The shallow and meretricious world of the music industry’s players, publicists and producers is a brave subject for a novelist. Is it possible for pop culture to be rendered timeless? In her latest novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan unpicks the boom-and-bust nature of the struggle to hit the big score. And for a book that addresses the fragile nature of a world complicated by hype, she arrives from America surrounded by lots of it.
Nominated for a clutch of awards, Egan is one of only a handful of women who have appeared on the cover of The New York Times Book Review as well as on the bestseller list: she has pinned the mass and literary market in one hit. The book has been praised as “genre-defying”.
Egan, a self-proclaimed “adventurer”, likes to dabble with form and subject. Her first novel, The Invisible Circus, was a Bildungsroman set in post-flower-power San Francisco, and her 2006 story within a story, The Keep, was a Gothic thriller. This novel is the pure embodiment of pop culture; one almost feels that its lean and kaleidoscopic structure arises from a fear of being boring.
Spanning several continents and about 50 years, it comprises 13 loosely interlinked chapters, each focusing on a different character and each using knowingly diverse techniques. She deploys first, second, third and omniscient narration as if she is ticking them off a list, as well as experimenting with new media — a magazine feature chapter mocking the fame and infamy of personality journalism via a modern-day Raskolnikov and another made up of 74 pages of PowerPoint. So is this stylistic razzle-dazzle all it’s cracked up to be or does it reflect too closely the stunts pulled in the world that she has chosen to explore? If it does seem a little like a series of creative-writing exercises, Egan is certainly a master of all. There is no flatness of tone and the restless, breathless nods to reinvention suit the subject. The act of reading is akin to being a social butterfly; look over your shoulder at someone else in the story and you’re likely to meet them in a later chapter, out of context. The downside is that it wears cleverness, rather than heart, on its sleeve.
The characters around which all others orbit are Bennie Salazar and Sasha. Bennie’s a former punk rocker and fading big-shot producer hoping to recapture his sexual prowess by sprinkling gold flakes into his coffee and listening to dated punk songs. But, dropped from his own record label, divorced and alienated from his tweenage son, the reality is that “he was nothing — a guy on a john looking up at the nauseated face of a woman he’d wanted to impress”. Sasha, his assistant, crops up at various stages, first as a kleptomaniac, then as a prostitute in Naples and later, in her daughter’s PowerPoint narrative, as a mother of two. But these episodes snatched from different times in their lives estrange rather than connect. Perhaps that’s the point. But this interlinking short-story format better suits the peripheral characters who are symptoms of, rather than tied to, this indefinite reality.
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One of the stranger chapters follows a shamed PR girl, La Doll, whose attempt to wow guests at a party leads to ornamental trays of hot oil pouring from the ceiling and blistering the B-listers below. Left to ponder her mistakes in a futile moment of wisdom, she realises that “she’d overlooked a seismic shift — had conceived of an event crystallising an era that had already passed. For a publicist, there could be no greater failure. She deserved her oblivion.” In all chapters, success is lost at its inception. Now a washed-up spin doctor, La Doll accepts a job from someone she considers more despicable than she — a Gaddafi-like dictator — and attempts to rebrand him as a benevolent man of the people.
Egan knows how people can be bent out of shape by the need to stay young and relevant, as well as the desire to be “a somebody” in the digital age. It’s an urge that seems to attract and repel her in equal measure, but she has an uncanny grasp of its machinations and handles it with aplomb. There might be prescience here, too.
The book surely owes its title to Fashion, David Bowie’s prophetic anthem ridiculing the slavish following of trends. Egan has forecasts of her own: the last chapter, set in the near future, envisages “Starfish”, or kiddie handsets that enable toddlers to download music. “These babies had not only revived a dead industry,” says a hapless promoter, “but become the arbiters of musical success. Bands had no choice but to reinvent themselves for the preverbal.”
Let’s hope that this prediction doesn’t add to Egan’s tally: she included intimations of MySpace and YouTube in her 2002 novel Look at Me, while The Keep concerned a hipster desperate to be permanently connected to the internet long before our obsession with round-the-clock status updates.
Timing in the music business is crucial, but Egan is as intrigued by the link between time and music. For a novel about ageing, or burning out, the clearest engagement with music comes from Sasha’s unborn daughter. In the future Alison and her brother obsessively listen for pauses in songs, plotting graphs to measure the “Relationship of Pause-Length to Haunting Power”. They know that music is a portal to the past or a way of briefly escaping time. This is the betrayal and infinite purity of music; its ability to immerse you in timelessness before reminding you of the ticking clock. “The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”
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This polyphonic novel listens in on the pauses in people’s lives, the brief moments in which they dare to believe in their own hype. But while the book is a clever and captivating celebration of novelty, with pathos beneath the surface, there isn’t anything particularly new about that.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan Corsair, £11.99, 336pp. To buy this book for £10.79 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134.