The National Book Critics Circle 2010 Fiction Awardee, Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad"

The National Book Critics Circle today announced that Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squadis its winner of the best fiction award for 2010.

Though I found the book very entertaining and possessing considerable structural bravura, it suggest to me that panache is a thing of which it is possible to have too much. It is certainly structurally daring, jumping around over the course of 40 or more years among those in the music business, and public relations, plus children who grow up or grow down from chapter to chapter. The chapters are not marked with place and time, though occasionally there is internal evidence in the form of age specifications. It is generally easier to tell which of four continents a chapter is set on (though I may be mistaken that a dictator rules in South America).

The "goon squad" which roughs up all the characters is time. Time may proceed relentlessly, but the book is anything but linear, with chapters (thirteen in all) going back and forth. The last chapter only sort of closes the circle, unlike the elegant linkages in Joan Silber's story chains (in Ideas of Heaven and The Size of the World) . Reaching the end, I am particularly disappointed to have learned nothing of the "suicide tour" of a bloated has-been, Bosco, and his publicist, Jules Jones a celebrity journalist who went to prison for attempted rape in Central Park of a young actress, Kitty Jackson, he was interviewing.

To my surprise, Kitty reappears, her star having gone out, as a PR prop to soften the image of the general (dictator) though up by Stephanie, Jules's sister, who had also fallen from success by scalding the rich and famous. Kitty both plays her photo-op part very well and takes daring risks by asking the general where the bodies are buried (and more).

There are many other characters, including a Berkeley anthropology graduate student who accompanied producer Benny's mentor Lou to Africa along with some of his punk-rock musicians, one of whom is mauled by a lioness, Benny's indispensable assistant, the kleptomaniac Sasha. Earlier, Benny and Scott played bass and guitar players for a band the name of which epinions bans. Their paths having diverged for decades (Scott is a janitor, Benny a mogul), they meet again years later, with Scott giving Benny a striped bass he caught in the East River.

A plot summary would take too much of the magic (which may depend partly on frustration about who the characters are, where, and when in the openings of the chapters; one in which at least the who is clear is a 70-page-long Power Point presentation. I have to say that I have not encountered so elaborate a post-narrative device before in a novel (if that's what the book is) though I'd add that I found it tedious a third of the way through (the chapter, not the book!).

There is a lot of wreckage of careers (some of them vocations) and of relationships among the characters. Benny, for instance, already has six children by three different wives when he demands and receives oral servicing by one of the members of the band at the Mabuhey Gardens (in San Francisco) in the first chapter. The book occasionally requires steely suspension of disbelief (if not at the first gig or that one of the band members would get out of the van to go up close to a pride of lions or the "parrots" of the near-future).

Though rock stars, movie starlet, and publicists are easy targets to satirize, Egan makes even some quite reprehensible characters understandable if not quite sympathetic. It is a wild ride that I mostly enjoyed, though I would have appreciated space-time markers for the chapters. There is frequent reference to getting from point A to point B. Given the non-(anti-?)chronological order of the book, it seems to me that there are at least thirteen points, and Egan could have supplied a letter indicating the chronological point for each chapter (the first is definitely not A).

BTW, Egan, who was born in Chicago in 1962 and lives in Brooklyn was a finalist for the National Book Award a decade ago for her second novel, Look at Me. (The previous time, the prize went to Johnathan Frantzen, who was nominated again this time).