“A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan

“There’s just something about us that can’t be known…” is an approximate quote I pulled from Jennifer Egan’s Google interview, from 15 years ago, for the promotion of this book. I finished it last night, at the kid’s primary-colored table, at my local Barnes, and it was very satisfying. I really loved it, every story felt like a distinct movie that I could see. It even makes me want to storyboard each scene like I’m “in prep” for an imaginary movie, that only I could direct. Maybe, I could sell it. It’s amazingly relevant because it feels like a book that represents the experience of doomscrolling, which now I imagine everyone is experiencing at one time or another. Sometimes, I’m on YouTube for reasons that seem harmless, but after 2 hours, I’m in a grumpy haze, affected by all the overstimulation. The novel isn’t an argument against technology, though. It feels more like a beautiful reminder that humanity persists, no matter what changes in the world. Time is called a goon only a few times in the book. A goon that kicks your ass, and either you lay down from your defeat from it, or by some random luck, of possibly your own creation, you get the chance to fight back. When the goon shows up, he presses pause on the lives of these characters, like a pause in a song that you’re not sure has ended yet, and who’s’ stories link to each other in inexplicable ways. These characters’ stories are like songs I’m shuffling through. Like a literary version of a music app’s feed, where people passionate about music get to be funny, tragic, and transparently real.

Part of its cinematic feel, is that it’s very romantic and sexy, reminding me of scenes from Luca Guadagnino’s movies. The back of the book has a reviewer call her writing here romantic. The book has a bird’s eye view of many different characters, at different points in their relationships. In an interview, Jennifer Egan says she was exploring the ways technology and the music industry are changing and how those changes are affecting youth culture. She says that students at NYU were talking about how they felt like “dinosaurs” compared to 14 year olds, because of the gap in experience with technology. Which I definitely relate to, I didn’t have a phone as a kid and couldn’t watch TV from my room. So, I really, really loved this book and related to its time/existential quality. Weird, how tech changes our perception of time. It felt like a coming-of-age story, but from the perspective of people at different points in their self-discovery, navigating their complicated inner worlds as adults, or as kids almost projecting themselves into adulthood. There’s a line in there, after we’ve jumped in time, where one of our protagonists tells another that, “Nothing’s happened, you’ve just grown up, like all of us.” That felt very powerful at the end of the novel, after all the jumping in time, through different snapshots of peoples’ private-est moments. Instead of this jaded, cynical feeling in my chest, that I could get after hours on Instagram, Egan affirmed my spacey perspective, on my life’s imperfections, as magically normal. For me, all our stories, in their likeness to each other, and shortness on the internet, can feel null, marking their value as meaningless at times. But, this line and the end of the novel, comforted me that not everything about us can be completely codified, digitized, or binary. It can’t all be predicted and known from the blue-lit displays of screens.

It reminded me of my own relationship to Instagram. After hours of phone scrolling, sometimes I feel I’ve witnessed the entire scope of human existence in mere hours. From 30 sec. clips, I assume peoples’ whole journeys. Happy, sad, depressed, Babies, weddings, death, tragedy, fear, anxiety, love, sex, it’s all there to experience, with mirror neurons, in easily, one hour. What feels most unlike the book, is when the videos misrepresent the urgency with which I’m seeing them. Some come to my feed after 6 months to a year of their original posting. Other people have already seen these clips. These sometimes add to the dread of the internet. Everything I witnessed has already ended, passed, has been dealt with or accepted. All without me having seen it. Worlds I can not ever experience. I remember seeing a reel of a drug addicted perfume critic, in which he’s peddling some perfume in oversized expensive clothing, around much younger people, with commenters talking about his physical appearance being different. They commented how these obvious changes were probably linked to his rise in party and drug content. Then the following week, another post from this same influencer, in much better shape, much healthier-seeming, and commenters glad to see he had changed his ways. In my going back to his page, I realized the two posts were six months apart. I felt so deeply unsatisfied with my experience of his life, truncated by so much editing, that I assumed it misrepresented his authentic life’s story. Frustrated, I used my own lens of addiction and recovery, to judge whether his posts were valuable or not. In a way, it made me feel like his journey through life was more insignificant than his main profession of perfume critiquing. Maybe, it is. Maybe the internet’s many uses exclude clear boundaries. I felt hurt, weirdly. Like my time was wasted by someone’s posts that felt tragic, in their implications, but that were more vapid in their taking up space and time on my phone. Maybe, I was looking too deeply for something that doesn’t exist. A lot of meaning, purpose, and validation has to come from within me, not from everyone else’s life. But, how could I not be drawn in by the story of this influencer, who physically seemed in need of help. In a few 30 sec. clips, without a clear start-to-finish, or correct chronology of events, like documentation, it was hard to believe that his reels were actually honest or accurate. Maybe I shouldn’t have assumed he cared about his life’s value beyond perfume. His life, from my phone, was more like a flier for his business, on a cork board full of hundreds of others’ fliers.

This isn’t always happening to me, to be honest. On Instagram, I can feel like I’ve been transported into space, like a satellite, communicating back to Earth, wirelessly, to a fly-on-the-wall version of myself, where I can buzz into every nook and cranny that holds the tiny experiences of Earth. At their most effective, reels connect to my deepest personal moments, in ways that make me laugh and cry. But lately, too many reels/shorts leave me deeply unsatisfied. Too many videos, in general, can do this. That’s the gamble, but enough times, I close my phone feeling lost. And this book, in a way, was telling me that it understood that, that the characters felt just as lost. In its time-travel from the 70’s to the future, I felt reassured that in my tiny pursuit, of my life’s success, no matter the outcome, I would still feel the otherworldly sensation of being alive. No matter the amount of omniscient human eye contact online, whatever limitation to the amount of eyes closest to me. No numerical value of my failures/moments of ignorance could encapsulate the invigorating experience of life moving forward into a new future. The potential for my own redemption or self-discovery. A visit from the goon squad is the visit from those people who tie you down to your past, hopefully connecting you to your future self. These visits are like musical pauses in one’s journey, shifting them from one profound moment towards another, until the end of their life. Which like a song, is humming-ly beautiful.

Rolling Ferro