back in time, from sex and “pot, coke, quaaludes” to jump rope and charm bracelets as the activities of friendship. It’s also important to note, here, that Rhea’s consideration of what it means to move from “innocent” childhood activities to sex and drugs occurs in the specific context of the sexual exploitation of a teenage girl by an older, powerful man in his forties. Egan is often concerned with emotions and experiences— shame or failure, the desire for authenticity, the fears of aging and of missing out on life—which she depicts as affecting men and women in similar ways. Yet it’s also the case that the argument Egan is making about work and life and the search for meaning in the world does look and play out very differently for men and women—and that the novel contains many instances of female ambition or creativity thwarted, disrupted, or sidelined by men, so much so, in fact, that it can be plausibly read as a (pre-)#MeToo novel. The thoroughgoing sexism of the rock music world is a given in the novel, and Egan seems interested in punk as offering some initial feminist potential that goes mostly unfulfilled. Rhea’s narrative of the formation and first public performance of the Flaming Dildos begins with hints of possible gender equity: although the two boys, Bennie and Scotty, perform while Jocelyn and Rhea do not (there is also—as is so often the case— a somewhat anonymous drummer, this one named Joel), Rhea points out that “Jocelyn and I write all the lyrics and work out the tunes with Bennie and Scotty.” They are, then, in fact, part of the band, as lead songwriters— even if “we sing with them in rehearsal, but we don’t like being on stage” (41). The band’s name, presumably derived from the Sex Pistols (cf. the actual Australian band the Celibate Rifles), is interestingly ambiguous when considered in terms of gender. Like so much

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early punk music, the name “the Flaming Dildos” can be plausibly interpreted either as a parody or an instance of triumphalist phallic aggression. (Perhaps it depends on one’s sense of to what purpose the dildos have been set on fire . . . and by whom.) And if the band begins with a degree of gender parity, the chapter develops into a tale about disturbing sexual predation in the music industry, as the seventeen-year-old Jocelyn is sexually exploited by the middle-aged music executive Lou. Rhea’s description of the (up to this point) joyously rage-filled Flaming Dildos show at the Mab takes a nightmarish turn: I turn to Jocelyn, but she’s gone . . . I see Lou’s fingers spread out over her black hair. She’s kneeling in front of him, giving him head, like the music is a disguise and no one could see them. Maybe no one does. Lou’s other arm is around me, which I guess is why I don’t run, although I could, that’s the thing. But I stand there while Lou mashes Jocelyn’s head against himself again and again so I don’t even know how she can breathe, until it starts to seem like she’s not even Jocelyn, but some kind of animal or machine that can’t be broken. I force myself to look at the band.

( 53)

Two weeks after this, Jocelyn runs away and moves in with Lou. In a subsequent chapter, set about twenty-five years later, as the forty-three-year-old Jocelyn and Rhea visit the dying Lou, we learn of some of the longer-term consequences of this episode: Jocelyn is now living with her mother, “trying to finish my B.A. at UCLA Extension after some long, confusing detours,” her “lost time” (86). “So this is it,” she thinks, gazing at Lou lying in bed hooked up to colostomy bags and tubes for IVs, “what cost me all that time” (87). Here is another representation

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of a particular subjective experience of time: Jocelyn’s encounter with Lou robbed her of purpose and stability at a vulnerable moment in her life and knocked her into one of those unanticipated, less positive A-to-B trajectories. She now contemplates murdering Lou, and she tells him, “you deserve to die” (90), but realizes that it’s “too late” to exact revenge. Jocelyn’s experience with Lou also complicates the reading I’ve been offering of punk music as linked to ideals of purity or authenticity. For Bennie and Scotty, performing allowed an expression of emotional abandon and “fibrillating excitement”: that figurative and literal kick in the chest. But Jocelyn and Rhea never felt comfortable performing publicly in what were aggressive and very male-dominated punk spaces (it was only especially trailblazing young women who did so in 1979, years before Riot Grrrl),11 and while they were initially able to participate in the band’s creative process by coauthoring the songs, Lou’s intervention presumably transformed the meaning of the music for both Rhea and Jocelyn. We can assume that having had to “force [herself] to look at the band” while Jocelyn performed oral sex on Lou while kneeling at both of their feet most likely prevented Rhea from continuing to feel a sense of ownership or agency in the music. Jocelyn’s delayed fury at Lou also recalls Rhea’s earlier remark that of their circle of friends, “Scotty is the truly angry one”; there’s an implication now that certain forms of female rage are slower building but no less potent or authentic than the form of overt anger that Scotty can perform. We also learn that Lou subsequently became Bennie’s mentor, setting the inept teenage musician on a path to becoming a powerful and wealthy (albeit unfulfilled) music executive. The events of this chapter, that is, anatomize a thoroughly misogynistic music world in which certain forms of authenticity and

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the rewards associated with them are made available to some while utterly denied to others, in a textbook instance of what Gayle Rubin famously called the shoring up of male privilege through “the traffic in women.” Lou in effect talent-scouted the members of the Flaming Dildos, plucked out Jocelyn for his own sexual use, and set Bennie on a prominent career path; he nurtured one’s creative “flame” while snuffing out the other’s. And to consider Bennie as Lou’s protégé can also make his “lunge” at the mother superior and his mentorship and then abandonment of the (no longer as) “young and adorable” women in Stop/Go appear in a more troubling light. Sexual harassment and mistreatment of young women seems, in Egan’s telling, built structurally into the music industry. This backstory also bears upon our interpretation of Sasha’s subsequent career as Bennie’s secretary and assistant and of her own “lost” period in her twenties. Sasha often does not act decisively herself as much as she assists others; she is, for years, a taken-for-granted and highly effective gal Friday and assistant to Bennie as she grapples with her own theft compulsion. Sasha somewhat resembles Jocelyn, in fact; they both feel, for a time, stymied, stuck, knocked off from any purposeful career or life path. Sasha has attempted suicide and grapples with her college friend Rob’s death. And in her interlude in Naples, living in a “seedy palazz[o]” with ominous, unseen “friends” (217) who fence stolen goods, there are implications of possible sexual exploitation. All of this even suggests a possibility that Sasha’s especially fragmentary and scrambled chronology in the novel, as well as her stuckness, may relate in some way to sexual trauma. It is especially satisfying, therefore, when we eventually encounter a middle-aged Sasha having broken away from Bennie, living with her husband and two children in the desert,

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making her own art rather than “assisting” in the production and selling of others’. From this perspective, we might even reconsider Sasha’s seemingly senseless and unkind theft of the plumber’s “beautiful screwdriver,” which is inescapably phallic (“the silvery shaft sculpted, sparkling” [7]—almost a “flaming dildo”?), as unconsciously driven by a desire to claim the privilege, often denied to women in this novel, of both purposeful work and of sexual agency. In the novel’s final chapter, “Pure Language,” set in a nearfuture Manhattan, Egan considers “authenticity” and “purity” in relation to both language and music. We’ve already considered how Alex’s wife Rebecca has made her reputation through the study of “word casings . . . words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks . . . that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks” (323). The chapter includes an extensive, very funny discussion of the new forms of “handset” texting that seem to be displacing standard English, at least among the young—perhaps as one reaction to the perception that English generally is becoming “reduced to husks” (but also a possible causal agent in that change). When Alex is talking with Lulu, Bennie’s new young (of course) assistant— and also Dolly’s daughter; we previously encountered her as a middleschooler in the chapter about Dolly and the dictator—Lulu interrupts their conversation to express frustration with the limitations and pitfalls of spoken language: “I’m fine. I just get tired of talking.” “Ditto,” Alex said. He felt exhausted. “There are so many ways to go wrong,” Lulu said. “All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can’t ever just Say. The. Thing.” ( 321)

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Egan has commented that she was “theory nut” as an undergraduate student and that “theory-lust still guides me as a fiction writer,”12 and this exchange can be read as manifesting poststructuralist insights about the impossibility of moving beyond metaphors, in language, to any stable or inherent meanings. Both Alex and Lulu experience a sense of “exhaust[ion]” in their use of English. Lulu’s surprising solution, however, is to pivot away from spoken language: “Can I just T you?” Lulu asked. “You mean—” “Now. Can I T you now.” The question was a formality; she was already working her handset. An instant later Alex’s own vibrated in his pants pocket. ( 321)

From this point on, the chapter is punctuated by occasional exchanges in handset language (the novel’s version of texting): U hav sum nAms 4 me? he read on the screen. hEr thA r, Alex typed, and flushed the list of fifty contacts, along with notes, tips on angles of approach, and individual no-nos, into Lulu’s handset. GrAt. Il gt 2 wrk. They looked up at each other. “That was easy,” Alex said. “I know,” Lulu said. She looked almost sleepy with relief. “It’s pure—no philosophy, no metaphors, no judgments.” ( 321)

Lulu, in a nearly postcoital state of “relief,” suggests that these handset communications are “pure,” a surprising term that brings to mind Alex’s note, “I BELIEVE IN YOU.” Like

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that note, these messages are “minimal,” compressed, stripped down—but these are even more so than the note, in that many letters have been dropped and numbers substituted for words. And this handset language’s close alliance to the language of young children—“I do dat!”—Alex’s daughter declares as she reaches for the handset, risking getting her father in trouble with his wife, as the parents have agreed to keep the toddler from the devices—further associates it with a nearly nonverbal baby talk. (Rock music, too, which always seems to stand in for art more generally in this novel, has been infantilized: toddlers armed with handsets have become tastemakers, and bands therefore “had no choice but to reinvent themselves for the preverbal” [313]). Egan here is interested in the expressive possibilities of a minimal expression, one that evades many of the complexities and ambiguities of English and aims for a more direct communication. (“Even though I would be sad if all communication were reduced to the kind of  T-ing I was creating,” Egan has observed, “one thing that struck me was that there’s a kind of poetry to the fragmentation.”)13 To view this language as “pure” seems rather perverse, however, considering the nature of the verbal exchange here, which involves Alex “flush[ing]” a list of contacts into Lulu’s phone: potential “parrots” who can be hired to spread fake word-of-mouth publicity for Scotty Hausmann’s comeback performance. Goon Squad continually positions characters and their actions on one side or another of the divide that runs through the novel between art and commerce/publicity— but often ambiguously or laterally and frequently shifting their positions. So, for example, Bennie begins as a teenage punk rocker and becomes a music executive who vampirically searches out young artists whose talent he can monetize; Sasha, in the other direction, spends her young adult years working for Bennie but,

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by the novel’s conclusion, makes her own sculptures and other artworks (not intended for sale); La Doll retires from her comically exploitative PR/publicity business to run a small “fine produce and unusual cheeses” (164) shop; Jules goes from writing cynical glossy-magazine celebrity profiles to editing “a weekly prison newspaper” that wins him “a special citation from the PEN Prison Writing Program” (119); and so on. In this final chapter, the worlds of art and culture have become almost completely commodified, with any potential meanings or values, aside from financial or economic ones, “shucked” or “reduced” to nothingness. Egan slips seamlessly into what is in effect a just slightly science-fictional mode as she chronicles Alex’s desperate attempt to maintain his family’s financial stability by going all-in on a thoroughly compromised social media campaign to promote Scotty’s comeback concert. This slightly future America (as of the novel’s production circa 2008; it feels much closer now as I write, in 2020, under a pandemic lockdown) is one in which “the suspicion that people’s opinions weren’t really their own” is pervasive and “ ‘Who’s paying you?’ was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm” (315). Companies and brands compete to hire effective “parrots,” the term for a paid influencer on social media. Once again, Egan mordantly jokes both about her long-standing interest in “how mass media invites a particular sort of self-consciousness, or self-objectification”14 and perhaps about the representations and “bout[s] of enthusiasm” of authors in particular, those who aim to imbue verbal representations with emotion and meaning. That Alex was, earlier in the novel, the recipient of that memorable, bold-faced message adds to the irony that he is now reduced to “devising a system for selecting potential parrots from among his 15,896 friends,” based on his calculation of “how much they needed money (‘Need’), how connected and

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respected they were (‘Reach’), and how open they might be to selling that influence (‘Corruptibility’)” (315). Goon Squad here seems again to be considering new formal-technical means— other than novels—by which the fates and life paths of large groups of loosely connected individuals might be “tracked” or assessed. As we’ve seen, as early as in her depiction of the prescient “Ordinary People” app in Look at Me, Egan has been interested in the means by which social media have remediated this function, which previously the novel more exclusively served. Something like this might be said about Alex’s “system for selecting potential parrots” and “graph[ing] the results on his handset in three dimensions” (315); Egan might be taken to imply that the former cultural role served by the novel has been usurped by such social media “graphs” or charts of social connection that—more efficiently than Balzac or Dickens ever could?—represent elaborate social networks as a graspable network.15 Alex’s quest seems very much like one final instance in the novel of what I’ve called a drama of selling out, of a kind that Egan depicts as endemic to the pop music industry but also as increasingly pervasive in the culture broadly. In a society that rushes to convert or translate all values into economic ones and in which any culture worker must always sell her labor, Egan seems to wonder, at what point does a necessary selling becoming a corrupted selling out? Alex ponders the paradox that he “was a purist” (316) who had a history of avoiding compromising temptations in both work and romance but that he had now “caved to Bennie Salazar without a fight.” In part, he thinks, this was because “every byte of information he’d posted online . . . was stored in the databases of multinationals . . . that he was owned, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when he’d felt most subversive.” He

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snaps himself out of these reflections by concluding that what he needed now “was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it” (317). We’ve considered the ways that versions of the question “What happened to you?” recur throughout Egan’s work: “Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit?” (85). This question— of how someone continues or stops “being themselves”—is at once psychological (to what degree do we feel like the “same” person, or a different one, as we change through time?), ethical (what are the variations in ethical consistency or principle, as opposed to “corruptibility”?), but also formal/aesthetic: under what conditions, in the course of a novel or other narrative, do we perceive a “character” as maintaining consistency? One of the basic laws of realist fiction that certain postmodern fictions abandon or gleefully undermine is the assumption that a literary “character” should be represented as possessing the same general consistency through time that we presume actual human beings do. In David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, for example, characters like Luisa Rey or Timothy Cavendish in effect toggle between the status of “realist,” plausible human characters and “characters” in increasingly baroque nonrealist fictions within the novel. Egan’s Goon Squad can and has been compared to Cloud Atlas for its comparable play with “multiprotagonist” novelistic form and character—both novels seem to push or rebel against conventional conventions governing the novelistic representation of character—but Egan never quite makes a full leap away from a baseline realist presumption that her characters should be understood as plausible human beings rooted in specific historical contexts. Here is one classically realist core to Egan’s method: she is always interested in the ethical dramas of characters who feel some responsibility for continuing to “be themselves,” to avoid (in Bennie’s ironic

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articulation of the idea to Alex), “compromising the ideals that make you, ‘you’ ” (310). To Lulu and others of her rising generation, such an approach is laughably outdated, “part of a system we call atavistic purism, [which] implies the existence of an ethically perfect state . . . used to shore up the prejudices of whoever’s making the judgments” (319). In Lulu’s ironic twist on “I BELIEVE IN YOU”: “if I believe, I believe. Who are you to judge my reasons?” (320). For Alex, this personal/ethical “compromising” and “selling out” (or acknowledgment of “being owned”) is tightly bound up with aesthetics and art; like Sasha and Jules, Lou and Bennie, Dolly and Lulu, Alex has become a publicist/salesperson, promoting an artist through dubious or insincere means. The concluding chapter of Goon Squad revolves around Alex’s “strong marketing action” on behalf of Scotty and the suspense regarding Scotty’s comeback performance, which seems likely to be a disastrous failure, especially when Alex finally meets the reclusive artist in person: Alex had been about to move closer, to ask what the fuck Bennie thought he was trying to do: put this decrepit roadie on in Scotty Hausmann’s place? To impersonate him? A guy with gutted cheeks and hands so red and gnarled he looked like he’d have trouble playing a hand of poker, much less the strange, sensuous instrument clutched between his knees? But when Alex’s eyes fell on the instrument, he suddenly knew, with an awful spasm in his gut: the decrepit roadie was Scotty Hausmann. ( 332)

Scotty very much resembles Bosco in chapter 7, a has-been former rock musician (although Scotty was never a star or even

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a success) who has been ravaged and utterly transformed by time, landing at a hugely diminished “B” from the heights of a youthful “A,” such that he now no longer even seems to be himself, but an impersonator. The figure of the washed-up rock musician operates in Goon Squad as a quintessence of the general tendency of youthful beauty, creativity, and vividness to fade and decay. But Egan now sets the stage for Scotty’s triumphant performance at the 9/11 memorial “footprint,” her moving conclusion to the novel as a whole: a scene that risks but, in my view, avoids a too-easy or sentimental valuation of the persisting force and vitality of “authentic” art. As we’ve seen, Goon Squad has returned throughout, in various guises, to intertwined aesthetic and ethical dilemmas regarding authenticity and the experience of art. At times, especially in this chapter, the novel seems to suggest, with Lulu, that any longing for a powerfully authentic aesthetic experience— one that is valued in terms distinct from the financial or career yardsticks of the marketplace—is little more than a form of judgmental “atavistic purism,” a leftover formation associated with old media and aesthetic forms, such as the rock LP or the long realist novel, that have now become nearly as anachronistic as medieval altar frescos or “early Roman wall paintings” (208). But now, Scotty’s music—the “twanging filigree of his slide guitar, its gushy metallic complexity,” and his singing—emerges with an unexpected force: It may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-in and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form

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of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever the reason, a swell of approval palpable as rain lifted from the center of the crowd and rolled out towards its edges, where it crashed against buildings and water wall and rolled back at Scotty with redoubled force, lifting him off his stool, onto his feet (the roadies quickly adjusting the microphones), exploding the quavering husk Scotty had appeared to be just moments before and unleashing something strong, charismatic, and fierce. ( 335)

Egan seems to show, here, in Lee Konstantinou’s words, that “new forms of authentic experience can still emerge unexpectedly even in a world whose social life is fully enclosed within corporate platforms.”16 As we’ve seen, Goon Squad is interested, throughout, in powerful countercultural forces, such as punk in the late 1970s, that seem to be linked in Egan’s mind with her own adolescent feeling of having “missed the 60s.”17 Rhea and Jocelyn aspire to be “real” punks but can only “eavesdrop” on those who are more fully part of the movement; Egan implies that truly worldhistorical aesthetic and cultural eruptions are fleeting and tightly knitted to very particular historical moments, such that one can easily “miss” them when they occur. And then, just as one may wish to return to a particular dwelling to recapture one’s past self, one might long fruitlessly to recapture that certain moment— of 1967, or 1977, or whenever it might be—when art seemed to speak powerfully for a larger totality. A character in Don DeLillo’s Mao II (published in 1991, a decade before 9/11) declares that “Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative. . . . In societies reduced to blur and glut,

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terror is the only meaningful act.”18 Egan seems to share DeLillo’s concern that the novel (and perhaps art more broadly) has lost its capacity “to shape the way we think and see,” to seize hold of a moment, and to define and mold it. “A crowd at a particular moment creates the object to justify its gathering” is a DeLilloesque declaration that suggests that the artwork is fundamentally and dialectically tied to its democratic mass audience. By situating Scotty’s concert at the 9/11 memorial site, Egan makes nearly explicit an implication that, pace DeLillo’s character’s claim, perhaps art still can rival terrorism as a source of “meaningful acts,” as a force that can serve as an “embodiment” (not just a representation) of its audience’s “unease.” Scotty’s performance recalls Ted’s intense experience with the Orpheus relief and suggests a broader, albeit subtle Orpheus pattern in the novel. Orpheus was the first rock star, the archetype of all subsequent sexy, irresistible, doomed musicians. His song not only charmed all human listeners but also, in Ovid’s words, “allured the trees, the savage animals, and even the insensate rocks.”19 While the power of Orpheus’s music to harmonize and enchant is central to the classical myth, most of us may now likely be most familiar with the story of Orpheus’s attempt to win back his wife, Eurydice, from the land of the dead. Orpheus travels to the underworld and pleads with Hades and Persephone to allow her more life. “While [Orpheus] sang all his heart said to the sound of his sweet lyre, the bloodless ghosts themselves were weeping.”20 Just as he was able to move the trees and rocks with his song, so he overcomes the dread rulers of hell and gains permission to restore his wife to the living. Yet on their journey back up to the surface of the earth, Orpheus looks back at Eurydice too soon. “Instantly she slipped away. . . . With no further sound she fell from him again to Hades.”21

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Orpheus’s song is defined both by the power of its nearuniversal appeal and by its weakness: in the end, his music cannot truly or fully restore life. Nor can it save Orpheus. Following Eurydice’s death, Orpheus is attacked by the jealous Ciconian maidens, who try to kill him with spears and stones. At first, their weapons are disabled by the “true harmony of [Orpheus’s] voice and lyre” and fall harmlessly to the ground. But then the maidens drown out his song. The “clamorous discord of their boxwood pipes, the blaring of their horns, their . . . Bacchanalian yells, with hideous discords drowned his voice and harp,” and their stones and spears finally reach their mark.22 Orpheus’s death can even be read as an allegory of broadcasting, as “his torn limbs were scattered in strange places,” perhaps as reminders of a lost original harmony. We are left only with fragments of Orpheus’s song.23 Egan subtly weaves Orpheus references through the novel, figuring the twinned fear that powerful art has disappeared and the hope that it still survives, albeit perhaps in fragmentary or diminished form. Scotty is an Orpheus figure: an eccentric figure clutching a “strange, sensuous instrument”—remember that he constructed his own lap steel guitar as a teenager—he shockingly produces music that is enchanting, transformative, “exploding the quavering husk [he] had appeared to be just moments before and unleashing something strong, charismatic, and fierce.” As with Ted’s experience with the Orpheus relief, this is an aesthetic experience that is not “bloodless” but fundamentally “embodied,” something felt as much as cognitively perceived. Scotty performs “ballads of paranoia and disconnection” that seem to emerge physically from him, ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was

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part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched. But of course, it’s hard to know anymore who was really at that first Scotty Hausmann concert—more people claim it than could possibly have fit into the space, capacious and mobbed though it was. Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn’t a myth belong to everyone? ( 336)

The characterization of Scotty’s music as “full of rage” recalls Rhea’s earlier description of Scotty’s performance at the rowdy Flaming Dildos show at the Mab. Rage or anger seems to be one of the forces that Egan fears is at risk of diminishment or extinction in a contemporary world in which there is little appetite for powerful emotion. When Lizzie says “fuck you” to Rob, he responds (writing in second person): “ ‘You too,’ you say, grinning with satisfaction at the sight of real anger on a human face. It’s been a while” (190). A major source of the power of Scotty’s music is its expression or “embodiment” of an authentic “rage” that Egan depicts as a proof of humanness and as one necessary component of powerful art.24 Scotty’s concert becomes, a bit like Dolly’s disastrous New Year’s party, a cultural talisman: one that everyone, whether or not they were actually in attendance, wants to claim. But where that quality of the earlier event functioned mostly as an amusing commentary on the ludicrous nature of in-group Manhattan status competition, now Egan depicts Scotty’s concert, in much more earnest terms, as connecting to “the realm of myth.” Scotty becomes a modern Orpheus whose song and “sensuous instrument” can set the “bloodless ghosts” to weeping and “shape the way we think and see.”

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And the performance also becomes, I think, an ars poetica for Goon Squad itself, as Egan seems to allegorize a desire for literature, or the novel specifically, to regain the special power and force that we often fear it has lost: a longing that the novel might once again become an irresistible, widely shared democratic “myth,” one that “belongs to everyone” and that grabs hold of us and won’t let us go, as “palpable as rain”—or as a kick in the chest.

NOTES

INTRO / BONUS TRACK: WHEN ART DEMATERIALIZED 1. “Lossless audio is the unmodified output of the recording process. It’s the most accurate representation of output of the recording process that exists.” Jamie Carter, “Lossless Audio Explained: Sorting the FLACs from the ALACs,” Techradar, August 3, 2018, https:// w w w . techradar . com /news / lossless - audio - explained -sorting-the-flacs-from-the-alacs. 2. Qtd. in Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Madonna at Sixty,” New York Times Magazine, June 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com /2019/06/05/maga zine/madonna-madame-x.html. 3. I am not alone in so valuing Egan’s novel, which has already achieved a canonical status within twenty-first-century U.S. fiction: it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award and in 2015 was ranked no. 7 in the BBC’s list of the twentyfirst century’s twelve greatest novels. Jane Ciabattari, “The 21st Century’s 12 Greatest Novels,” BBC Culture, January 19, 2015, http://www .bbc.com/culture/story/20150119-the-21st-centurys-12-best-novels. 4. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me: A Novel (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 498, 368. 5. Alec Michod, “The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Egan,” The Rumpus, June 23, 2010, https://therumpus.net /2010/06/the-rumpus -interview-with-jennifer-egan /.

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6. David Lidsky, “The Definitive Timeline of Spotify’s CriticDefying Journey to Rule Music,” Fast Company, August  8, 2018, https://www.fastcompany.com /90205527/the -definitive -timeline -of-spotifys-critic-defying-journey-to-rule-music. In defining Goon Squad as a “Spotify novel” I intend a nod of the hat to Mark McGurl’s ongoing investigations into “fiction in the age of Amazon.” Mark McGurl, “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon,” Modern Language Quarterly (2016) 77, no. 3: 447– 71. 7. Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (New York: Knopf, 2010), 30. All subsequent references to this novel provided in text. 8. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 11, trans. Brookes Moore, Theoi Classical Texts Library, http://www.theoi.com / Text /OvidMetamor phoses1.html. 9. Jennifer Egan, quoted in Rachel Cooke, “I Was Never a Hot, Young Writer. But Then I Had a Quantum Leap,” The Guardian, September 24, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com /books/2017/sep /24/jennifer-egan-quantum-leap-manhattan-beach-visit-from-the -goon-squad. 10. Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2018), 375. 11. See, however, Margaret Cohen, who, while noting that Egan associates Anna’s dive with a wide range of literary and mythic depictions of travels to an underworld, argues that the emphasis on “technical details of diving” also “enable[s] the novelist to reclaim the depths from their long-standing metaphoric status as mythic underworld.” Margaret Cohen, “A Feminist Plunge Into Sea Knowledge,” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 375.

SIDE A, TRACK 1: TIME’S A GOON: FROM A TO B 1. Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 7.

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2. Egan’s intertwining the form of the novel with rock and roll is not, of course, unique: see Florence Dore’s “The Rock Novel” for an argument that “rock and roll became a salient aesthetic category in the American novel at the turn of the twenty-first century,” even ushering in “a new cultural fantasy: [that] the American novel has transmogrified, has become an album.” Florence Dore, “The Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude,” Nonsite.org, January  20, 2013, http://nonsite.org/article /the-rock -novel-and-jonathan-lethems-the-fortress-of-solitude. For a broader argument about a “genealogical overlap between literature and rock” in American fiction of the second half of the twentieth century, see Florence Dore, Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 122. 3. Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 183. 4. Alec Michod, “The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Egan,” The Rumpus, June 23, 2010, https://therumpus.net /2010/06/the-rumpus -interview-with-jennifer-egan /. 5. The relation of Egan’s novel to Proust has been a frequent object of critical discussion to date. David Cowart offers usefully detailed consideration of the ways that “Egan’s characters, like Proust’s Bergotte, Elstir, Vinteiul, Swann, Madame Verdurin, and Baron Charlus, undergo various reversals of social standing” in The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 179. 6. Jennifer Egan, cited in Thessaly La Force, “Jennifer Egan Fever,” Paris Review Daily, July 12, 2011, https://www.theparisreview.org / blog/2011 /07/12/jennifer-egan-fever/. 7. Michod, “The Rumpus Interview.” 8. Cathleen Schine, “Cruel and Benevolent,” New York Review of Books, November 11, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com /articles/2010 /11 /11 /cruel-and-benevolent /.

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9. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne and Christopher Prendergast (New York: Viking, 2004), 94. 10. I take the term “omnitemporality” from the novel theorist Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 78. See also Christina Lupton’s suggestion that “reading makes events that have been ordered one way into things that still can be accessed and reordered in time, and that therefore come with a surfeit of possibility that real life lacks.” Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time, 121. 11. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 8. 12. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 101. 13. OED, s.v. “goon.” 14. Elvis Costello, “Goon Squad,” https://genius.com / Elvis-costello -goon-squad-lyrics. 15. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 30. 16. On a potentially “minimal” version of a long novel, consider Joseph Conrad’s cranky response to a critic who remarked of his novel Chance that “if I had taken a little more trouble the tale could have been told in about two hundred pages.” Conrad’s response (in his “Author’s Note” to the novel): “No doubt that by selecting a certain method and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out on a cigarette paper.” Joseph Conrad, Chance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 331. 17. Jennifer Egan, The Keep: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2006), 128. 18. Egan, The Keep, 28– 29. 19. Jennifer Egan, Emerald City: Stories (New York: Picador USA, 1997), 6. 20. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me: A Novel (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 132, 374. 21. Egan, Look at Me, 178, my italics. 22. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2004), chap. 43.

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23. Jeremy Rosen reads Egan’s novel as an instance of what he calls a new kind of twenty-first-century “multi-protagonist fiction” that “affirm[s] that any figure that enters their fictional worlds, no matter how fleetingly, has a rich interiority and a radical particularity that could serve as a novelistic center of consciousness.” Rosen, Minor Characters, 183. (Rosen views this seemingly “democratic” potential with some skepticism, however.) 24. Jonathan Arac, “What Kind of History Does a Theory of the Novel Require?” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2 (2009): 193. 25. Arac, “What Kind of History,” 194. I was led to Arac’s essay, and to his phrase “a melancholic novel lover,” by Nicholas Dames’s contribution to the “Theory of the Novel Now” roundtable at the Society of Novel Studies, Ithaca, NY, June 2018. 26. Jennifer Egan, cited in Stephen  M. Deusner, “Proust and Punk: Jennifer Egan, ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ at Politics and Prose,” Washington Post, June 27, 2010. 27. Compare Mark McGurl on “Philip Roth’s Modest Phase,” in which “traditional literary forms” such as the novel “are no longer understood, as they were in Roth’s youth, and in the youth of literary modernism itself, as forms of enclosure that need to be shattered in the search for an authentic expression of desire. Rather, they are offered as fragile, already-failing vehicles that can carry us, but only for a short while, through the encompassing onslaught of time.” Mark McGurl, “Philip Roth’s Modest Phase,” Post45, April  12, 2019, http://post45.research.yale.edu /2019/04 /philip-roths -modest-phase/. 28. See Alexander Alter, “TV’s Novel Challenge: Literature on the Screen,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2013. 29. Michod, “The Rumpus Interview.” As Florence Dore points out, Michael Chabon’s 2012 Telegraph Avenue implies a similar alliance between novel and LP: Chabon’s novel “comes complete with a perfectly scaled record label, offset to appear glued as on a vinyl LP, listing its chapters as if they were recorded tracks.” Dore, Novel Sounds, 98.

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30. Egan, Look at Me, 120– 21. 31. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 78, 41. Genette (85) argues that Proust made clear, “more than anyone had done before him and better than they had, narrative’s capacity for temporal autonomy”— that is, an author or narrator’s ability to play God by rearranging, grouping, reordering events in divergence from the way that they in fact chronologically occurred (according to the logic of the fiction). 32. Michael  W. Clune describes as the artwork as a “technology for defeating time”; the “ideal art object of the Romantic tradition,” he suggests, is an object “that never gets old.” Michael  W. Clune, Writing Against Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 6, 60. 33. On the backward consideration of life paths not taken and their representation in literature and film, see Andrew  H. Miller, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 34. The “optative” is a term Miller uses to sum up the consideration of paths not taken, or “lives unled”: see Andrew H. Miller, “ ‘A Case of Metaphysics’: Counterfactuals, Realism, Great Expectations,” ELH 79, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 773.

SIDE A, TRACK 2: STORAGE, PRESERVATION, MEMORY, RECORDING 1. See Lauren Berlant’s suggestion that depression and obesity have been linked in U.S. discourse as twinned and comorbid national “epidemics.” Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 109. Berlant points out that in the medical literature, obesity is often defined as a “chronic condition,” “etymologically a disease of time” (103). 2. See also, in Egan’s Manhattan Beach: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2018): “a gristle of pistons and turbines and pulleys all juddering

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

toward some mysterious purposes,” and “it was followed by a juddering rumble deep inside the ship” (365). OED, s.v. “Judder,” https://www-oed-com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/view / Entry/101880. OED, “Fibrillation,” https://www-oed-com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu /view/ Entry/69761. See “Gold & Platinum,” https://www.riaa.com /gold-platinum /story/. “Music recording certification,” https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki / Music _recording_certification. “Chasing History: The World of Collecting, Gold, Platinum and Diamond Records,” Billboard, https://www.billboard.com /articles /news /7550080 /chasing -history -the -world - of - collecting - gold -platinum-and-diamond-records. Zara Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial’: An Interview with Jennifer Egan,” Post45, May  20, 2016, http://post45.research.yale.edu /2016 /05 /this-is-all-artificial-an-interview-with-jennifer-egan /. Both Bosco and Sasha can be understood as “hoarders” performing what Scott Herring describes as a form of “material deviance.” Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2014, 6. Michael W. Clune, Writing Against Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), describes as the “addictive object” as a model for a “truly effective work of art—the work of art that will destroy habit and arrest experiential time” (62); he argues that “literature wants to become like an addictive object,” wants to preserve “vivid phenomenal experience” and to seem “always new” (59). Jennifer Egan, Look at Me: A Novel (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 253. Bosco’s Suicide Tour idea recalls Don DeLillo’s Bucky Wunderlick, the Dylanesque rock-star-in-hiding in his 1973 Great Jones Street (New York: Penguin, 1994), who comments, “Suicide was nearer to me than my own big toe. It was the natural ending. I mean

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13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

it was right there. No one would have been surprised or shocked. I really think it was expected of me” (86); “Suicide’s the best answer all around. . . . It’s what everybody expects of you, right down to the littlest scribbler of fan mail” (284). Dana Spiotta’s 2012 Stone Arabia is another recent novel (postdating Egan’s) that is especially interested in the mythology of the rock-star suicide. “I Have to Ask: The Jennifer Egan Edition,” Slate, October  26, 2017. http://www.slate.com /articles/podcasts/i_have_to_ask /2017 /10 / jennifer_egan_on_writing_fiction_amid_technological_dis tractions.html. Jennifer Egan, “The Thin Red Line,” New York Times Magazine, July  27, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com /1997/07/27/magazine/the -thin-red-line.html. Jennifer Egan, Emerald City: Stories (New York: Picador USA, 1997), 30. Jennifer Egan, The Keep: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2006), 26. Egan, Look at Me, 95. Egan, Look at Me, 43. Egan, Look at Me, 152. Alec Michod, “The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Egan,” The Rumpus, June 23, 2010, https://therumpus.net /2010/06/the-rumpus -interview-with-jennifer-egan /. Florence Dore makes a related point about Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue: “We might consider Telegraph Avenue to be a particularly apt comment on obsolescence and note that the teen-aged character Jules switches from eight-track to iPod at the point in the novel where Archy gives up vinyl to become a real estate agent in 2008.” Florence Dore, “The Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude,” Nonsite.org, January 20, 2013, http://nonsite .org/article /the-rock-novel-and-jonathan-lethems-the-fortress-of -solitude. Aden Evens, Logic of the Digital (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1– 2. Egan, Look at Me, 496. Egan, The Keep, 105.

Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation, Memory, Recording = 147

25. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Vintage, 2012), 344. 26. “A Spotify listener who clicks on a favorite old song may hear a file in a compressed audio format called Ogg Vorbis. That file was probably created by converting an MP3, which may have been ripped years earlier from a CD, which itself may have been created from a suboptimal ‘safety copy’ of the LP master— or even from a dubbed duplicate of that dubbed duplicate. Audiophiles complain that the digital era, with its rampant copy-paste ethos and jumble of old and new formats, is an age of debased sound: lossy audio files created from nth-generation transfers; cheap vinyl reissues, marketed to analog-fetishists but pressed up from sludgy non-analog sources.” Jody Rosen, “The Day the Music Burned,” New York Times Magazine, June  11, 2019, https://www .nytimes .com /2019 /06 /11 /magazine /universal-fire -master-record ings.html. 27. “The Studio Master—the original recording file laboured over by the artists and producers—perfectly captures the sound, the texture, the detail, and the space required to express the feeling and the emotion of the original performance.” Jamie Carter, “Lossless Audio Explained: Sorting the FLACs from the ALACs,” Techradar, August 3, 2018, https://www.techradar.com/news/lossless-audio -explained-sorting-the-flacs-from-the-alacs. 28. John Markoff, “The Passion of Steve Jobs,” New York Times, Bits blog, January  15, 2008, https:// bits.blogs.nytimes.com /2008/01 /15 /the-passion-of-steve-jobs/. 29. Alexandra Schwartz, “Jennifer Egan’s Travels Through Time,” New Yorker, October 9, 2017. 30. Egan, Look at Me, 52. 31. Amelia Precup, “The Posthuman Body in Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box,’ ” American, British, and Canadian Studies 25, no.1 (2015), 171. 32. “Coming Soon: Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box,’ ” New Yorker, May 23, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com / books/page-turner/coming -soon-jennifer-egans-black-box.

148 = Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation, Memory, Recording

33. Schwartz, “Jennifer Egan’s Travels Through Time.” It’s also interesting to note that Egan says that her first attempt at writing Goon Squad ’s PowerPoint chapter “was trying to write a presentation on legal pad by hand, without actually owning PowerPoint,” although “I didn’t get too far with that.” Cited in Stephen  M. Deusner, “Proust and Punk: Jennifer Egan, ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ at Politics and Prose,” Washington Post, June 27, 2010. 34. Egan’s adoption of PowerPoint can be viewed as a version of what Zara Dinnen has dubbed “the digital banal.” Zara Dinnen, The Digital Banal: New Media in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press), 2017. And as Lee Konstantinou argues, Egan suggests in this chapter “that reified forms (such as PowerPoint) allow for genuine artistic expression and emotional involvements for her characters, and, by allegorical extension, for . . . [the] contemporary novelist.” Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 42.

SIDE B, TRACK 3: FAILURE, SHAME, TRAGEDY, EMPTINESS 1. “An almost mystical conviction of individual and collective failure pervades A Visit from the Goon Squad. . . . And yet there is energy, even exuberance, in its despair.” Pankaj Mishra, “Modernity’s Undoing,” London Review of Books, March 2011, 27. 2. Allan Hepburn remarks on the centrality, in Egan’s work, of the theme of “disappearance” and the way those who “disappear” leave an empty space: “In Egan’s novels, characters tend to disappear,” drawing “on the novelistic potential built into the trope of disappearance.” Allan Hepburn, “Vanishing Worlds: Epic Disappearance in Manhattan Beach,” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 386. 3. Jennifer Egan, quoted in Zara Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial’: An Interview with Jennifer Egan,” Post45, May 20, 2016, http://post45 .research.yale.edu /2016/05 /this-is-all-artificial-an-interview-with -jennifer-egan /.

Side B, track 3: Failure, Shame, Tragedy, Emptiness = 149

4. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 151– 94. 5. Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 6. Jennifer Egan, quoted in Rachel Cooke, “I Was Never a Hot, Young Writer. But Then I Had a Quantum Leap,” The Guardian, September 24, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com / books/2017/sep /24/jennifer- egan- quantum-leap-manhattan-beach-visit-from -the-goon-squad. 7. Chris May, “Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares: How This All-Female Bulgarian Folk Choir Became a Timeless Cult Phenomenon,” Vinyl Factory, February 28, 2017, https://thevinylfactory.com /featu res/mystere-des-voix-bulgares-4ad-story/. 8. Florence Dore makes a broader claim that applies well both to Bennie and La Doll: “rock novels offer a deflated version of self, a human whose diminishment is a key feature of its new significance.” Florence Dore, “The Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude,” Nonsite.org, January 20, 2013, http://nonsite .org/article /the-rock-novel-and-jonathan-lethems-the-fortress-of -solitude. 9. Jennifer Egan, The Keep: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2006), 10. 10. And it’s worth noting that in Genette’s discussion of narrative “ellipsis” in Proust, one of his prime examples is a gap of precisely this length: “between the end of Gilberte and the beginning of Balbec a two-year ellipsis occurs that is clearly definite.” Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 106. 11. OED, s.v. “Demise.” 12. This moment also brings to mind Theodor Martin’s observation, about so-called contemporary fiction of the twenty-first century, that “at a time when manners and conventions are changing so quickly that it is impossible to record them accurately,” “the contemporary comprises dates but is not datable” and that the very notion of the “contemporary” begins to seem so mutable as to be

150 = Side B, track 3: Failure, Shame, Tragedy, Emptiness

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

impossible to grasp. Theodor Martin, Continental Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 31, 47. Jennifer Egan, Emerald City: Stories (New York: Picador USA, 1997), 115. “The world one touches at the computer is not the same as the material world at one’s fingertips. It is another world, constituted by the digital code, a world generated by processes of abstraction.” Aden Evens, Logic of the Digital (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 69. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me: A Novel (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 368, 498. Moose could be citing C. Wright Mills’s classic White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): “Contemporary divisions of labor involve a hitherto unknown specialization of skill: from arranging abstract symbols, at $1000 an hour, to working a shovel, at $1000 a year. . . . As a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols” (65). I am here citing Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 126. Jennifer Egan, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake,” http://jenniferegan.com /excerpt /a-visit-from-the-goon-squad /. Egan, quoted in Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial.’ ” Egan, Look at Me, 234. Egan, quoted in Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial.’ ” In what seems an oversight on the author’s part, considering the chapter’s historical placement in the 2020s, all the pop songs referenced in the chapter are actual songs from the 1960s through to about the time of the novel’s composition; it seems unlikely that Lincoln would listen only to music at least fifteen years old. The spelling “Foxey” also indicates that Lincoln was in possession of an early U.S. or Canadian pressing of the song, either the single or on the album Are You Experienced?.

Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity = 151

22. Alec Michod, “The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Egan,” The Rumpus, June 23, 2010, https://therumpus.net /2010/06/the-rumpus -interview-with-jennifer-egan /. Egan also commented, “I had a failed chapter with an academic, writing about the pauses in music but it was incredibly boring! I was fascinated by the idea of the pause, what it means and how it can function in music, but it was only when I was able to finally use PowerPoint that I could bring in the pauses.” Quoted in Zara Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial.’ ” 23. This passage is cited in Genette, Narrative Discourse, 98. Genette points to Proust’s commentary on Flaubert in Genette’s own discussion of narrative “ellipses,” or temporal gaps, as a crucial novelistic tool; Genette distinguishes between different kinds, ranging from “explicit ellipses,” in which a narrator specifies a particular period of time that has passed (e.g., “two years later”), to “implicit ellipses, that is, those whose very presence is not announced in the text and which the reader can infer only from some . . . gap in narrative continuity” (108), and then to “hypothetical ellipses” (“impossible to localize . . . and revealed after the event” (109). 24. Egan, The Keep, 128. 25. I am thinking here partly of what Ann-Lise François defines as a quality of “empty-handedness,” a willingness to accept inaction, nonpossession, and nonagency. Ann-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 21.

SIDE B, TRACK 4: AESTHETICS, PURITY, GENDER, AUTHENTICITY 1. Jennifer Egan, Emerald City: Stories (New York: Picador USA, 1997), 92. 2. Egan notes that “In Look at Me, the character Moose has a correspondence with an Art History professor called Barbara Mundy. She exists; actually she is one of my oldest and closest friends and a celebrated art historian. I wrote letters to Barbara in the

152 = Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

character of Moose and she responded as she would have responded had someone actually written her those letters.” Quoted in Zara Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial’: An Interview with Jennifer Egan,” Post45, May  20, 2016, http://post45.research.yale.edu /2016 /05 /this-is-all-artificial-an-interview-with-jennifer-egan /. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me: A Novel (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 168. Jesse Rosenthal cites Thackeray’s vivid image as one instance of a widespread belief, among Victorian novelists and critics, “that narrative mechanics such as suspense and delay could have a physical effect on a novel’s reader.” Jesse Rosenthal, Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 14. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 55. These snippets are all cited in the opening pages of the paperback edition of Manhattan Beach. What I call a strobing quality here resembles what C. Namwali Serpell calls narrative “oscillating.” Of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Serpell declares that “reading Lot 49 entails an oscillation between an immersion in an other’s consciousness and a selfawareness of the artifice of both that consciousness and that immersion.” C. Namwali Serpell, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 71. Egan, Look at Me, 234. “In some ways I was a lot like Rhea; I wanted desperately to be “real,” without really knowing what that meant. A cosmology existed in my mind: some people were real, and had intense, vivid lives, and some—like me— did not and might never. I was ashamed of my unreality, and I tried to conceal it from those around me. Punks seemed real, so I was afraid of them; or rather, my dealings with them consisted of trying very hard to act as if I, too, was real. It was a nervewracking performance.” Christopher Cox, “Jennifer

Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity = 153

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

Egan,” Paris Review Daily, June  25, 2010, https://www.theparis review.org/ blog/2010/06/25 /qa-jennifer-egan /. “Flipper Redux,” SF Weekly, February  10, 1999, http://www .sfweekly.com /music /flipper-redux /. See, e.g., Viv Albertine, who went on to found the trailblazing allwomen punk band the Slits, on her teenage 1970s reflections on the possibility of playing guitar in a band: “Every cell of my body was steeped in music, but it never occurred to me that I could be in a band, not in a million years—why would it? Who’d done it before me? There was no one I could identify with. No girls played electric guitar. Especially not ordinary girls like me.” Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys: A Memoir (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2014), 49. Cox, “Jennifer Egan.” Egan also recently commented, “During my undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania and afterward, as a postgrad reading English literature at St.  John’s College, Cambridge, I found the practice of literary analysis and argument every bit as urgent and creative an enterprise as writing fiction. Though I’ve ended up throwing in my lot with fiction, my novels still tend to begin with abstract questions that might seem equally— or better!— suited to academic writing.” Jennifer Egan, “Notes from an Academic Interloper,” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 416. Alec Michod, “The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Egan,” The Rumpus, June 23, 2010, https://therumpus.net /2010/06/the-rumpus -interview-with-jennifer-egan /. Egan, quoted in Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial.’ ” “Evincing what several critics have called ‘network aesthetics,’ Egan’s stories mimic the form of an online social network, disbursed across time, reimagining the form of the novel as a sort of Facebook wall.” Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 260. Konstantinou, Cool Characters, 266.

154 = Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity

17. Carly Schwartz, “Jennifer Egan on Growing Up in San Francisco, Finding Inspiration, and Experiencing the ‘Sixties Hangover,’ ” Huffington Post, October 10, 2011, updated January 30, 2012, https:// www.huffpost.com /entry/jennifer-egan-my-sf_n_1001091. 18. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1992), 157. 19. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 11, trans. Brookes Moore, Theoi Classical Texts Library, http://www.theoi.com / Text /Ovid Meta mor phoses11.html. 20. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 10. 21. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 10. 22. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 11. 23. I draw some language here from my “Harmony and Discord,” Public Books, June 15, 2014, https://www.publicbooks.org/ harmony -and-discord /#fn-1085-2. 24. Compare Sarah Brouillette’s observation about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: “Our wish for Kathy to scream and cry, to express indignation, is our wish for an art outraged by human suffering.” She suggests that Never Let Me Go allegorizes a contemporary world in which “the possibility of this sort of release” may no longer be available in art. Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the  Creative Economy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 204.

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a2 š

Albertine, Viv. Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys: A Memoir. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2014. Arac, Jonathan. “What Kind of History Does a Theory of the Novel Require?” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2 (2009): 190– 95.  Berlant, Lauren  G. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Brouillette, Sarah. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Ciabattari, Jane. “The 21st Century’s 12 Greatest Novels.” BBC Culture, January  19, 2015. http://www.bbc.com /culture/story/20150119-the-21st -centurys-12-best-novels. Carter, Jamie. “Lossless Audio Explained: Sorting the FLACs from the ALACs.” Techradar, August 3, 2018. https://www.techradar.com /news / lossless-audio-explained-sorting-the-flacs-from-the-alacs. “Chasing History: The World of Collecting, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond Records.” Billboard, October 24, 2016. https://www.billboard .com /articles/news/7550080/chasing-history-the-world-of-collecting -gold-platinum-and-diamond-records. Clune, Michael W. Writing Against Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Cohen, Margaret. “A Feminist Plunge Into Sea Knowledge.” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 372– 77.

156 = Bibliography

Conrad, Joseph. Chance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Cooke, Rachel. “I Was Never a Hot, Young Writer. But Then I Had a Quantum Leap.” The Guardian, September  24, 2017. https://www .theguardian.com / books/ 2017/sep/24/jennifer-egan-quantum-leap -manhattan-beach-visit-from-the-goon-squad. Cowart, David. The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Cox, Christopher. “Jennifer Egan.” Paris Review Daily, June  25, 2010. https://www.theparisreview.org/ blog/2010/06/25 /qa-jennifer-egan / DeLillo, Don. Great Jones Street. New York: Penguin, 1994. ——. Mao II. New York: Penguin, 1992. Deusner, Stephen M. “Proust and Punk: Jennifer Egan, ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ at Politics and Prose.” Washington Post, June 27, 2010. Dinnen, Zara. The Digital Banal: New Media in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. ——. “ ‘This Is All Artificial’: An Interview with Jennifer Egan.” Post45, May  20, 2016. http://post45.research.yale.edu /2016/05 /this-is-all-art ificial-an-interview-with-jennifer-egan /. Dore, Florence. “The Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude.” Nonsite.org, January 20, 2013. http://nonsite.org/article/the -rock-novel-and-jonathan-lethems-the-fortress-of-solitude. ——. Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Egan, Jennifer. Emerald City: Stories. New York: Picador USA, 1997. ——. “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake.” http://jenniferegan .com /excerpt /a-visit-from-the-goon-squad /. ——. The Invisible Circus. New York: Anchor Books, 2007. ——. The Keep: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2006. ——. Look at Me: A Novel. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. ——. Manhattan Beach: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2018. — —. “Notes from an Academic Interloper.” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 416–17. — —. “The Thin Red Line.” New York Times Magazine, July  27, 1997. https://www.nytimes .com /1997 /07 /27 /magazine /the -thin -red -line .html.

Bibliography = 157

——. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Knopf, 2010. Evens, Aden. Logic of the Digital. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. “Flipper Redux.” SF Weekly, February  10, 1999. http://www.sfweekly .com /music /flipper-redux /. François, Ann-Lise. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Vintage, 2012. “Gold & Platinum.” RIAA. https://www.riaa.com /gold-platinum /story/. Grigoriadis, Vanessa. “Madonna at Sixty.” New York Times Magazine, June 5, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/magazine/madonna -madame-x.html. Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2004. Hepburn, Allan. “Vanishing Worlds: Epic Disappearance in Manhattan Beach.” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 384– 90. Herring, Scott.  The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. “I Have to Ask: The Jennifer Egan Edition.” Slate, October 26, 2017. http:// www. slate .com /articles /podcasts / i_have_to_ask /2017 /10 / jennifer _egan_on_writing_fiction_amid_technological_distractions.html. Konstantinou, Lee.  Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Harmony and Discord.” Public Books, June 15, 2014. https://www.publicbooks.org/ harmony-and-discord /#fn-1085-2. La Force, Thessaly. “Jennifer Egan Fever.” Paris Review Daily, July 12, 2011. https://www.theparisreview.org/ blog/2011 /07/12/jennifer-egan -fever/. Lidsky, David. “The Definitive Timeline of Spotify’s Critic-Defying Journey to Rule Music.” Fast Company, August 8, 2018. https://www

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. fastcompany. com /90205527 /the - definitive -timeline - of - spotifys -critic-defying-journey-to-rule-music. Lupton, Christina.  Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Markoff, John. “The Passion of Steve Jobs.” New York Times, Bits blog, January 15, 2008. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/the-passion -of-steve-jobs/. Martin, Theodor. Continental Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. May, Chris. “Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares: How This All-Female Bulgarian Folk Choir Became a Timeless Cult Phenomenon.” Vinyl Factory, February 28, 2017. https://thevinylfactory.com /features/mystere -des-voix-bulgares-4ad-story/. McGurl, Mark. “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon.” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2016): 447– 71. ——. “Philip Roth’s Modest Phase.” Post45, April 12, 2019. http://post45 .research.yale.edu /2019/04 /philip-roths-modest-phase/. Michod, Alec. “The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Egan.” The Rumpus, June  23, 2010. https://therumpus.net /2010/06/the-rumpus-inter view-with-jennifer-egan /. Miller, Andrew H. “ ‘A Case of Metaphysics’: Counterfactuals, Realism, Great Expectations.” ELH 79, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 773– 96. ——. On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Mills, C. Wright, White Collar: The American Middle Classes. 50th anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Mishra, Pankaj. “Modernity’s Undoing.” London Review of Books 33, no. 7 (March 31, 2011): 27– 30. “Music Recording Certification.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki / Music _recording_certification. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Brookes Moore. Theoi Classical Texts Library. http://www.theoi.com / Text /OvidMetamorphoses1.html. Precup, Amelia. “The Posthuman Body in Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box.’ ” American, British, and Canadian Studies 25, no. 1, 2015: 171–86.

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Proust, Marcel. The Guermantes Way. Trans. Mark Treharne and Christopher Prendergast. New York: Viking, 2004. Ricoeur, Paul.  Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Rosen, Jeremy. Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Rosen, Jody. “The Day the Music Burned.” New York Times Magazine, June  11, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com /2019/06/11 /magazine/univer sal-fire-master-recordings.html. Rosenthal, Jesse. Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Schine, Cathleen. “Cruel and Benevolent.” New York Review of Books, November 11, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com /articles/2010/11 /11 /cruel -and-benevolent /. Schwartz, Alexandra. “Jennifer Egan’s Travels Through Time.” New Yorker, October 9, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com /magazine/2017 /10/16/jennifer-egans-travels-through-time. Schwartz, Carly. “Jennifer Egan on Growing Up in San Francisco, Finding Inspiration and Experiencing the ‘Sixties Hangover.’ ” Huffington Post, October 10, 2011, updated January 30, 2012. https://www .huffpost.com /entry/jennifer-egan-my-sf_n_1001091. Serpell, C.  N.  Seven Modes of Uncertainty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 151– 94. Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Picador, 2008.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures and tables. absence: aesthetic, 44, 95, 112; beauty and youth as, 57; emptiness as, 71, 105; formal gaps as, 88; 9/11 footprint as, 91– 92, 105 adolescent, 121, 134 adult, 28– 29, 121, 128 aesthetics: African, 31– 32, 58; character, 131; digitized, 114; disappointment of, 108, 112, 116, 136, 154n24; ethics of, 132– 33; joys of, 108– 9, 111, 113, 136, 138; memorializing, 57; temporality of, 109, 113 (see also time); terrors of, 135; transcendence of, 108– 9 Africa, 31– 32, 58, 109 aging: bodily, 23, 35, 52–53, 57, 77, 94; development through, 21,

26– 29, 77, 85; of earth, 35; shame and fear of, 4, 17, 77, 122 Albertine, Viv, 153n11 Amazon (corporation), 45, 62, 64 Ambassadors, The (James), 51 American: Egan’s characters described as, 31– 32, 50; fiction identified as, 4, 15, 141n2; Indigenous, 58; 9/11’s impact on the, 89; teenage, 120; as term, 98 analog, 31, 56, 60, 147n26 Apple (corporation), 64 Arac, Jonathan, 29, 30 archive: autobiographic, 51; digital music, 63; fiction as, 64; personal object, 46, 67. See also collecting; hoarding Are You Experienced (album), 150n21

162 = Index

Armed Forces (album), 19 artifact: artwork as, 2, 7, 10, 57–59; collected object as, 43–45, 50, 57–59, 113; pre-Columbian, 32, 39, 43–44, 58; prose fiction as, 64 authenticity: aesthetic, 7, 116–17, 133; emotional, 122; music industry and records as, 6– 7, 56, 76, 116– 22, 124, 126 Avengers (band), 118 Bad Brains (band), 1 Balzac, Honoré de, 130 Bay Area, 14 Beckett, Samuel, 102, 134 Believer (magazine), 74 Benjamin, Walter, 46, 63 Berlant, Lauren, 144n1 “Bernadette” (song), 100, 103 bildungsroman, 24, 28, 29 Billboard (magazine), 43 Black Flag (band), 1 Bleak House (Dickens), 28 body: data preservation as analog for the, 56–57, 65, 70; erotic, 62; novel as analog for the, 17, 56; readerly, 144; scarred and maimed, 52–55, 70, 100; sensory, 5, 35, 40, 82–83, 86, 153n11; time’s imprint on the, 53, 55–56. See also embodiment; scars Bolaño, Roberto, 51

Booklist (magazine), 115 Brouillette, Sarah, 154n24 California, 67, 103 Cambridge University, 153n12 cassette, 1, 59, 109 CD, 5, 31, 42, 59, 147n26 Celibate Rifles (band), 122 Chabon, Michael, 143n29, 146n21 Chance (Conrad), 142n16 Chase, David, 15 Christgau, Robert, 3 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 36 chronology, 15, 88–89, 125, 144n31. See also time Ciabbatari, Jane, 139n3 Clarissa (Richardson), 73 climate change, 14, 89, 103 “Closing Time” (song), 103 Cloud Atlas (Mitchell), 131 cloud (server networks), 4, 97 Clune, Michael W., 144n32, 145n10 Cohen, Margaret, 140n11 collecting, 40, 113; cross-cultural, 39, 43, 58 (see also artifact); litter, 25; music, 100, 103; self-, 51; stealing as 45–49, 51–52, 67– 68, 70, 72, 103 Coltrane, John, 62 commodity: art as, 2, 7, 44–45, 116–17, 129; everyday object as, 34, 44, 46; self as, 51, 74

Index = 163

compressed: art as, 97, 114; artifacts as history, 57, 113; data, 62; human life, 47–48, 67, 111, 113; music, 19, 59, 61– 64, 68; narrative form as, 19, 64; texting language as, 128 (see also texting; handset) Conrad, Joseph, 142n16 continuity, 21, 79, 151n23 Costello, Elvis (singer), 18 Cowart, David, 141n5 Crime (band), 118 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 152n7 Dames, Nicholas, 143n25 Dantean, 87 Darwin, Charles, 27 Dead Kennedys (band), 60, 62 death: art’s transcendence of, 33– 34, 50–52; Egan’s characters and their preoccupations with, 32– 33, 51, 61, 72, 119; myths of, 136; realist character’s, 27; self-inflicted, 101, 125 (see also suicide); social demise as, 77, 86, 125 decay: preservation versus, 58, 70 (see also preservation); time as, 17, 22– 23, 44, 133 DeLillo, Don, 134– 35, 145n12, 154n18 dematerialization: art as, 2, 4, 62– 64, 114; digitized books as,

65– 66; streamed music as, 5, 59– 60, 62– 64 demise, 43, 86, 87 depression, 41, 90. See also melancholy development, 21, 120– 21, 131 Dick, Philip K., 89 Dickens, Charles, 28, 114, 130 digitization, 4; aesthetic crisis of, 95– 96; music, 31, 56, 59– 63, 147n26; streaming, 4–5, 59– 60, 62– 64; writing as, 65– 66 Dinnen, Zara, 145n8, 148n34 disaster, 9, 71, 92, 105, 132, 137 discontinuities, 22 Dore, Florence, 141n2, 143n29, 146n21, 149n8 downsize, 5, 61– 62, 84, 94, 96– 97, 110 Dracula (Stoker), 73 duration, 17, 19, 101 eBay, 45 ecological, 34 Egan, Jennifer, references to the persona of: adolescence, 118, 127, 134, 152n9, 153n12; careers, 98– 99; personal relationships, 64– 66, 151–52n2; reflections on writing, 51, 74, 77, 101, 128, 151n22 Egan, Jennifer, works of: “Black Box,” 65– 66, 96– 97; Emerald City, 24, 53, 94, 108; “Found

164 = Index

Egan, Jennifer, works of (cont.) Objects,” 13; “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake,” 97; The Invisible Circus, 51–52; The Keep, 23, 24, 53, 61, 84, 105; Look at Me, 26, 31, 49, 54–55, 61, 65, 74, 97– 98, 108, 130, 151–52n2; Manhattan Beach, 10, 115, 144–45n2; “Sacred Heart,” 53; “The Thin Red Line,” 53; “Why China?,” 24 elegiac, 8. See also nostalgia Eliot, George, 7, 18, 28, 114 Elle (magazine), 115 embodiment: fiction’s impact on, 114, 152n4; harming of, 52–53, 55–56, 86, 94, 100–101, 136 (see also scars); information as, 65; music experienced through, 5, 60– 62, 75– 76, 112, 133, 136– 37, 153n11; novel as analogue for, 17; sexual and erotic, 60– 62, 75– 76, 80, 112–13, 121– 23; shame of, 82–84, 86; storage inside of, 56; time’s imprint on, 52–54, 56–57, 77, 133; visual art’s impact on, 114 Empire State Building, 8, 14 emptiness, 71, 93– 96, 98, 100, 102, 105, 107 environmental, 34– 35 Eurydice (mythic figure), 110–13, 135–136 Evens, Aden, 60, 150n14

Facebook, 49–50, 153n15 failure, 71, 102; acceptance of, 70; avoidance of, 78; character’s developmental, 25, 78–81, 98; collective, 148n1; entertainment industry, 19, 57, 78–81, 116, 132; feminine versus masculine, 122; urban, 24 Father Knows Best (television show), 30 Faulkner, William, 30 Felski, Rita, 114 Ferrante, Elena, 51 fiction: autobiographic, 51; baroque, 131; digitized, 64, 97, 114; experimental, 11, 15; historical, 115; modernist, 11, 30; narratives about, 64; nineteenth-century, 85, 114–15; nongenre, 29; nonrealist, 131; postmodernist, 11, 15, 131; premodernist, 114; prose, 7, 29, 64, 66, 97, 115; realist, 131 (see also literary modes: realist; novel: nineteenth-century); science fiction, 129; sensation, 114 film: aesthetics of, 29, 108; digitized, 4, 62, 64; dramatic, 30; physical medium of, 1, 2, 61, 62 Flaubert, Gustave, 101– 2 Flipper (band), 119 “Footprint, The,” 91, 133

Index = 165

Four Tops (band), 100 “Foxey Lady” (song), 100 François, Ann-Lise, 151n25 Freud, Sigmund, 16 future: characterological, 34; distant, 109; fiction’s prediction of, 32; impossible visions of, 36; near, 8, 23, 28, 66, 91, 97, 126; slightly, 129 gender, 62, 75, 90, 122– 23 Genette, Gerard, 19, 32, 142n10, 144n31, 149n10, 151n23. See also “omnitemporality” Germs (band), 118 Giacometti, Alberto, 102 Gleick, James, 62, 147n26 Go-Between, The (Hartley), 3 Go-Betweens (band), 3 gold albums, 41–43, 48, 50, 56, 76, 80 goon: American meaning of, 18–19; temporal significance of, 18, 21, 31– 33, 36 “Goon Squad” (song), 18 Gothic, 61 Great Jones Street (DeLillo), 145–46n12 Guermantes Way, The (Proust), 16, 142n9 Gunsmoke (television show), 30 handset, 126–28, 136. See also texting Hardy, Thomas, 27, 84

Hartley, L. P., 3 HBO (Home Box Office), 30– 31 headphones, 109 Hendrix, Jimi, 100 Hepburn, Allan, 148n2 Herring, Scott, 145n9 historian, 23, 51, 97, 108–109, 151n2 history: art, 110, 151n2; art’s memorializing of, 39, 40, 43, 57, 87, 92; bodily scars as, 55; computer, 64; destruction of, 52; earthly, 91; fiction’s, 7–8, 11, 64, 73, 91; material, 65– 66; music, 43, 59, 109, 119; personal and particular, 40, 87–88, 130– 31, 133– 34 Hitchcock, Alfred, 108 hoarding: bodily, 56; deviance of, 40, 56, 68, 145n9; healthy forms of, 73; object, 40, 43, 44, 51, 58, 113; stealing as, 68. See also collecting; preservation Hoboken, New Jersey, 40 Homeric, 19 Hudson River, 40 Human Be-in, 133 impermanence, 22 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 16 Invisible Man (Ellison), 29 iPod, 96, 146n21 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 154n24 Italy, 14, 52 It’s a Wonderful Life (film), 36

166 = Index

James, Henry, 51, 109 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 2 jazz (music), 80 JFK, 91 Jobs, Steve, 64 journalist, 55, 89; Egan as, 44, 98 JPEG, 62, 68 “juddering,” 40, 41, 144–45n2 Kael, Pauline, 2 Kindle, 4, 64. See also Amazon (corporation) Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 51 Konstantinou, Lee, 75, 134, 148n34, 153n15 Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (album), 78 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 119 linearity, 12, 32, 115. See also time literature: aesthetics of, 7, 138; broad category of, 48, 73, 102; private writing, 73. See also fiction literary modes: diaristic, 73; Egan’s mixture of, 78; epic, 19; epistolary, 73; lyric, 11 (see also time, single moments of); mythic, 140n11 (see also myth); realist, 11, 14–15, 19, 25, 27, 91, 115–16, 131; ironic versus sincere, 74– 75, 98– 99 live music, 5 Lolita (Nabokov), 29

loss: collecting objects as marker of, 48; digitization as, 4, 34, 96, 99; ecological, 34; Egan’s novel characters and their perception of, 9, 23, 71, 76, 84, 105; time and aging as, 23, 34, 35, 94, 123, 125 “lossiness,” 62– 63, 93 lossless audio, 62, 63, 68, 139n1 “lossy,” 62, 68, 147n26 “Love Supreme, A” (song), 62 LP (long playing) records, 1, 5, 25, 31, 59, 147n26; Conduit albums, 39, 41; novel form’s affinity to, 143n29 Lupton, Christina, 12, 140n1, 142n10, 150n16 Mabuhay Gardens, 6, 18, 118–19, 123, 137 Mac (computer), 65 Madonna (singer), 3 Manhattan, 14, 58, 83, 126, 137 Mao II (DeLillo), 134 Martin, Theodor, 149n12 Mayor of Casterbridge, The (Hardy), 27, 93 McGurl, Mark, 140n6, 143n27 McLaren, Malcolm, 119 McLuhan, Marshall, 29 McSweeney’s (magazine), 74 medieval, 86–87, 133 melancholy: collecting objects out of, 43, 48; fiction’s reflection

Index = 167

and transcendence of, 29, 32, 143n25; time as, 4, 23, 38 memento, 45, 51, 52, 56, 73– 74; bodily scar as, 56 memento mori, 23. See also decay memorialization: art and fiction as, 49, 50–51; music as, 12, 42, 43; 9/11, 133, 135; object collection as, 39, 40, 43, 47–48, 58 memory, 4; bodily scarring as, 54; false, 85; music as, 78– 79; objects as 39, 46, 58; Proust on, 16, 32; reader’s experience of, 22; shame, 79–82, 86–87, 93; stealing as, 49; written form as, 22, 31, 49, 63, 65, 74 metafiction, 22 metonym, 2, 42, 68 #MeToo (movement), 122 Middlemarch (Eliot), 7, 18, 24, 28, 93 Miller, Andrew, 144nn33– 34 Mills, C. Wright, 150n15 minimal: narrative form as, 19– 20, 22, 25, 73, 142n16; texting language as, 128 (see also handset; texting) Minor Threat (band), 1 Mitchell, David, 131 mixtape, 1 Moby-Dick (Melville), 29 modernism: literary, 11, 30, 143n27; painterly, 58

Mohawk: hairstyle, 118–120; nation, 120 Monterey Pop, 133 Moonstone, The (Collins), 73 Moviegoer, The (Percy), 2 MP3, 56, 59– 60, 62, 64, 68, 147n26 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 11 MTV, 90 multiplot novel, 28– 29. See also Victorian “multi-protagonist fictions,” 13, 131, 143n23 museum, 46, 58, 92, 114, 116. See also archive; preservation myth: classical, 9–10, 135; novel form as, 137– 38. See also Eurydice; Orpheus National Book Critics Circle Award, 139n3 Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro), 154n24 New York City, 8, 24, 67, 82, 83, 87, 98, 115 New Yorker (magazine), 2, 13, 66, 96 New York Times Magazine, 53 9/11: disastrous analogs of, 61, 91– 93, 100; memorial of, 133– 35; post-, 88–89; pre-, 87 nineteenth century: literary styles of the, 16, 85; novels of the 27– 31, 78, 82, 114–15. See also novel, nineteenth-century; Victorian

168 = Index

nonlinearity, 14, 22, 88, 125 North by Northwest (film), 62 nostalgia, 4, 121 novel: confessional, 74; cultural displacement of the, 8, 64, 130, 135; developmental, 28 (see also bildungsroman); form of, 99, 131, 138, 153n15 (see also fiction; literature); modernist, 78; nineteenth-century, 27, 28, 31, 78, 82, 114; postmodernist, 78; realist, 12, 27, 133 (see also fiction, realist; literary modes, realist); twenty-first century, 87; Victorian, 7, 28, 82, 114, 152n4 NYU, 14, 67 objects: collectively created, 133, 135; commodified versus personal, 46, 50–51, 96; humans as, 83, 99, 109, 120, 129; memorializing, 39–40, 44, 47–49, 50–52, 57, 59; music recordings as, 10, 42–44, 59; present versus absent, 102; stolen, 46–47, 68-69, 71– 73, 94, 125– 26; temporal transcendence of, 34, 57; temporary allure of, 4, 63, 97; visual and literary artworks as, 7, 48, 70, 97, 113 Odyssey (Homer), 19 “omnitemporality,” 16, 21, 32, 91, 142n10. See also time

Orpheus (mythic figure), 6, 9, 110–13, 135– 37 Ovid, 6, 135 pause, 18, 66, 100–103, 104, 105, 106, 107 Peace Corps, 24 Pearl Harbor, 91 Penguin (publishing house), 2 Percy, Walker, 2 photography, 61, 89 Picasso, Pablo, 58 platinum records, 42. See also gold albums; silver albums Plato, 63 Pompeii: disastrous analogs for, 61, 89, 92– 93, 100–101; ruinous site of, 52, 92, 100, 102; visual art of, 70, 87; 102, 111 pop: career in industry of, 76– 78, 90– 91, 130; fiction industry as analog for that of, 64, 116; formal features of, 100, 102, 105, 119, 133; history of, 43, 59, 61; music genre of, 3, 14, 112–13, 150n21 postmodernism: fictional, 11, 15; irony of, 75; meaninglessness of, 97 poststructuralist, 127 PowerPoint, 35, 66– 68, 97, 100, 105, 151n22; visual representations of, 37, 69, 104– 7

Index = 169

pre-Columbian, 39, 43 predigital, 2, 8 presence: aesthetic, 1–2, 60, 111–13; architectural, 91; bodily, 83, 102 preservation: aesthetics and artwork as, 9, 50, 57, 65, 92, 113; artifacts and tokens as, 39, 113; collecting and storing as, 40, 56, 58–59, 68– 70; digitization as, 65; fiction’s powers of, 31, 64, 74, 92; musical records as, 42, 59; perverse forms of, 40, 44, 56 progression: characterological, 21, 49, 78; temporal, 20; narrative, 80 Proust, Marcel: Egan as inspired by, 14–15, 30, 73, 101; novel characters who align with, 94– 95, 102, 112, 141n5; epigraphs by, 16, 32– 33; Genette on, 19, 144n31, 149n10, 151n23 Proustian, 33, 36, 94 Pulitzer Prize, 30, 89, 139n3 Pulp Fiction (film), 15 punk: fans of, 14, 117, 120– 21, 128, 152n9; fashion, 121 (see also Mohawk); feminist potential of, 122, 153n11 (see also RiotGrrrl); male-dominated, 122, 124; music genre, 1, 5, 6, 12, 116–18, 119, 123– 24, 134; musicians, 14; post-, 90

purity, 58, 75, 116–18, 124, 126 Pynchon, Thomas, 152n7 radio, 3 Ralph Lauren (corporation), 81 realism, 115. See also fiction; literary modes records, 1, 14, 41–44, 50, 56, 59, 62, 76 reels, 1. See also film relic, 10, 43, 50, 51, 52 repetition, 22, 45, 49 residual, 8, 45, 66 retrospect, 26 RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), 42 Ricoeur, Paul, 16, 17 Riot Grrrl (movement), 124, 153n11 rock: albums of, 133; amateur musicians of, 132; fans of, 117; fiction as an analogue for, 12; music genre of, 2, 5, 8, 100–101, 116–18, 128; other art genres versus, 7, 12, 33; “rock novel,” 141n2, 146n21, 149n8; rock stars, 18, 22, 39, 50, 135; sexism of, 122 Roman, 52, 87, 110, 133 Romantic, 33, 70, 144n32 Rosen, Jeremy, 143n23 Rosenthal, Jesse, 152n4 Roth, Philip, 143n27 Rubin, Gayle, 125

170 = Index

ruins, 52, 100. See also decay; loss; Pompeii; preservation San Francisco, 6, 14, 18, 60 San Francisco Chronicle (newspaper), 115 scars, 52–56, 87 Schine, Cathleen, 16 Scott, Walter, 17 sculpture, 7, 70, 91– 92, 110–113, 116, 129, 135– 36. See also visual art Semisonic (band), 103 Serpell, C. Namwali, 152n7 Serra, Richard, 102 sequence, 21 sexism, 122, 124– 25. See also #MeToo; punk Sex Pistols (band), 119, 122 shame, 71; aging as a source of, 17; art’s power as an analog for, 92– 93; feminine versus masculine, 122; fiction as a narration of, 77; private moments as a source of, 50, 71, 79–84, 86, 99; stealing as a source of, 48, 68, 71– 73 Shannon, Claude, 62 silver albums, 41. See also gold albums Sleepers (band), 60, 119 Slits (band), 153n11 smartphone, 63, 65

social media, 49, 66, 99, 129, 130, 153n15. See also Facebook; Twitter solar panels, 35, 36, 37, 103, 104. See also environmental; ecological Sopranos, The (television show), 15, 30 Spin (magazine), 25 Spiotta, Dana, 145–46n12 Spotify, 3, 5, 59, 62, 63, 140n6, 147n26 Stone Arabia (Spiotta), 145–46n12 storing, 39, 40, 51, 56, 57, 58, 63, 64, 66; novel as aesthetic form of, 59 success: lifetime of, 16, 25– 26, 81; memorialization as, 43, 48, 64; music industry, 14, 25, 41, 80–81, 117, 133; narrative representations of, 20, 93 suicide, 50, 51, 53, 55, 125, 145–46n12 talisman, 2, 137 tape, 60, 109. See also mixtape Tarantino, Quentin, 14 Technicolor, 108– 9. See also film, aesthetics of Telegraph Avenue (Chabon), 143n29, 146n21 television, 30, 49, 50, 62 texting, 126– 28 Thackeray, William, 114, 152n4

Index = 171

time: aesthetic representation of, 101, 144n32; echoes across, 52, 87–88, 92–93; fiction’s ability to reverse or undo, 16, 24–27, 29, 32, 38, 144n31; fiction’s compression and dilation of, 19, 31; fiction’s leaps and jumps of, 14, 31–32, 36, 80, 88, 115, 125; fiction’s stopping and resisting of, 29, 31–34, 38, 48, 91; forward movement of, 11, 15, 20, 31, 79; genres defined by their relationships to, 20, 87; irreversibility of, 23, 25, 33, 36, 38, 57, 70; memory’s backward loops of, 11, 79–80, 121–22, 134; modern (industrial), 12; narrative gaps in, 15, 88, 115, 151n23; overlaps of, 87–88; passing of, 12, 23–27, 36, 94, 98, 101, 107, 121, 151n23; readerly experience of, 12, 26; scales of, 32, 35; sensation of static, 20–21, 41, 79, 125; single moments of, 11, 57, 88–89; spans of, 26, 57, 77, 85, 87, 90, 115 time’s arrow, 16, 29, 33 time travel, 16, 33, 36, 148n33. See also wormhole token, 2, 39, 43 Tokyo, 14 tool, 46–47. See also objects tragedy, 22, 33, 71, 87, 94, 102, 105; post-9/11, 134

trajectories, 26 trauma, 23, 71, 78; sexual, 126 Tribeca, New York, 32, 58 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 15 turning point, 20, 25 Twin Towers, 91– 92, 100 Twitter, 65, 96– 97 Ulysses (Joyce), 11 Ulysses (mythic figure), 19 uncanny, 81, 89, 92, 103 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Beecher Stowe), 29 University of Pennsylvania, 64, 153n12 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 82 VCR (videocassette recorder), 2 Victorian, 7, 28, 82, 114, 152n4 Village Voice, 3 visual art, 7, 102, 128– 29; Italian, 110–13, 133, 135– 36; literature and music versus, 48, 116. See also sculpture vinyl: cultural shift away from, 31, 56, 59– 60, 62, 64, 146n21, 147n26; displaying, 42; fond memories of, 1, 25, 63; novel form as an analogue for, 143n29; scarring as an analog for, 52. See also LP (long playing) records; records Vox (magazine), 115

172 = Index

Walkman (media player), 109 Wallace, David Foster, 74– 75 Warhol, Andy, 119 Waverley (Scott), 18 Williams, Ricky, 119 Wood, James, 67 Woodstock, 133 World Trade Center, 88, 102 World War II, 115 wormhole, 31, 57

“Young Americans” (song), 100 youth: age versus, 28– 29, 35, 56–57, 87; fiction’s power to restore, 24, 112–13; illusions of, 23– 24; memory’s recapturing of, 16; music’s appeal to, 12, 118 Zuckerberg, Mark, 49