A Visit from the Goon Squad

Bennie Salazar, an elderly former punk musician and record entrepreneur, and Sasha, the passionate, unstable young woman he hires, are the subjects of Jennifer Egan's captivating interwoven storylines. While the reader is never made aware of Bennie and Sasha's pasts, they are revealed to them in great detail, along with the hidden lives of several other individuals whose paths cross with theirs over a lengthy period of time in places as diverse as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Kenya.

When we first see Sasha, she is in her mid-thirties and sitting on the sofa of her therapist in New York City, facing her long-standing theft urge. Eventually, we witness her as the kid of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, and last as a college student attempting to stop her best friend's suicide thoughts, which reveals the origins of her suffering. We delve into the inner desires and disappointments of her uncle, an art scholar trapped in an unhappy marriage. He flies to Naples to free Sasha from the city's demimonde, and while gazing at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice at the Museo Nazionale, he has his own revelation. In 1979, when Bennie Salazar was at his most impressionable, he was shy and sensitive, reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he rediscovers his love for rock and roll and his talent for spotting. We meet him at the melancholy low point of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house. We find out what happened to his high school crew, who succeeded and who failed. We also meet Lou Kline, Bennie's very reckless mentor, and the lovers and kids he left behind after his wild success and rapid decline.

The novel A Visit from the Goon Squad explores the relationship between time and music, survival, and the stirrings and changes that are uncontrollably sparked by even the briefest meeting of our destiny. Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we must all either master or succumb to, the fundamental human hunger for redemption, and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progression of time—in the evocative realms of art and music in an astounding array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint. Clever, shocking, thrilling work from one of our most audacious authors.