A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
"Familiar things fall back over me like the softest, oldest blanket. I start to cry."
A Visit From the Goon Squad was published in 2010. I was eight years old. I was just beginning to develop my existential and borderline unhealthy relationship with time. I learned that many of the stars we see in the night sky are already dead. I kept looking at the stars in an attempt to travel through time. I thought that if I could just understand time, then I could defeat it, that I could somehow pause its relentless march forward. But time, as Jennifer Egan writes, "is a goon."
Fourteen years after it was published, I finally got around to reading this novel. And I'm so glad I did.
The novel tells several different parts of the same overarching story spanning 40 years. Unforgivable characters grow up, grow even more detestable, and then somehow, you are left with no choice but to forgive them, and sometimes even envy their capacity for self-discovery. The novel begins by telling the story of Sasha, an assistant a record label in New York City, and a kleptomaniac. Then we see Bennie, her boss, about fifteen years earlier, a teenage punk rocker in San Francisco. As the story unfolds, the interconnectedness of their lives leaves the reader wondering if there really is such a thing as fate.
Toward the end of the book, a family member of Sasha's writes, "Familiar things fall back over me like the softest, warmest blanket. I start to cry." Egan's novel weaves a cast of unpredictable and sometimes unlovable characters into the warmest, softest blanket. The experiences of each character feel familiar, even though I have never been in a punk band, nor have I done PR for a murderous dictator. In one chapter I am reminded of my childhood, when everything felt straight forward, and in the next I feel the full weight of an unknown future. But through these characters, I know I am not alone.
I am comforted knowing that I am not the first person in the world to feel doubt or fear. I am not the first person to be afraid of the unknown but dissatisfied with the present. I am not the only person who has ever felt like a victim of time. I am embraced by all the people who have made it through doubt and fear and anger and uncertainty, and who have found meaning despite time's relentless ticking. The blanket of the human condition is familiar, and it keeps me warm.
