OceanofPDF - Com A Visit From The Goon Squad Reread - Ivan Kreilkamp

A Vi s i t f ro m t h e
Goon Squad Reread

RE R EA DI N GS
REREADINGS
EDITED BY NICHOLAS DAMES AND JENNY DAVIDSON
Short and accessible books by scholars, writers, and critics, each one revis-
iting a favorite post-1970 novel from the vantage point of the now. Taking
a look at novels both celebrated and neglected, the series aims to display
the full range of the possibilities of criticism, with books that experiment
with form, voice, and method in an attempt to find different paths among
scholarship, theory, and creative writing.
Vineland Reread, Thomas Coviello

A Visit from
the Goon Squad
REREAD
I VAN KREIL KAM P
COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y PRESS
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kreilkamp, Ivan, author.
Title: A visit from the goon squad reread / Ivan Kreilkamp.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] |
Series: Rereadings | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020034843 (print) | LCCN 2020034844
(ebook) | ISBN 9780231187107 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) |
ISBN 9780231187114 (trade paperback ; acid-free paper) |
ISBN 9780231547017 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Egan, Jennifer. Visit from the goon squad. |
Rock music in literature. | Mass media and literature. |
Time perception in literature. | Memory in literature.
Classification: LCC PS3555.G292 V57357 2021 (print) | LCC
PS3555.G292 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54— dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2020034843
LC ebook record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2020034844
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

Cover illustration: Jessica W. Schwartz
To S, C, & I, again
CONT ENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Intro/bonus track: When Art Dematerialized 1
Side A, track 1: Time’s a Goon: From A to B 11
Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation,

Memory, Recording 39
Side B, track 3: Failure, Shame,

Tragedy, Emptiness 71
Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity,

Gender, Authenticity 108
Notes 139
Bibliography 155
Index 161
AC K N OWLED GMENTS
It’s exciting to be part of the new Rereadings series, and I am

especially grateful to the series editors, Nicholas Dames and
Jenny Davidson: first, for encouraging me to submit a proposal
to the series and, then, for their amazingly attentive, encourag-
ing, and insightful advice on the manuscript. Nick and Jenny’s
copiously detailed responses, to more than one draft, were mod-
els of sympathetic and rigorous editorial attention; to benefit
from such hands-on—in the best way—series editors is nothing
to be taken for granted. I am also grateful to Florence Dore and
to two other anonymous readers for the press for their detailed,
generous commentary and advice. Thanks also to Jennifer
Fleissner for an encouraging read of an early draft. All of these
readers helped me immeasurably as I worked to sort out exactly
what kind of book this would be: with this new series, an espe-
cially open-ended question.
I am also very grateful to senior editor Philip Leventhal, edi-
torial assistant Monique Briones, copyeditor Robert Fellman,
and the rest of the team at Columbia University Press, who per-
formed the final work of turning this into a book with patience
and dedication, under extraordinary pandemic conditions. Thanks
x = Acknowledgments
also to my graduate student Jordan Bunzel for some help pre-

paring the manuscript.
My thanks and appreciation to the College Arts and Human-
ities Institute and the New Frontiers in Arts and Humanities
program, both at Indiana University, Bloomington, for two
course releases that gave me time to write, and thanks also to the
Global Popular Music symposium, part of the Mellon-funded
Platform initiative at Indiana, for stimulating conversations about
pop music as I completed this book. I’d also like to thank Sharon
Marcus and Public Books for, starting almost a decade ago, giving
me a space to explore the kind of public critical writing that this
book also represents.
And thanks once again to Sarah, Celie, and Iris for all of
their support and good company.
A Vi s i t f ro m t h e
Goon Squad Reread
Intro/bonus track
W H E N A RT D EMAT ER I A LIZED
A
rt used to possess weight, presence, gravity. You could
touch it, hold it in your hands, feel its presence near
you. For anyone of my generation—I was born in the
late 1960s—books and records and film, writing and music,
always took some particular physical form: paperbacks whose
cover art conveyed coded signals and whose scuffs and marks
were traces of previous owners; big, glossy vinyl LPs that could
warp or scratch and that you had to carry home on the bus
under your arm, place carefully on your turntable, and lower the
needle onto before you heard the first note; film reels spinning—
and occasionally catching or breaking—in hidden projection
booths at the movie theater. These all were things in the (my,
our) world: tangible, visible, present, vulnerable to accident,
attached to specific locations in time and space; sensuous objects
combining language, image, sound, touch in idiosyncratic ways;
taken and marked up by audiences and consumers. When I think
of my most meaningful teenage aesthetic experiences in the
1980s, I think of things (literally things) like the punk mixtape
my friend George made me in 1983 (Minor Threat, Black Flag,
Bad Brains)—I can picture the aggressive band names in his
messy scrawl on the cassette’s label—books I took from my
2 = Intro/bonus track
parents’ shelves or bought at the many used bookstores—all of

which have now become either banks or imported-sneaker
emporiums—lodged into cramped warrens in and around Har-
vard Square, bearing the inscriptions of previous owners and
readers (specific copies are vivid in my mind: Walker Percy’s The
Moviegoer with a photobooth montage of a man’s head on the
cover, a battered 1960s Penguin edition of Jane Eyre with my
mother’s student notes in the margin); film experiences that,
because we did not yet own a VCR, were always excursions
into the shared spaces of theaters, each one—the Brattle, the
Orson Welles, the Harvard Square Theater, the Coolidge Cor-
ner, and the bad, generic mall theaters, too—with its own spe-
cific atmosphere.
We wanted to possess artworks, or at least metonymic tokens
of them, not as commodities bearing economic value but as tal-
ismans, artifacts, proofs that we were there—like the ticket
stubs from rock shows and baseball games at Fenway Park that
I kept in a fragrant old cigar box. Now that art has become
increasingly dematerialized, out there nowhere in servers and
clouds, I can still remember the feeling of all of that predigital
art: the pressure and presence and weight of it, the pleasure of
touching and holding it. And from our vantage point after the
data-compression revolution of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, I can also now recognize the profound
losslessness of all of that art: its sheer, inefficient abundance of
original, uncompressible data, unlost.1
And all of this was also true of criticism. My experiences
of film and music (less true for me of literature until some-
what later) were always mediated, it seemed, by criticism and
interpretation—also embodied in particular material forms. I’d
devour Pauline Kael’s brash film commentary, somewhat incon-
gruously housed in the slick pages of the New Yorker, filled with
When Art Dematerialized = 3
luxury ads for jewelry and perfume— copies of which piled up

in the bathroom magazine rack until my parents would cart a
year’s worth to my grandparents’ in Maine in August—those
issues often to remain in the cabin for years until eventually
used for kindling. And I used to visit the Cambridge Public
Library to leaf through week-old copies of the Village Voice for
Robert Christgau’s “Consumer Guide” columns and the rest of
the pop music and arts coverage—the vividness of its profane,
ridiculously insider debates inextricable from the thick layers of
pulpy newsprint pages they spilled out of, the issues bloated by
the NYC real estate and massage-parlor ads that subsidized
them. (We never realized just how precariously an entire bohe-
mian way of life rested upon an economic base of apartment ads
until Craigslist laid waste to it all.) Later, in my early twenties,
seeing my own first Village Voice record review in a copy I’d
picked up at midnight on a corner newsstand in Manhattan— of
an album by the indie band the Go-Betweens, named after L. P.
Hartley’s 1953 novel—probably remains my single most thrilling
appearance in print. Amazing to see commuters on the subway
holding and reading that very issue that week!—I was tempted
to tap them on the shoulder to point out my byline, though I
would surely have been disappointed to discover how few cared
whatsoever about the obscure Australian band’s best-of.
Well, as Hartley’s The Go-Between famously declares—
the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
Am I overstating and catastrophizing the difference between
then—“life before phone,” as Madonna recently put it 2—and
now? This all may sound, especially to anyone younger than I
am, like the melodramatic lament of a sad Gen-Xer in midlife
crisis. After all, did music coming out of my radio have a “physi-
cal” manifestation back then, any more than it does now when
I listen to Spotify on my laptop speakers? How much does it
really matter to my experience that, in movie theaters now—

pre-pandemic, anyway—I am watching digital projections
rather than actual film? (I probably can’t reliably tell the differ-
ence.) And although I own a Kindle, I still mostly read paper
books. Granted—nostalgia and aging and fear of what is hap-
pening to the planet are all likely tipping the scales of my
memories. But all of my LPs and CDs are boxed up in the base-
ment, and something has surely changed as art has become
increasingly untethered and released into the clouds and streams.
I’m occasionally struck by a panicked sense that we’ve given up
something important—too much—as we’ve allowed nearly all
writing and art to be dissolved and compressed into what can
feel like one enormous immaterial digital stream into which we
all wade in and out at will.
= = =
I love Jennifer Egan’s 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I see
it as one of the quintessential early twenty-first-century works
of American fiction, for the ways that it articulates and responds
to this sense of loss—the ways it makes that loss, or the fear of
it, the occasion for its own creative response.3 Egan’s fiction has
long been preoccupied with a sense that, as a character in an
earlier novel puts it, “the world of objects was gone”; things,
“objects existing in time and space,” “lost their allure genera-
tions ago.”4 Goon Squad is a melancholy, elegiac, but also joyous
meditation on fiction, art, and time, one that is preoccupied
with the question of what has happened to aesthetic experience
as art has shed its physical forms or rendered them always tem-
porary and contingent, digitized and dematerialized them, shifted
them into the algorithmic cloud. (And perhaps, among other
things, the novel is also a late baby-boomer’s midlife lament:
Egan was born a few years before I was, in the earlier 1960s, and
she published the novel in her late forties.)
The novel’s thirteen chapters are organized into an A- and
a B-side; Egan has commented that this organization of the
novel is
an homage to a form that’s sadly gone—the LP, even the CD.

Now we buy music in this atomized way which I find sad
from the point of view of the musicians, because now they’re
unable to conceive of large visions and have the general public
engage with them on those visions. They can only sell their
vision in defragmented form. Who sees the whole thing? I
found that poignant, and since the book is so much about
time and change, it’s a poignancy that seemed apt.5
The novel is suffused by a fear that aesthetic experience, as

we used to know it, has been irrevocably transformed, down-
sized, rendered inauthentic and immaterial. We might even call
the 2010 Goon Squad a “novel of the Spotify era”— after the ser-
vice that, beginning in 2008, marked an epochal, final (so far)
turn in the dematerialization of music, in the shift to stream-
ing.6 The possibility of meaningful aesthetic experience and of
realized “large visions” is most often sought, in Egan’s novel, in
music, either recorded or live (but certainly not streaming),
especially the rock or punk music that most of its characters
listen to, create, or promote, which has the capacity to tap some
zone of purely somatic response: “These sensations met with a
faculty deeper . . . than judgment or even pleasure; they com-
muned directly with his body, whose shivering, bursting reply
made him dizzy.” 7
Music’s capacity for such overwhelmingly embodied effects
is especially associated with the performances of one of the
novel’s main characters, Scotty Hausmann. We’re first intro-

duced to Scotty in chapter 3, narrated by his friend Rhea,
describing a few eventful weeks in the lives of their group of
teenage friends in San Francisco, where Egan also grew up, at
the end of 1979. Scotty is an Orpheus figure, an artist whose
transcendent music enthralls all listeners. The Orpheus legend,
as told by Ovid, pits the “true harmony” of Orpheus’s voice and
lyre against the “hideous discords” and noise of those who
attack and kill him with spears and stones.8 The novel, however,
projects this distinction between harmony and disharmony into
two different kinds of performances by Scotty. Rhea’s chapter
culminates with the altogether (and intentionally) disharmoni-
ous performance, at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens, of the
Flaming Dildos, the amateurish punk band formed by Scotty
and another friend, Bennie, with their friends Rhea and Jocelyn
cowriting the songs: “People are slam-dancing hard, the kind of
slam-dancing that’s basically fighting. . . . Then one of the gar-
bage throwers tries to storm the stage, but Scotty kicks him in
the chest with the flat of his boot—there’s a kind of gasp from
the crowd as the guy flies back. Scotty’s smiling now, grinning
like I almost never see him grin, with teeth flashing, and I real-
ize that, out of all of us, Scotty is the truly angry one” (52). Part
of what punk represents to Scotty and Rhea and their friends—
and what it meant to me, too—is sheer irrefutable authenticity
of emotion, whether positive or negative, felt bodily.
But if Scotty’s anger is pure and potent, he can also, in a
more Orphic mode, play beautifully: “On warm days, Scotty
plays his guitar. Not the electric he uses for Flaming Dildo
gigs, but a lap steel guitar that you hold a different way. Scotty
actually built this instrument: bent the wood, glued it, painted
on the shellac. Everyone gathers around, there’s no way not to
when Scotty plays” (41). Whether in rage-filled discord or in
pastoral harmony, Scotty’s music is always emphatically present,

and it seems to embody a receding ideal of aesthetic authentic-
ity within the novel: one that sometimes can (still) kick you
right in the chest. What is particular to rock music, the novel
implies— compared to other aesthetic forms such as sculpture,
visual art, or literature—is the way it reveals an especially wide
gap between a moment of live/embodied performance and the
music’s recording in physical form. Egan turns to music in part, I
think, for the possibility it offers, through live performance, of
completely transcending a felt diminishment in contemporary
art’s transformation into an object or artifact.
But whereas Goon Squad is a novel about music, set largely in
and around the late twentieth/early twenty-first-century rock
music industry, its musical contexts serve an allegorical func-
tion, as well. The novel’s rock-music world also serves as an
occasion for broader thinking about the role of art—and spe-
cifically the novel—in contemporary culture. Goon Squad often
seems to be indirectly considering the state of the novel in its
diminishment, in an age in which the form has long surren-
dered or lost much of the cultural authority it once possessed.
Egan, who wrote an introduction for a recent edition of George
Eliot’s monumental Middlemarch, commented in an interview
in 2017 that “I’m obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can’t help
it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways
I’m not sure it is now.”9 Goon Squad seems to wonder whether, in
any art form but certainly including the novel, “large visions,”
received by a “general public” and graspable as powerful
“wholes,” are still achievable. Or has art been entirely reduced,
“compressed,” commodified, and sliced into small pieces for
easier transmission and consumption?
Egan, a well-informed student of the history of the novel as
a form, seems to explore the question of whether prose fiction
can maintain its long-time cultural role as the provider of an

up-to-date history of the present. The novel once embodied the
new and the news; today it is more often associated with a
receding, predigital, print past. I read Goon Squad as a novel
that is self-consciously about the late stage of the novel form, even
if it may seem to displace much of that “aboutness” onto another
art form, that of rock music. That displacement from fiction to
music can be read as possessing multiple valences, some of them
contradictory. The displacement could offer a kind of solace
(the novel isn’t the only art form whose influence is waning!);
it could imply envy (for the slightly more contemporary if also
increasingly residual glamour of the music industry); it
could be an attempt to feel a more collective elegiac mood or
to think through the general conditions of artistic decline. But
I do not think that one can properly understand what Egan is
doing in this novel without grappling with this fundamental
indirection or displacement.
There’s a wonderful moment late in Goon Squad that can be
read as making an oblique comment on the ways that we per-
ceive both nature and art in a context of their diminishment
and vulnerability. The scene occurs in a chapter set in a near-
future New York City of the 2020s, one in which the last rem-
nants of light and air are gradually being monetized as preserves
for the ultrawealthy. This seems to be broadly true for the city as
a whole but is particularly so for the modest apartment of Alex
and Rebecca and their daughter, Cara-Ann:
When [Alex] stood close to the middle window and looked

straight up, he could see the top of the Empire State Build-
ing, lit tonight in red and gold. This wedge of view had been a
selling point. . . . Alex and Rebecca had planned to sell the
apartment when she got pregnant, then learned that the squat
building their own overlooked had been bought by a devel-

oper who planned to raze it and build a skyscraper that would
seal off their air and light. The apartment became impossible
to sell.
This situation is, in one sense, an obvious disaster and an impov-

erishment. Yet Egan focuses on a curious effect of Alex’s loss:
And now, two years later, the skyscraper had at last begun to
rise, a fact that filled Alex with dread and doom but also a
vertiginous sweetness— every instant of warm sunlight
through their three east-facing windows felt delicious, and
this sliver of sparkling night, which for years he’d watched
from a cushion propped against the sill, often while smoking
a joint, now appeared agonizingly beautiful, a mirage.
( 31 4)
I take this image as self-reflective on Egan’s part— as a com-

mentary on aesthetic experience, even specifically on literary
experience, which now acquires a particular “vertiginous sweet-
ness” and sheer sensuous, “delicious,” beauty from a sense of
diminishment and an awareness of possible imminent loss. This
scene implies, I think, a perception of art as something that
acquires a new valence in an “agonizing” perception of its
endangerment and vulnerability: in this novel, both aesthetic
and natural experience—both art and the natural world—seem
precarious, very much at risk.
As I’ve suggested, the myth of Orpheus and the story of his
fateful journey, for love, into the Stygian underworld of the
dead—very much a story about the loss or preservation of art—
winds subtly through A Visit from the Goon Squad. I’ll now con-
clude these introductory remarks by pointing to a moment when
Egan seems to draw again, in her next novel, on that myth, for
a figure of aesthetic experience as a desire for possession—not in
the economic sense but the more sensuous and tactile one that
I’ve tried here to evoke and to remember: that is, a desire to
experience the art object as a tangibly material thing or artifact,
one with heft, weight, and solidity. In the novel Egan published
after Goon Squad, Manhattan Beach (2018), a daughter has dived
deep into the sea in search of her presumed-dead father and has
returned bearing a relic, a treasured pocket watch of his. “Cup-
ping her palm around its lozenge of weight gave Anna a surge
of strength, of protection. It was a relic from an underworld
she’d visited once, under perilous conditions, purely in order to
retrieve it. She slept with it under her pillow.”10 Perhaps we can
take Anna’s visit to this underworld as a metaphor for aesthetic
experience and even as a model for criticism, as a manifestation
of a desire to hold onto the artwork as it threatens to fall away
from us or through our hands.11 A novel reader or critic is also a
traveler who leaves behind her own world in order to “dive” head-
first into another, fictional one, a “foreign country.” We return
from these pilgrimages back into our own world and selves,
clutching treasured relics from the territories we’ve visited.
Side A, track 1
~ 5 N Ǆl ǭ ǭ-TTOāǭ,dTNǭ ǭ~Tǭ
P
rose fiction is so flexible a literary form, definitionally
loose and baggy, that it can seem silly to try to name
any one consistent quality or focus throughout its end-
lessly varied history. But if pressed to choose a single preoccu-
pation, one could do worse than to choose time: the sheer fact of
movement forward, through temporality, that all fiction regis-
ters, represents, and sometimes resists. Fiction’s basic form is
inescapably temporal, more so than other literary modes. A
lyric poem might outline the thought of a single moment,
whereas virtually any novel involves the representation of
extended duration: at the typical minimum, as in Ulysses or Mrs
Dalloway, a full day, but more often, years or generations.
Order, duration, frequency; time passed and time regained;
time’s forward march and memory’s backward loops: these are
at least among the most constantly recurring preoccupations
of prose fiction and of the novel, from its eighteenth-century
origins to its twenty-first century. We often distinguish between a
classic or more traditionally “realist” fictional mode, perfected in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—as opposed to the more
modernist or experimental (and eventually, postmodernist)
approaches that began to emerge in the twentieth century— on
12 = Side A, track 1
the basis of different approaches to the aesthetic problem of the

representation of time. Many of the most notable innovations in
fiction in the past century or so have taken the form of a frac-
turing, scrambling, or restructuring of the familiar realist tem-
poral orders. But whether in a more traditional or experimental
mode, even the shortest of novellas calls attention to the reader’s
own experience of time’s passing.
And not just any time’s passing, but often the passing of
specifically modern time: novels are ineluctably bound to the
industrial and postindustrial age. The critic Christina Lupton
memorably observes of the experience of reading a realist novel
that “the pages of the book give materiality to the tick, tick, tick
of modern life, with . . . one minute following the next” and
“even the most personal life narrative occurring in regular, daily
time.”1 The novel has long served (although it may no longer do
so) as a crucial timekeeper for our sense of what constitutes the
modern “everyday,” even the “real.”
Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad draws on the legacy of
prose fiction’s grappling with temporality in many ways, with a
particular attentiveness to the question of whether and when
fiction can resist temporality’s steady and linear forward
motion—whether it can evade or halt or disrupt that “regular,
daily time.” It does this, in part, via a sidewise adaptation and
mediation of a range of rival media forms of our day, especially
those associated with rock music. Rock and punk music provide
Goon Squad ’s richest source of metaphors, images, and ideas
regarding the passage of time and the many ways that human
beings name it, think about it, evade it, memorialize it. Egan
offers the rock song as an analogue for fiction, a comparable
form for temporalizing human experience, and that many of the
novel’s characters work in the youth-obsessed music industry
imparts an additional layer of concern with time and aging.2
Time’s a Goon: From A to B = 13
Egan’s novel has received a lot of attention and posed some

categorical challenges for its unusual form. Grouped by one
critic into a twenty-first-century category of “multi-protagonist
fictions,”3 Goon Squad takes the form of thirteen chapters (six on
Side A, seven on Side B, like a classic album), each one focal-
ized around a different character. Egan has explained that the
novel began with the first chapter, “Found Objects,” published
in the New Yorker as a story, narrating a single day’s experiences
of a young woman, Sasha, who works as a music publicist for
Bennie Salazar, only briefly alluded to in this first chapter/story.
Initially, Egan says, she intended the references to Bennie in the
story as no more than
a humorous sketch about a neurotic record producer. . . . But

then I found myself thinking who is Bennie Salazar? Why
does he do that stuff? Which prompted me to write the next
chapter. And the same thing happened again: a minor char-
acter would catch my eye, and I’d want to crack them open. I
knew pretty early that it wasn’t a conventional novel, or a
story collection—it didn’t fit into the standard literary genres
that were available to me, so I thought, well, it’s a record
album. The pieces all relate, they tell one big story, whereas
often in a story collection— certainly collections of connected
stories—there tends to be a sameness of tone and world, and I
really didn’t want that.4
Neither Sasha nor Bennie focalize more than their allotted

single chapter, but they do arguably serve as two dual protago-
nists for the novel as a whole: as other characters come and
go, emerging temporarily at the center of one section only to
fade into minor figures in other characters’ dramas, Bennie and
Sasha recur, and their two interrelated life stories serve as
primary through lines for the whole. Amid continual temporal

and characterological leaps and jumps in the novel, we gradu-
ally can piece together a coherent narrative mostly centered
around two primary character strands: first, there’s Bennie
Salazar and his friends Scotty, Alice, Rhea, and Jocelyn, who
first (temporally, although not diegetically) appear as teenage
punk fans and musicians in San Francisco in the Bay Area in
the late 1970s, where Bennie and Scotty form the short-lived
Flaming Dildos; then there’s Sasha, who, after some tumultu-
ous teenage years in which she runs away with a punk drummer
to Tokyo and then moves alone to Naples, Italy, returns to attend
NYU in her twenties and later becomes Bennie’s secretary, and
then assistant, at Sow’s Ear Records, the successful Manhattan
independent label that he founded. All of the other characters
in the novel connect in some way to the “Bennie” or the “Sasha”
strand, or to both; the novel’s final chapter is focalized by Alex,
who makes a fleeting appearance in the book’s opening chapter
when Sasha goes on a date with him and then has sex with him
in her apartment; by the last chapter (when he is living with his
wife and daughter in the apartment with the imperiled view
of the Empire State Building), he is hired by Bennie to do PR
for the comeback performance by Scotty that concludes the
novel. The novel unfolds nonlinearly, continually twisting back
on itself, but permitting an attentive reader to grasp the ways
that all of the sections and characters ultimately do connect
logically to one another to constitute a plausibly realist world
(albeit one that eventually slides into science-fiction territory, in
a 2020s grappling with extreme climate change).
One could imagine Egan’s early thoughts for the novel hav-
ing taken the form of something like “Proust, but set in the
late 20th/early 21st-century pop music industry.”5 She has also
acknowledged “a great debt to Quentin Tarantino [his 1994
Pulp Fiction in particular], for the way Goon Squad plays with
chronology and narrative,”6 as well as to David Chase’s The
Sopranos. She commented about her aims in the novel,
I thought about it . . . as a novel about time, and I did think

carefully about who else has done that and what they did,
Proust being Number One. I thought about other literary
novels about time and I wanted to be a part of that
conversation. . . . I think there’s a huge amount of tension
around the issue of time, and especially chronology, in fic-
tion, and we’ve been wrestling with that from minute one.
Look at a book like Tristram Shandy, which is so crazily
experimental in a way we still have yet to match. There’s such
a desire not to just say: this happened and then this happened
and then this happened. The tension is between the incremen-
tal and inexorable passage of time and the leaping, stuttering
quality of consciousness. The two do not match up. One
result of that is that time is passing gradually, but we experi-
ence its effect as very sudden. Our perception of time is full of
all these gaps. That really interests me, and I think it informed
the fragmented structure of the book. I wanted to capture as
many shocking discoveries of time having passed as possible,
which is difficult to do if you’re just moving forward in time.
I also was just really interested in gaps. Things that happen
when you’re not looking.7
“There’s such a desire not to just say: then this happened and then
this happened” declares Egan’s disinclination to follow the path
of what might be seen as a mainstream of realist Anglo-American
fiction. But in pointing to Tristram Shandy as standing at the ori-
gin of an alternative path for experimental fiction, she signals a
relative disinterest in the category of postmodern fiction, which
she can seem to sidestep, even as she uses certain techniques often
associated with it; Goon Squad has been aptly characterized by
Cathleen Schine as “an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic
brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche.”8
Goon Squad begins with two epigraphs from Proust’s In
Search of Lost Time, including the following one from vol. 3, The
Guermantes Way: “Poets claim that we recapture for a moment
the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or
garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most
hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment
as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find
those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”
Proust identifies a fallacy—that to “enter some house or garden
in which we used to live in our youth” will be to “recapture for a
moment the self that we were long ago.” But such a recapture is
impossible; it is “in ourselves that we should rather seek.”
Speaking of “the garden where we played in our childhood,”
Proust continues, “There is no need to travel in order to see it;
we must dig down inwardly to discover it.”9 Proust, a peer of
Freud’s, advises that an individual must travel into the uncon-
scious realm of memory in order to attempt to recover the previ-
ous self, but he also demonstrated that the novel allows a kind
of portal by which any reader can vicariously experience a simi-
lar journey, or at least a simulation or representation of one.
Egan too seems to approach the form of the novel as a potential
time-travel device, a means of supernatural “omnitemporal-
ity.”10 If we are, in our everyday lives, locked into time in its
remorseless forward travel, fiction can serve as a magic carpet, a
door into the past, a spell to halt or to reverse time’s arrow, if
only temporarily.
One great critic, Paul Ricoeur, had declared that the “mod-
ern novel . . . has constituted for at least three centuries now a
prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of compo-

sition and the expression of time.”11 Such claims are notably true
of Goon Squad, which is at once a “tale of time” and a “tale about
time”—the latter Ricoeur’s phrase for a novel in which time’s
passage does not simply (as in every novel) provide a basic struc-
ture for the narrative but one in which, in his words, it is “the
very experience of time that is at stake.”12 Egan’s characters are
often stunned by the passage of time, feeling taken unawares,
unprepared for its effects. “How did you get so old?” a character,
Jocelyn, wants to ask an older former lover, Lou, revisited after
twenty years, who has been incapacitated by two strokes.
“Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? Did
everyone else get old too, or was it just you?. . . Did you know
this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you
from behind?” (85). These questions remain, however, unvoiced;
the fact of aging and its decay can be a source of embarrassment
or even shame. Lou’s “second stroke really knocked him out—
the first one wasn’t so bad, just one of his legs was a little shaky”
(84). This series of Lou’s two strokes offers a mininarrative of
time’s violence upon the body—a central preoccupation
throughout the novel—its one-two punch that starts out not “so
bad” but then becomes crippling. Egan’s characters, amazed at
how fully time has overtaken and “ambushed” them, look back
for clues about when it took its hold and about its duration—
whether it occurred “all at once, in a day,” or “bit by bit.” And
the novel itself operates as, among other things, a finely modu-
lated device for measuring time and assessing its effects (in that,
somewhat like a human body).
The novel takes its title from another exchange, also revolv-
ing around a passage of twenty years—a temporal duration that
seems to function in this novel a bit like a modernized and com-
pressed version of Walter Scott’s “sixty years since” (the subtitle
of his historical novel Waverley) or the forty-year span from

which George Eliot looked back to 1830 in Middlemarch—that
has left a formerly vital person decrepit and ill. Bosco is a for-
mer rock star, now a has-been, visited at home by his publicist
Stephanie (Bennie’s wife) and her brother Jules. Bosco is pro-
posing a concept album based around the fact of his own
decline:
“The album’s called A to B, right?” Bosco said. “And that’s

the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from
being a rock star to being a fat fuck nobody cares about? Let’s
not pretend it didn’t happen. . . . This is reality, right? You
don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when
you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t
that the expression?”
Jules had drifted over from across the room. “I’ve never
heard that,” he said. “ ‘Time is a goon’?”
“Would you disagree?” Bosco asked, a little challengingly.
There was a pause. “No,” Jules said.
(127)
The title phrase recurs when Bennie says to Scotty (another

washed-up rock musician), “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let
that goon push you around?” Scotty replies: “The goon won”
(333). The word goon, in the United States, acquires the meaning
in the late 1930s of a “person hired (esp. by racketeers) to terror-
ize workers; a thug,” and so a “goon squad” is an organized
group of such thugs.13 Given the beginning of several of Goon
Squad ’s primary character arcs at the end of 1979, when Bennie
and Scotty’s band the Flaming Dildos play a gig at San Fran-
cisco’s Mabuhay Gardens, it seems possible that Egan was
thinking of Elvis Costello’s song “Goon Squad,” from his 1979
album Armed Forces: “Goon squad / They’ve come to look you

over and they’re giving you the eye / Goon squad / They want
you to come out to play / You’d better say goodbye.”14 “Time’s a
goon” is not, to my knowledge, an actual idiom, so if Egan did
in fact invent it, it functions as a telling neologism in the novel,
as if in this fictional world that is primarily, but not entirely, a
plausibly realist representation of our own, the personification
of time as a threateningly violent “goon” is one marker of a just
slightly intensified cultural preoccupation with the tragic effects
of time.
Bosco’s proposed album serves, a bit like Lou’s two strokes,
as a very compressed model of narrative sequence and order.
One of the key theorists of fiction’s relationship to time, Gérard
Genette, suggests that even the most complex narrative—such
as a Homeric epic or Proust’s novel—can be viewed as an
“amplification” or “development—monstrous, if you will” of a
simple, “minimal” subject-verb sequence: “the Odyssey or the
Recherche is only, in a certain way, an amplification (in the rhe-
torical sense) of statements such as Ulysses comes home to Ithaca or
Marcel becomes a writer.”15 Bosco’s planned album presents itself
as just that kind of “minimal” narrative; From A to B is a reduc-
tion or quintessence of narrative itself, minimized to the most
basic one-two sequence. Egan plays with compression and
amplification, as if to explore how long a duration of time can be
condensed into a tiny phrase and—in the other direction—how
much language can be spun out to describe crucial moments or
bursts of time.16 The containment of Bosco’s album within Egan’s
novel illustrates two extremes of compression/minimization
(the album) and extension and amplification (the novel). The
question of his own failure is one Bosco “want[s] to hit straight on,”
even if Egan’s own text suggests the value of approaching such
questions less directly and at far greater length. Egan often
seems to be thinking on the page about the questions she raised

in the interview about fiction’s representation of temporal pro-
gression. We can see her at times seeming intentionally to shift
in and out of “minimal” or maximal modes, exploring different
degrees or scales of amplification for different purposes, experi-
menting with very different scales of meaning.
The endings of her chapters sometimes offer such occa-
sions. For example, the first chapter, the story of Sasha and her
shoplifting, concludes with Sasha’s anxious desire “to please”
Coz, her therapist, “to say something like It was a turning point;
everything feels different now . . . or just I’m changing I’m changing
I’m changing: I’ve changed!” (18). Sasha sees herself and Coz as
“collaborators” (like the members of the Flaming Dildos?),
“writing a story whose ending had already been determined: she
would get well” (6). This desired story would require forward
movement, “turning points” and “change”; for it to be a success-
ful story, Sasha feels, it cannot be static. “I’m changing I’m chang-
ing I’m changing: I’ve changed!” marks the difficulty of locating
that exact “turning point” when “change” occurs (it would have
to have occurred in the point in the sentence where the colon
appears).
The chapter ends with Sasha and Coz “in silence, the longest
silence that had ever passed between them.” She lies on his
couch, in the chapter’s final sentence, “claiming . . . these min-
utes of Coz’s time: another, then another, then one more” (18).
As a conclusion to the chapter, this moment operates with nota-
ble self-awareness, as Egan invites consideration of the ways
that different genres or kinds of stories (such as novels or the
“story” of a therapeutic analysis) define themselves in relation to
temporality. Sasha (and Egan) conclude here in a “minimal”
mode; there may be “such a desire not to just say: this happened
and then this happened,” but this in fact resembles how this
part of Sasha’s “story” concludes. This moment seems to hint
not yet at “progress” or “change” but at a self-acceptance on
Sasha’s part that may be the prelude to eventual change. Sasha’s
thefts can be interpreted as attempts to stop time; here, she
achieves a kind of perhaps only momentary ability simply to be
in time, allowing “another” minute, “then another, then one
more” to pass without commentary or resistance. This is, in a
sense, the exact opposite of “omnitemporality”—rather, an abso-
lute acceptance of a single limited track of experienced time, one
moment after another. This could be taken to be a capitulation to
time as the “goon” (allowing time to “win”) but might also be
viewed more as a form of stepping away from an adversarial rela-
tion to it.
The subsequent chapter, dedicated to Sasha’s boss Bennie,
also concludes in a manner that calls attention to temporality,
sequence, and continuity. The depressed Bennie has jeopardized
his working relationship with Sasha by making a romantic
overture to her that she gently rebuffs. Looking at Sasha, Ben-
nie realizes, “it was a girl’s face, but she’d stopped being a girl
when he wasn’t watching” (38) (this is later echoed by Sasha’s
uncle Ted: “She had grown up. . . . Ted experienced the change
as instantaneous” [216]). Since the end of “Sasha’s” previous
chapter, we too have, in a sense, stopped directly “watching”
her, as Egan strikes a characteristic note, making us aware that
the novel’s characters are developing and aging even as our
attention has moved away from them. The chapter ends with
Sasha saying something to Bennie through the car window that
he initially misses. “As he struggled to open the door, Sasha said
it once more, mouthing the words extra slowly: ‘See. You.
Tomorrow’ ” (38).
I read this as a subtle echo of the earlier “another, then

another, then one more” (18). Once again, Egan ends a chapter
with a reflection— one with a metafictional implication— on
temporality, repetition, and continuity. There is an obvious
irony to Sasha’s statement, in its insistence that what has hap-
pened will repeat and will occur again as it previously has—
given that this marks the end of Bennie’s chapter and that the
next time we hear about his relationship with Sasha in the novel
it’s in the form of a reflection from years later about his subse-
quent firing of her for stealing. The world of Goon Squad is one
in which continuous and repeating patterns are frequently dis-
rupted; the novel’s discontinuities emphasize life’s potential to
depart from any set pattern. Egan’s novel is designed as a kind
of temporal puzzle, its various pieces thrown out of linear order,
and it also reflects on the way its own characters, like its readers,
must also “struggle to organize” their own memories: “It jarred
Sasha to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that
Alex would struggle to organize a year or two from now” (14).
In this context, Sasha’s closing comment to Bennie is poignant—
insisting on a state of steady equilibrium that is in fact illusory:
we can never really know that we will see someone tomorrow.
And in fact, one of the basic (and unusual) structural features of
Goon Squad is that we are not guaranteed to “see” any given
character again after the chapter in which they feature con-
cludes. The novel emphasizes the minor tragedy of every indi-
vidual’s impermanence: we are all doomed to become simply “a
glint in the hazy memories” of others who may struggle even to
recall us at all.
To return now to Bosco, his sequence is pitched in a tragic
key: how did he “go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck
nobody cares about”? Or, in “minimal” form, perhaps some-
thing like: Bosco ages and fails. Time is essentially tragic and
melancholy in this novel, such that a version of that sentence

could apply to nearly every character, who will eventually find
themselves with “nothing”—as in Danny’s questions to himself
in The Keep: “How had he ended up with nothing? Did he
always have nothing?”17 Goon Squad ’s characters struggle with
the insight that time speeds everything toward decay and loss;
Ted, an art historian exploring the streets of Naples, observes,
“Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive
doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining
symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time” (215).
These “forgotten coats of arms” are evidence of the frightening
power of time to evacuate human symbols of meaning and
value: to render what was once pressing and contemporary for-
gotten and discarded. The coats of arms also recall Alex’s com-
ment, in the near future, about the current young generation’s
turn against “piercings, tattoos, or scarifications” (317): “And
who could blame them . . . after watching three generations of
flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly
stuffed biceps and saggy asses?” (318). A “flaccid,” drooping tat-
too on aging skin is, like the coats of arms, a kind of memento
mori, a reminder that every human-made symbol or form is
doomed to eventual decay.
A perception that time’s passing represents a painful and
even traumatic loss is nearly universal in the novel, which is pre-
occupied by time’s irreversibility—the fact that while in youth it
may appear as if any bad decisions can be corrected, it soon
becomes apparent that one’s choices and good or bad luck are
permanently consequential. Ted’s wife, Susan, once declared to
him, “let’s make sure it’s always like this” (231), but this is an
impossible wish. A middle-aged Stephanie recalls her and her
friends’ heedless twenties: “They were young and lucky and
strong—what did they have to worry about? If they didn’t like
the result, they could go back and start again. . . . Was this out-
come a freak aberration from natural laws, or was it normal—a
thing they should have seen coming?” (131– 32). Or Jocelyn
remembering meeting Lou while hitchhiking at age seventeen:
“in 1979, that could be the beginning of an exciting story, a story
where anything might happen. Now it’s a punch line” (87).
Egan’s characters—very much in the classic bildungsroman
tradition— often associate youth, and its promise and illusion of
infinite choice, with the large metropolis, specifically New York
City, as with Danny in The Keep: “It was Danny’s nature to be
new to the game of living in New York—he needed to be young
or nothing about him made any sense and he was a failure, a
loser, a guy who’d done nothing—all the things his pop said.”18
Stephanie’s hope also echoes a statement made in an early short
story of Egan’s, “Why China?,” whose narrator tried to con-
vince himself that he and his wife are still the same people who
spent time working in Kenya in the Peace Corps years ago: “I
always liked remembering that time, knowing the money and
houses and trips we’d gotten our hands on hadn’t washed it all
away. We’re still those people, I’d tell myself, who helped the
Masai to repair their houses made of cow dung.”19
The potential Stephanie associates with youth—to “go back
and start again” if one comes to an unsatisfactory outcome—
may also seem to be a power of the artist or the novelist; to be
an author is, in a sense, permanently to possess an enviable
magical power of endless self-restoring youth, an ability to
undo, halt, repair, or reverse time. (This is surely one reason we
turn to novels and particularly why we reread them: to enter an
aesthetic space miraculously exempt from time’s rule. Every
time I begin Middlemarch, it is 1829, and Dorothea Brooke, Fred
Vincy, and Will Ladislaw are naïve and hopeful again.) But the
corollary of that insight is that this power is never available for

any human being—including, of course, authors— outside of
the world of art. Even if Egan, as novelist, can freely reverse
time, the novel is essentially realist and nonfantastical in the
sense it conveys that for the human beings depicted within it,
time’s forward march is unstoppable.
Bosco’s “From A to B” phrase also appears when the former
teenage bandmates Bennie Salazar and Scotty Hausmann, who
is now socially isolated and working intermittently as a school
janitor, meet again, after over two decades, when Scotty comes
across a reference in Spin magazine to Bennie’s thriving career
and sends him a note. When Bennie asks Scotty what inspired
him to reconnect, Scotty replies, “I came for this reason: I want
to know what happened between A and B. . . . A is when we
were both in the band, chasing the same girl. B is now” (101).
He also comments, in his own narration, “I’d said something
literally, yes, but underneath that I’d said something else: we
were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I’m an ass-
wipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an ass-
wipe, always an asswipe.” “From A to B” is at once a “minimal”
sequence, a basic building block or abstraction of narrative, and
also a summation of a career, of a given character’s success or
failure over time. (It also recalls the process of flipping over the
sides of a vinyl LP.) The philosophically inclined Scotty claims
that he “understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp,”
that “there was only an infinitesimal difference” (93) between
Bennie’s luxurious and successful life and his own, “collecting
litter in a park.” From his perspective as a clear loser in the life-
success sweepstakes, he suggests that the distinction between
the “B” where he has landed and Bennie’s “B” is “a difference so
small that it barely existed” (93). One of the virtues of a novel,
like Goon Squad, that considers and depicts extended spans of

time is that it allows an experimental consideration of how tiny
decisions, turning points, or trajectories can make one person an
“asswipe” and the other, from a similar background and perhaps
no greater talents, a great success. “What happened to you?” or
versions of that question recur throughout Egan’s work (this
example cited from Look at Me; also from that novel: “But . . .
how did you change from being like that, to now?”), 20 and Goon
Squad ends with a final version of that question, as Alex and
Bennie walk away from Sasha’s old apartment, where Alex half-
hoped he would find her along with his old self:
“I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his

head. “I honestly don’t.”
Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic
silver hair and thoughtful eyes. “You grew up, Alex,” he said,
“just like the rest of us.”
( 339 – 40)
In a contemporary world in which the outcomes of individ-

ual lives are not easily predicted from their starting point, fic-
tion is one means of viewing a cluster of interrelated lives and
careers in order to envision how and why they took the paths
they did. When Scotty says that he contacted Bennie in order
“to know what happened between A and B,” he is very much
like a novel’s reader, also eager to track and better to under-
stand, or at least to accept, the passing of time and its effects.
Egan treats the novel as a finely tuned instrument for the
“tracking” of the varying life paths of individuals, with a special
interest in the moments when—sometimes only in retrospect—
one can see a particular “career” cresting and turning down-
ward: “nothing could halt the sensation of rapid, involuntary
descent. . . . It took several more years before I was truly a cata-

logue girl with no prestige whatsoever. Just how many years I
wasn’t sure, exactly, because at that point, the point at which my
acceleration began to reverse, time started running together.”21
Goon Squad ’s interest in the extended life paths of characters
and especially the process by which certain characters travel
from rags to riches or vice versa is one quality that links it back
to those classic nineteenth-century novels whose “power and
agility” Egan has said she envies. Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of
Casterbridge comes to mind, for instance, in its devastating portrait
of the downward path or “decline” of its protagonist, depicted
almost as if a result of a natural force such as gravity: “Henchard
formed at this moment much the same picture as he had pre-
sented when entering Casterbridge for the first time nearly a
quarter of a century before; except, to be sure, that the serious
addition to his years had considerably lessened the spring to his
stride, that his state of hopelessness had weakened him, and
imparted to his shoulders, as weighted by the basket, a percep-
tible bend.”22
For Hardy, the form of the realist novel allowed a long and
panoramic view of human character as it evolves, rises, or falls
through the passage of time. Influenced by the work of Charles
Darwin, Hardy created his texts as experimental considerations
of how character and environment interact: with some unstable
combination of inherent attributes, environmental conditions,
and sheer chance leading some individuals from similar back-
grounds to thrive while others slide into “hopelessness” and
eventual death.
Goon Squad, too, can be viewed as a “workshop for
experiments”—an updated workshop for new experiments, of
course—relating to the effect of time’s passing on a range of
characters, loosely and sometimes accidentally related by both
strong and weak or happenstance links. A classic nineteenth-

century bildungsroman, or “novel of development,” tracking a
character from youth to maturity, balances youth (in its open-
endedness and indefinition, “nothing decided”) and age (with
its certainty and completion or “decision”); a given example of
the form might seem to value or favor one more than the other,
although the distinction of the form lies in the way it balances
both. Egan’s novel combines, in a sense, the traditional form of
the bildungsroman (focusing on a single protagonist’s path to
maturity) with that of a Victorian multiplot novel, like Middle-
march or Bleak House. But if a Dickens or a George Eliot novel
at once offers a wide-ranging and panoramic vision of a whole
“society” in the form of a range of representative characters (of
various classes and social positions) but also narrows its focus to
a much smaller handful of major characters or protagonists,
Egan employs an arguably more democratic form that grants
virtually every character an at least potentially similar or com-
parable degree of meaningfulness.23
Although we follow the story of certain characters (espe-
cially Sasha and Bennie) more consistently from youth to mid-
dle age than that of others, who come and go more fleetingly
(for example, Lou’s anthropology PhD student girlfriend
Mindy in 1973, whose perspective focalizes chapter 4, “Safari,”
but who does not appear outside of that chapter), Egan holds
strictly to a self-imposed rule that each of the novel’s thirteen
chapters features a different protagonist (who is sometimes also
the narrator). One effect of this form, as it relates to temporal-
ity, is to emphasize a common problem or dilemma in the path
from youth to adulthood. In various ways, Egan can seem to
pose the question, in varying degrees of explicitness: what does
it mean to mature, to grow older, to age in the contemporary
and near-future world (from the 1970s to the 2020s)? Are the
familiar old novelistic forms—the bildungsroman, the multip-

lot novel—with their particular conceptions and representa-
tions of youth, adulthood, and aging, still applicable or work-
able? Is the novel itself still as helpful and illuminating as it once
was as a form with which to think through these topics? Or—
and this worry seems to cast a shade over the novel—is the tra-
ditional form of the novel more like those “soiled, forgotten
coats of arms” that Ted encountered in Naples— once a “univer-
sal, defining symbol,” now “made meaningless by nothing more
than time” (215)?
How should we interpret the pervasive mood of melancholic
loss—albeit sometimes leavened by the waving of the prose
magician’s wand that can temporarily halt or reverse time’s
arrow—that suffuses the novel? One possible answer relates to
Egan’s own sense of her position as a novelist in a twenty-first-
century media landscape in which nongenre or “literary”
fiction—let’s say, novels with slim prospects for large-budget
movie adaptations—have become an increasingly niche or
minority taste. The critic Jonathan Arac argued in 2009:
I think that, at least in the United States, there was an age of

the novel, and it has passed, even though many novels are still
written and are still worth reading.
In that age of the novel in the United States, say from
about the time of Moby-Dick and Uncle Tom’s Cabin to that of
Invisible Man and Lolita, the novel had a special relationship
to what we now call the national imaginary, and that special
relationship has now passed from print, in particular the
novel, to other media forms.24
Citing a comment by Marshall McLuhan about the way the

novel has given way to film as the aesthetic form best suited to
speak to and to represent the nation as a whole, Arac observes

that although “this understanding is very widely shared,” it still
remains to be fully considered in criticism and scholarship. “To
work out this claim in detail,” he suggests, would require “a
melancholic novel lover.”25
We could do worse than “a melancholic novel lover” as a
phrase to describe Egan herself or the implied version of the
author suggested by Goon Squad. (And perhaps some others of
us might also feel comfortable claiming that identity? Reader, if
you’ve come this far, you may be one yourself.) If the novel is
suffused by a melancholic sense of the violence wreaked by time
on its characters, it also suggests a mood of resigned, belated
sadness about the fate and status of its own form. As already
mentioned, Egan has pointed to the HBO serial drama The
Sopranos as, along with Proust, a key influence on the novel—
“some of the things that I ended up trying to do in Goon Squad
were things that I decided I wanted to try to do while watching
that show”26 —and this dyad of two major influences defines its
own “From A to B” narrative. That is, from classic nineteenth-
century and modernist fiction, A, to late twentieth-century
television and filmic drama, B, and from a world in which the
novel possesses “a special relationship to the national imagi-
nary” to one in which the once-major form has become side-
lined and minoritized.27 It is difficult to imagine a winner of the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the 1950s or 1960s—say, William
Faulkner— citing a recent TV drama such as Gunsmoke or
Father Knows Best as a primary inspiration for his prizewinning
novel. Yet when Egan cites The Sopranos, it is far from clear that
the literary author is slumming; she may, in fact, be attaching
her own work to a more obviously prestigious and culturally
influential one. (A Visit from the Goon Squad was in fact initially
optioned for production as a TV series by HBO, but the project

was never made and was eventually dropped by the channel.)28
An implied narrative of the novel’s decline maps onto a par-
allel cultural shift, namely, the transition from the analog or
material recording of music on vinyl albums to digital forms. As
we’ve seen, Egan has commented that her organization of the
novel into two “sides” was intended as an homage to “a form
that’s sadly gone—the LP, even the CD”; 29 given her “obses-
sion” with the novel in its nineteenth-century heyday, she also
seems concerned that her own form is “sadly gone” or at least
very much diminished. But if that sense of the novel, like the
vinyl album conceived as a whole work of art, as “finished” and
obsolete is floated as one possibility, Goon Squad does also offer
a countervailing, more positive or at least consoling, sense of the
remaining and sustaining possibilities of fiction.
One of the recurring, often pleasurable, effects Goon Squad
achieves is a two-part insight: first, that time’s forward move-
ment is inescapable—“time’s a goon” that mercilessly strips
away meaning, value, and beauty from people and symbols that
seemed untouchable—but also that art and narrative can at
least seem to arrest time, to preserve and protect memories, and
to allow for dizzying feats of expansion, dilation, and temporal
hopping, effects otherwise perhaps achievable only through
intoxication, as when Ricky in Look at Me skateboards while
high: “He was stoned, which made everything loop around and
curlicue until he was skating through time—kings, knights on
horseback waving lances.”30
In one of the novel’s most dazzling moments of temporal
expansion, for example, we leap from a scene of an unhappy,
wealthy American family’s African safari in 1973 to the twenty-
first century, traveling through a temporal wormhole opened by
a dagger that becomes a treasured artifact. A Samburu African

warrior smiles at Charlie, the family’s teenaged daughter, and
Egan tells us that after his death, thirty-five years from “now”
(that is, in 2008, so perhaps at or closely before the moment of
Egan’s writing this scene), one of his sixty-three grandchildren,
“a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger
now hanging at his side” (61–62). Joe becomes an engineer, “an
expert in visual robotic technology,” and marries an American
named Lulu (who will also feature in the novel’s final chapter);
“He and Lulu will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfather’s
hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglas,
directly under a skylight” (62).
This moment is a bravura playing with timescales of a kind
that gives the often-melancholy novel a giddily vertiginous fla-
vor, as Egan seems to revel in prose fiction’s capacity to boldly
predict the future and to mix or conflate times, to produce in
writing what Genette calls “omnitemporality” or “temporal
omnipresence.”31 “It is in ourselves,” Proust writes in Egan’s epi-
graph, “that we should rather seek to find those fixed places,
contemporaneous with different years”: places are “fixed,” but
that fixity can be loosened such that memories can be peeled
away from their original location and moved around at will. The
entire inner action of the genre of the novel may be “nothing but
a struggle against the power of time,” but even if time is a goon
who cannot finally be defeated, his power can be temporarily
flouted and disobeyed within fiction.
The looping, recursive, Möbius-strip structure of the novel at
once documents time’s losses and also offers the possibility that
art might offer a reversal or cessation of time’s linear march
(albeit an imaginary one). In the final pages of the novel, Alex,
looking at a building where he had a one-night stand with
Sasha, “imagined walking into her apartment and finding him-

self still there—his young self . . . with nothing decided yet” (339,
my italics). This is, of course, precisely the fallacy described in
Egan’s epigraph from Proust: the fantasy that by reentering a
particular building, one could find the self one had been when
last in it. And also the young Stephanie’s fallacy: “If they didn’t
like the result, they could go back and start again” (131). Egan’s
novel simultaneously shows us the tragedy of a world (the
actual world: our own) in which both of these are impossible—
the goon always wins— and also the consolation of an alterna-
tive world of art (a novel, a rock record) in which the goon’s
visit might be deferred or even denied and nothing need be
finally decided. Fiction can act as a universal solvent, “unfix-
ing” and freeing those decisions and life paths that are in real-
ity immutable.
Ted thinks of his wife: “Her rebellion and hurt had melted
away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was ter-
rible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, with-
out death to give it gravitas and shape” (210). Ted’s observation
offers a hint about how fiction may help us grapple with and
achieve some consolation for the impossibility of arresting time.
In her Proustian fixations, Egan participates in a Romantic tra-
dition that understands art as a means of arresting and escaping
time.32 But when Alex imagines encountering “his young
self . . . with nothing decided yet,” we can read this slightly dif-
ferently: yes, perhaps Alex wishes for a reality in which he could
return to this moment, but Ted’s observation implies that the
value of an artwork is that it allows us to engage in this kind of
imaginary time travel, but always within a reality in which time’s
arrow can never reverse, our lives always given “shape” by the
knowledge of death. We imagine that we would prefer to escape
this state. But perhaps the truer insight is that we long for an art
object that can resist time, but always from the perspective of an
organic being inescapably thrown into a temporal world of
death and loss.
Alex’s imagination of his younger self as a character with
“nothing decided yet” is poignant, but the force of that poi-
gnancy derives from his own perspective from a later position in
which particular decisions have been made, certain paths taken.
This moment in the novel stages a scene of reflection on a past
state in which a variety (even seemingly an infinity) of future
paths lay ahead, as yet unchosen—but, crucially, viewed from
far down one necessarily particular path of a lived life.33
I’ve already cited, in the introduction, Alex’s experience of
the view still visible from his apartment window, as a new sky-
scraper arises, soon to block it— a passage that I’ve suggested we
might read as implying that beauty acquires a particular value
not just in spite of but because of its fragility and vulnerability.
For Alex, what had been primarily “a selling point,” an attrac-
tive feature in a market economy—the view from the
apartment—seems to transform into something that is “agoniz-
ingly beautiful” because it is, in a sense, an ephemeral “mirage.”
It may be that Alex, in order fully or truly to appreciate the
beauty of the vision, had to lose it, both as a commodity and
otherwise. Egan also suggests an implicit environmental or eco-
logical insight here: that only “now” (whether that is when she
wrote the book, or the novel’s 2020s, or our own now), as we
begin to grasp the enormity of our ecological loss, can we fully
or truly appreciate the beauty or meaning of those losses. When
natural beauty seemed infinitely renewable or otherwise taken
for granted, we somehow could not see it— or could not recog-
nize its value without quickly trying to convert it into economic
value.
A similar point about the “sweetness” of a recognition of the

inescapability of temporal loss—and an even more explicit
environmentalist insight—is conveyed by Sasha’s daughter Ali-
son in a sequence of her PowerPoint slide presentation. After
Alison’s parents have a fight, Alison takes a long walk with her
father into the desert surrounding their home, farther than she
has ever walked before, into a long series of solar panels.
• I’ve never walked this far.

• The panels go on for miles.
• It’s like finding a city or another planet.
• They look evil.
• Like angled oily black things.
• But they’re actually mending the earth.
• There were protests when they were built, years ago.
• Their shade made a lot of desert creatures homeless.
• But at least they can live where all the lawns and golf
courses used to be.
(291)
We might recall Jocelyn’s questions for Lou: “How did you

get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by
bit?” (85). Egan here seems to be expanding the scale of such
questions, from the human being or body to the earth itself—
registering her and our surprised recognition that what had
seemed youthful and healthy is now aging and ill. The solar
panels are frightening, but they also offer some promise of
“mending the earth”—not reversing time’s effects but mitigat-
ing it.
As Alison and her father walk home, she suddenly feels
“scared” and offers a PowerPoint slide entitled “What I’m
Afraid Of ” (fig. 1.1):
• That the solar panels were a time machine.

• That I’m a grown-up woman coming back to this place
after many years.
• That my parents are gone, and our house isn’t ours anymore.
• It’s a broken-down ruin with no one in it.
• Living here all together was so sweet.
• Even when we fought.
• It felt like it would never end.
• I’ll always miss it.
(299)
Subsequently, she enters their house: “Inside there’s a light.

Familiar things fall over me like the softest, oldest blanket. I
start to cry” (300).
This scene initially appears to be a nightmare version of the
Proustian fantasy of Alex’s vision of returning to find his
younger self, but instead, here the impossible temporal leap
occurs in the other direction, sending Alison into the future—
perhaps twenty years, “From A to B,” finding that the life she
knows has vanished entirely. Egan has commented that “I
wanted to capture as many shocking discoveries of time having
passed as possible”; Alison’s fleeting nightmare offers another
“optative” experience, one resembling the famous scenes in
A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life in which the protago-
nist is granted a magical vision of a disturbing possible future
that (as it turns out) can still be forestalled.34 Or, perhaps, it is
more accurate to say that Alison is granted a version of a future
she cannot forestall— one in which she has grown up and her
family has been dispersed—but in such a way that allows her to
appreciate the time she still has left in that family as a child.
If time is a goon, does “the goon” in fact finally win in Goon
Squad? Egan’s novel at certain moments revels in its function as
From Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad.
a time-defying device, a means by which aesthetically to stop,

reverse, struggle against, or step entirely outside of time. Ulti-
mately, though, Egan returns us to a sense of time’s inescapability,
with a renewed or confirmed sense that even in its melancholy
declined state, prose fiction is still irreplaceable: for the illumi-
nation it offers both of our embeddedness in temporality and
our longing to transcend that embeddedness.
Side A, track 2
STORAGE, PRESERVATION,
M E MORY, R ECOR D I NG
J
“ ules had been wandering the loft, eyeing the framed
gold and platinum Conduit albums paving the walls,
the few guitars Bosco hadn’t sold off, and his collection
of pre-Columbian artifacts, which he hoarded in pristine glass
cases and refused to sell” (126). These artifacts, “hoarded” by a
washed-up rock star, emblematize Goon Squad ’s interest in the
ways that its characters remember, memorialize, and otherwise
preserve tokens of history and of the past. For Egan, the enter-
ing of a home or other private space offers a potential account-
ing or “eyeing” of individual memorial practices; here, Bosco’s
publicist Stephanie and her brother Jules have visited Bosco for
a pro forma check-in on his moribund career. (Stephanie’s hus-
band, Bennie, has only released Bosco’s recent albums out of
loyalty to a teenage friend.) In this visit, Egan suggests how
personal memories and tokens of the past are often stored and
displayed, both with intention and less purposefully, on walls
and in homes. Archaeological layers can often be observed by a
visitor, sometimes in the form of strata of different categories of
memories and memorials: the “official,” preferred, or self-
chosen story interlayered with less sanctioned or embraced ver-
sions of the story; purely private or personal artifacts mixed
with more public ones or with objects that in some way repre-
sent or symbolize aspects of history or culture. Memorializing,
storing, and collecting, all ways of preserving the past or main-
taining signs of it in the present, are activities prone to obsessive
or otherwise excessive forms. To “hoard,” as Bosco does here (in
Jules’s estimation), is to store and preserve too much or to do so
in inappropriate or perverse ways: to preserve what should be
disposed, to keep what should be let go.
Bosco preserves too much, often of the wrong things, and
this also seems to apply to his body. Jules observes a “black leather
recliner where Bosco spent the bulk of his time . . . positioned
by a dusty window through which the Hudson River and even
a bit of Hoboken were visible.” Bosco, who has become “huge—
from medications, he claimed” (125), although his trash also
nearly always contains an empty gallon container of ice cream,
not only “spent the bulk of his time” in this recliner but has
himself become “bulk,” excessive, weighted down by his own
history and unable to move forward with purpose or optimism
into the future.1 Bosco’s home has become cut off from the
world and nature (the river), now viewable only through
“dust” that represents an unhygienic and depressive relation-
ship to preservation. (When objects become “dusty,” it sug-
gests that they have become too static, or abandoned by those
who should bring activity and movement to the object.) When
he sits in his “recliner,” he begins “a juddering immersion into
his chair, which suctioned around him in a gelatinous grip”
(126). Egan likes, and uses elsewhere, the unusual adjective “jud-
dering”; 2 to “judder” means “esp. of something mechanical or
motor-driven: to shake or vibrate rapidly, forcefully, and often
noisily.” 3 “Juddering” seems a more mechanical analogue of
“fibrillation” (“a quivering movement in the fibrils of a muscle
or nerve, esp. the muscles of the heart”4 — a word that plays a
Storage, Preservation, Memory, Recording = 41
significant role in a key passage later in the novel [72]); that

Bosco “judders” here implies that he has become thing-like,
almost mechanical. His own “bulk” or “huge[ness]” signals his
own depressive and passive relation to a material world that
seems literally to overwhelm and engulf him. Bosco’s fatness,
ill health, and depression—“he’d been too sick to do much of
anything for the last two albums” (128)— sink him into a bulky,
immovable stasis.
In the context of his morbidly depressive state, “the framed
gold and platinum Conduit albums paving the walls” and “the
few guitars Bosco hadn’t sold off” function as signs of a better
past, tokens of a less depressed and more successful, agential
existence, when Bosco acted effectively in the world rather than
gorging on rocky road ice cream and being swallowed up by his
recliner like a rodent inside a boa constrictor. Gold, in the form
of Bennie’s homeopathic gold flakes, is a symbol of success and
potency in the novel—but a particularly illusory, self-deluding
form of these. Bennie swallows gold flakes in a compulsive and
pathetic bid to restore a lost joy and sense of engagement in the
world. And as Bosco’s framed albums suggest, in this music-
industry novel, gold also has a special symbolic meaning as a
public marker of success and renown. “Success” can be amor-
phous, subjective, fleeting, etc., but a framed gold album is a
crystallization of success, a material symbolization that prom-
ises to freeze a peak moment in time. Framed gold records are a
prerequisite for a successful music executive: “Lou is a music
producer who knows Bill Graham personally. There were gold
and silver albums on his walls and a thousand electric guitars”
(43). As far downward as Bosco spirals, his framed albums prove
that at least he once operated at a very high level. Gold operates
to freeze time, to arrest entropy, to mark off a “career” at a peak,
before it must—for most— decline.
Bosco’s albums are also interesting in their ambiguous rela-

tionship to objecthood. The Recording Industry Association of
America, in 1958, formalized an ongoing practice of record
labels awarding certificates to high-selling records by their own
artists. These new RIAA “gold records,” eventually awarded on
the basis of 500,000 copies sold, were later supplemented by
the categories of “platinum” (for a million sold) and then
“multi-platinum.” But are these gold or platinum records actual
records or symbols of such recordings? And are they themselves
valuable—“gold”— or do they only “represent” real value? Offi-
cial gold or platinum status leads to the issuing of an “official
RIAA trademarked seal and a certificate . . . manufactured
from a high quality self-adhesive gold and silver foil,”5 which
have been typically affixed to a vinyl record— or, more recently,
to a CD—for display in a plaque. But the gold is only adhesive
foil, and the record in the plaque need not be an actual copy of
the record in question; “trimmed and plated metal ‘masters’,
‘mothers’, or ‘stampers’ (metal parts used for pressing records
out of vinyl) were initially used” for this purpose in the place of
a copy of the actual recording.6 In other words, a framed gold
record may be both an authentic recording and a symbol of one
or simply a symbolic representation; it may be both metonymic—
containing a piece of the original object—and metaphorical or
simply metaphorical (only symbolizing that object). That which
is memorialized, the music and the experiences and creativity
and emotions that went into it, is in one sense “preserved” (if an
actual copy is in the plaque) but, in another, simply referenced
or symbolized. (Gold records are similar to coins, in these
respects—which once contained the precious metals that they
now merely symbolize.)
These ambiguities suggest some of the problems or pitfalls in
memorializing. To memorialize can be to preserve and not to
allow something valued to disappear forgotten—but it can also

seem to open up an ironic rift or gap between the present day
and the remembered object, in that once something is rendered
into a memorial, it likely is definitely gone or vanished or dead.
And it is normal to memorialize and document happy or suc-
cessful moments, but if those memorials seem to occupy too
much of your present day, it is a likely sign that you may have no
new moments worth memorializing or remembering.
Egan (and Bosco) group these tokens of long-past music-
industry success with a very different kind of memento: “his
collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, which he hoarded in
pristine glass cases.” The addition of this new kind of “cultural”
artifact invites us to consider his gold records and guitars as
analogous or similar to such ancient historical/cultural artifacts.
Such a comparison can be “positive”—Bosco’s personal memo-
rials are meaningful, at least to him, just as pre-Columbian
artifacts indisputably are— or more satirical or undermining:
we could see Bosco as akin to ancient peoples whose era of pur-
poseful activity is long since concluded and can now only be
accessed via such memorials. “Gold record” plaques or certifi-
cates can, indeed, become somewhat melancholy documents
over time. One gold-record collector quoted in an article in Bill-
board comments that he often rescues “plaques from a grim
demise at the bottom of a dumpster”: “Where I get my awards,
somebody in the business who has got them has moved, has lost
interest, doesn’t have any more room on the walls.”7 Pop music
history moves forward at an especially rapid pace, swiftly rede-
fining today’s hit or success as tomorrow’s forgotten and dis-
carded “relic.” To dwell too long, too permanently, on gold
records of the past can mark one’s own obsolescence.
The fact of the framing of the records and the “pristine glass
cases” of the artifacts calls attention to the way these various
artifacts have been presented as objects of aesthetic admiration.

These items are at once cultural artifact and aesthetic artwork,
although each category suggests a somewhat different, if paral-
lel, interpretive lens. Viewed positively, these are treasured
objects of aesthetic contemplation. Bosco keeps the framed
records and the guitars because these objects have a relationship
to the art and the aesthetic experience in which he participated
and that meant so much to him. He “hoards” all of these objects
in aesthetic frames and cases to preserve them and to mark
them out as special. But as we’ve already seen, another more
jaundiced perspective is possible here too: Bosco aestheticizes
and preserves in order to mark out the absence of the passion
and joy that once fed his aesthetic experience. What was once
living art is now kept under glass, not to be touched, in effect
dead and static—not an object saved from time’s decay but one
that has stopped living.
And to add one more consideration here, these items also
have a similarly bifurcated or ambivalent status as commodities.
The guitars on display are the “few . . . Bosco hadn’t sold off,”
and he “refused to sell” the pre-Columbian artifacts (although
he could certainly use the money). In our culture and the world
of this novel, what one refuses to sell may be especially valuable,
but it also may exist in a perverse, depressive, or irrational rela-
tion to a market. One senses Egan’s reflections here regarding
her own relationship to a marketplace and to the unavoidable
status of her own writing as at once artwork and commodity
to be sold. Egan has worked regularly as a magazine journalist,
and she defines this work as “an additional job” beyond her work
as a novelist.8 Like many writers today with artistic ambitions, she
seems to feel torn between a desire to produce a noncommodi-
fied artwork that could ignore or even refuse the marketplace
and a recognition that her writing must also be a “job” that
earns her income. Bosco is an artist who has fallen on hard

times, whose work no longer has much active value in a present-
day market; cause and effect can be slightly difficult to untangle
here, since in the world of Goon Squad (and perhaps our own as
well), it seems that those who operate too “purely,” who refuse
to take practical steps to make their products operate as saleable
commodities (whatever other values those products may also
possess), tend eventually to be punished, at least in the short
and medium term, by being in effect banished absolutely from
any market—akin to having one’s eBay or Amazon seller status
revoked. Bosco has been left with very little to show for his
career aside from a small number of artifacts that may or may
not have some residual market value but that he has taken pains
to secure entirely from the possibility of sale, literally or figura-
tively preserved “under glass.”
Bosco’s artifacts are not the first such personal collection of
mementos that we’ve seen in the novel. Occupying more fic-
tional space is a collection by Sasha that does some comparable
things in the novel. The story of this collection and of Sasha’s
“collecting” (stealing) in fact winds through the novel, offering
one of its most prominent through lines. Goon Squad begins
with Sasha’s collecting; the novel’s first words, “it began the
usual way,” signals that what follows will be part of a repetitive
sequence or dynamic, as Sasha spies an open handbag left on
the floor of a restaurant women’s room while its owner is in the
toilet stall and steals the “fat, tender wallet” (4) she finds inside
it. In fact, we soon come to realize that Sasha is in the grips of a
compulsion or (as her therapist labels it) “condition” (5), one that
she is working to free herself from. Egan gives us a list of “the
things she’d lifted over the past year”: “five sets of keys, fourteen
pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese
grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five
pens. . . . Sasha no longer took anything from stores—their

cold, inert goods didn’t tempt her. Only from people” (4).
We can again see a tension between the object as commod-
ity versus the object as privately held, cut off from a marketplace
and economic value. Sasha does not steal things either for the
sake of “use” or “exchange value”—for their value in practical
use or economic value in exchange— or even for “exhibition
value” (to be shown for informational or aesthetic purposes, as
in a museum) but to generate, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a
kind of personal “cult value.” Sasha is a perverse personal archi-
vist, stealing physical objects that do not, in most cases, even have
any particular preexisting emotional resonance but that simply
speak to her or draw her to them and that she feels compelled to
add to a secret archive possessing quasi-mystical properties. As
a plumber crawls under her bathtub, she spies “a beautiful
screwdriver” in his tool belt lying by her feet: “Sasha felt herself
contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite; she
needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute” (7). Sasha
“contracts around” the tool (and then steals it) almost in the way
Bosco’s recliner “suctioned around him in a gelatinous grip.”
Egan is interested in the ways people define themselves in rela-
tion to objects—and especially in perverse, unhealthy, or com-
pulsive such relations in which “usual” human-object practices
seem to break down or warp. In fact, Sasha’s “whole apartment,”
which “six years ago had seemed a way station to some better
place,” now appears to her to have, in a sense, “contracted
around” her: it “had ended up solidifying around Sasha, gather-
ing mass and weight, until she felt . . . mired in it” and unable to
“move on” (14). Much like Bosco, she is depressively “stuck,”
static, “mired” in objects and memories, accumulating objects
that seem to stand in for memories in an unhealthy manner.9
Sasha feels especially guilty about stealing that screwdriver;

she feels sorry for the plumber, who needed and presumably
treasured it. If her “collecting” practices always remove objects
from any “use value,” to place them in a zone of personal “cult
value,” in this case the screwdriver is not losing any abstract or
general use value but a very particular “use” by a hard-working,
working-class man who is trying to fix her bathtub. It is notable
that the tool is so emphatically (and somewhat unexpectedly)
defined as an aesthetic object of notable beauty: “she saw the
plumber’s tool belt lying on the floor at her feet. It had a beauti-
ful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle gleaming
like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted,
sparkling” (7). For Sasha, the screwdriver functions both as an
alluring aesthetic object and as something like an addictive
drug that hits her limbic system like an opiate: “once the screw-
driver was in her hand, she felt instant relief from the pain of
having an old soft-backed man snuffling under her tub, and
then something more than relief: a blessed indifference, as if the
very idea of having pain over such a thing were baffling” (8).
Very quickly, however, once the plumber leaves, the screw-
driver loses its magical glow and now looks “normal,” “not spe-
cial anymore” (8). Adding it to her collection seems to serve as
a way to memorialize the fleeting, “special” allure it once pos-
sessed for her.
When she brings her date Alex home from the restaurant
after the incident with the wallet, he sees her collection, includ-
ing the screwdriver: “It looked like the work of a miniature bea-
ver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random.
To Sasha’s eye, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments
and close shaves. . . . It contained years of her life compressed”
(15). Her therapist later asks her, “how did you feel, standing
with Alex in front of all those things you’d stolen?” “She didn’t
want to explain to Coz the mix of feelings she’d had, standing
there with Alex: the pride she took in these objects, a tender-
ness that was only heightened by the shame of their acquisition.
She’d risked everything, and here was the result: the raw,
warped core of her life” (15). The collection possesses a memorial
quality in that its items not only serve as reminders of the
moments when Sasha took them from their owners but as testa-
ments to the feeling of “blessed indifference” and freedom from
pain that a theft quite briefly induces. It is a little bit as if Sasha
maintained a collection of the paraphernalia used to shoot her-
oin: items—also somewhat like a framed gold record—that
memorialize and represent a now-past moment of peak experi-
ence. Her life is “compressed” into these objects, suggesting
both “successful” memorialization—the collection manages
this work of compression effectively—and also a sense of mel-
ancholy loss: “years of life” have been in effect shrunk or reduced
into this “heap” of “illegible” objects.
The items Sasha steals acquire a kind of intense, if transi-
tory, sensory value, a “sparkling” and vivid beauty resembling
that of an artwork. That Egan raises the question of the “legi-
bility” of the collection also points to another possible analogy—
not to visual art but to writing or literature. The objects Sasha
steals seem to operate according to the logic of the art object as
that which best resists time.10 Sasha, who works as a music
publicist for a record label, lies on one side of the divide that
runs through this novel and its characters between art and
commerce/publicity—although, as we’ll eventually see, she does
later become an amateur artist. Her collection may be best
understood as not only a record of personal neurotic compulsion
and even sickness but as a kind of conceptual art assemblage—
and in this also perhaps as one analogy or countermodel for
Egan’s own novel. Sasha can be seen to resemble a writer

attempting to memorialize, to symbolize, and to represent her
experience in some lasting form. Because the dopamine hit
from her stolen objects always quickly fades, she is trapped in a
compulsively repetitive series, documented in her collection,
one that is difficult for outsiders to “read.”
Sasha (and Egan) quite self-consciously frames her experi-
ence and her “condition” in terms of a novelistic narrative pro-
cess: “She and Coz [her therapist] were collaborators, writing a
story whose ending had already been determined: she would get
well” (6). The novel’s opening words, “it began the usual way,”
define a kind of familiarly redundant story—the story of Sasha’s
thefts—that she and her therapist work together to re-script.
Sasha, like Bosco, is “mired” in her memories such that she can-
not progress or move forward. The collection, the “raw, warped
core of her life,” embodies one form of memorialization, one
that is at once very effective and also painful and, Sasha has
come to feel, self-destructive.
To return now to Bosco and his collection and memorials:
somewhat like Sasha’s attempt to re-script her story, Bosco makes
a surprising proposal for an attempt at career revitalization—
albeit one that would also represent a final devitalization. He
surprises Stephanie and Jules by proposing a bold plan for his
new record: “I want interviews, features, you name it. . . . Fill
up my life with that shit. Let’s document every fucking humili-
ation” (127). Egan has a long-standing interest in the parallels
between fiction and various “reality”-based forms of contempo-
rary narrative, including both reality television and Facebook
and other social media. She offered an early and amazingly
prescient satirical depiction of a Facebook-like social media
platform called “Ordinary People” in her 2001 novel Look at
Me, published two years before Mark Zuckerberg created the
earliest version of Facebook (but two years after the launch of

LiveJournal, perhaps her immediate referent here): “It’s not a
magazine—it’s a database. . . . What I’m doing is, I’m option-
ing the rights to people’s stories, just ordinary Americans. . . .
Each one of these folks will have their own home page—we call
it a PersonalSpace™— devoted exclusively to their lives.”11 Here
Bosco proposes a kind of personal reality show, featuring near-
total documentation of every aspect of his life, including the
most shameful or private moments (“you can watch me take a
shit if you want to” [127]), as publicity for his new album,
prompting Stephanie to object that “no one cares that your life
has gone to hell, Bosco”; she points out that he isn’t a rock star
anymore but instead “a relic” (127). That is, he is something like
his gold records and guitars on the wall—merely referencing a
now-lost aesthetic power of the past rather than embodying it
as any active force.
Bosco now reveals the key twist in his concept: the point of
the album, the documentation, and the tour will be to build
suspense for his own suicide. “I want my death to be an attrac-
tion, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art. . . . Reality TV,
hell—it doesn’t get any realer than this. Suicide is a weapon;
that we all know. But what about an art?” (129). “I want out of
this mess,” he comments; we can now see that he is fully aware
of the poignancy and futility that surrounds his various career
artifacts, so much so that he proposes a two-stage process of
total documentation followed by spectacular suicide, one that
would transform his life and career from a collection of value-
less artifacts to a powerful work of conceptual art. One response
to the paradoxes of aesthetic preservation we’ve considered is to
go one step further than a mere retreat from the marketplace—
all the way to autodestruction and final refusal of art’s object-
hood and memorialization, a kind of burning or explosion of
the accumulated “hoard”—as if Sasha were to destroy both her-

self and her collection in one public display. Bosco here seems to
play out, to a radical extreme, a logic of the contemporary art
world: the artist, as part of the necessary process of self-
commodifying for a marketplace, is eventually pushed to a more
and more thorough “documentation,” as audiences demand
more and more “relics” and mementos of the artist and her art.
One way out of this logic would be suicide, turning one’s life and
art into one final, conclusive “spectacle” that at once fully “satis-
fies” and “refuses” the market in a single paradoxical gesture.12
Bosco’s proposed “Suicide Tour” may also offer an implicit
commentary on the fate of the contemporary artist more
broadly, including the novelist. Egan has claimed not only that
she does not draw directly on herself, family members, or close
friends as models for characters but that she is not even “capa-
ble” of writing about “myself or people I know” in fiction.13 She
takes pains to emphasize the difference between her fictional
art and her actual life—to render her work as distant as possible
from “autofiction” or from any fictionalized “archive” of “her
own story.” The contemporary novelist faces a marketplace in
which the author’s biographical self or “story” is often what
seems to fetch the highest price or to attract the most attention.
(See, for example, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Roberto Bolaño, or
Elena Ferrante.) Sasha and Bosco both suggest the risk of
becoming “mired” in self-reflective self-collecting/storage and
self-presentation, perhaps also offering a cautionary model for
the novelist who would transform her own narrative into a pub-
lic artwork.
The links the novel suggests between memorials, art, and
death are most striking when Sasha’s uncle Ted, the art histo-
rian, travels to Naples on a mission (recollecting both Henry
James’s The Ambassadors and Egan’s own first novel, The Invisible
Circus) to find and retrieve the college-aged Sasha, who has run
away with the drummer of a punk band and ended up in Italy,
having cut off ties with her mother, Ted’s sister. Ted visits “the
ruins of Pompeii, observing early Roman wall paintings and
small, prone bodies scattered like Easter eggs among the col-
umned courtyards” (208). He is “alert to lingering reverbera-
tions of screams, of sliding ash. How could so much devastation
have been silenced?” (210). Egan (and Ted) seem drawn to Pom-
peii in part as a vivid and extreme instance of art and culture as,
in effect, preserved mummifications of the life of the past. Ted
is haunted by the irony of “so much devastation” having been
“silenced,” extremes of suffering or feeling rendered completely
mute by history. Although her collection looks to an outside
observer like a group of inert objects, to Sasha, “it almost shook
under its load of embarrassments and close shaves” (my italics);
similarly here, the attuned observer can feel or almost hear in
the objects and mummies “scattered” in the courtyards “lin-
gering reverberations,” an apt phrase for the way the art, cul-
ture, and life of the past can be at once dead—“ruins,” relics,
silenced—yet still echo or vibrate in the present. Depending on
perspective, these ruins can occasion either wonder that “so
much” of the past has been silenced or surprise that what has
been silenced can still “reverberate,” that art and culture allow
for a continued sounding of the inert and vanished.
Ted’s broodings over the paintings and mummies of Pompeii
also bring to mind the novel’s motif of scars and scarring. Scars,
somewhat like tattoos, are marks, often violent, left by the past
on the present, proof (or mementos) that organic bodies have
moved through and been damaged or inscribed by time. They
also bring to mind the inscriptions of music on vinyl albums—
and of writing. If Pompeii’s mummies are dead bodies that have
been preserved (albeit in nonliving form) in the present, a
scarred body is one that still lives but whose surface reveals
time’s marks.
The topic of scarring represents a long-standing interest of
Egan’s. She published a 1997 New York Times Magazine article
about cutting and self-scarring on the part of teenage girls, one
of whom she quotes on the ways such cutting can function as a
substitute for language: “I had so much anxiety, I couldn’t con-
centrate on anything until I somehow let that out, and not being
able to let it out in words, I took the razor and started cutting
my leg and I got excited about seeing my blood. It felt good to
see the blood coming out, like that was my other pain leaving,
too.”14 Cutting plays a central role in Egan’s early story, “Sacred
Heart,” in which the narrator recalls an erotically charged epi-
sode in a school bathroom, in which she agreed to use a sharp
pin to cut a classmate’s arm: “I took her wrist and held it. I
scraped the pin hard this time. . . . I did not look once at
Amanda until I had finished an A like the one she’d carved on
the pew.”15 Here, the scarring is quite literally a form of writing,
turning the body’s skin into a surface for an inscription. And in
The Keep, Danny stands before a full-length mirror so he can
“see the dregs of the many IDs he’d tried on,” including tattoos
and “a cigarette burn on his left hand,” “a gash on the forehead,”
and “grease burns on one forearm.”16
When Ted finds Sasha in Naples, he notices that her fore-
arms “were scarred and scuffed like furniture” (225); she also
appears to him as “a girl whose feathery bones did not quite
heal” (217). Although Ted draws the obvious conclusion that she
has attempted suicide (a marking by the self), the scars also
suggest a broader sense that this still-young body has been
heavily marked by experience, from the outside. Egan is inter-
ested in the way the human body is “imprinted” by time and
experience—for example, Sasha’s observation about Alex that
she “could tell he was in excellent shape, not from going to the
gym but from being young enough that his body was still
imprinted with whatever sports he’d played in high school and
college” (6). Scarring represents a radical version of the usual
“imprinting” of experience on bodies. This imprinting can take
a literal, physical form, although sometimes the “scars” of mem-
ory are psychological and simply feel physical: “God, it hurt him
to think of this now—hurt him physically, as if the memory
were raking over him and leaving gashes” (31).
Scars are most prominent in the novel in the story of the
disastrous New Year’s party organized by the publicist La Doll
(Dolly), during which “translucent trays of oil and water” were
“suspended beneath small brightly colored spotlights” intended
to “make the opposing liquids twist and bubble and swirl” (141).
Unfortunately, the trays melt under the heat of the lamps,
“sending scalding oil onto the heads of every glamorous person
in the country and some other countries, too. They were burned,
scarred, maimed in the sense that tear-shaped droplets of scar
tissue on the forehead of a movie star or generally fabulous per-
son constitute maiming” (142). Among other things, this is a
scene of a failed aesthetic production, an attempt to create visual
beauty and glamour that ends disastrously. Egan is interested in
what precisely constitutes “maiming”: for an ordinary person,
it’s implied, a small “tear-shaped droplet of scar tissue on the
forehead” would simply be a scar, part of the usual “scuffing” life
leaves on a body, but for a celebrity who relies on physical glam-
our, this “constitute[s] maiming.” If scars represent one form of
the memory of an organic body, evidence of its path through the
material world, then a “maimed” body is one that has crossed a
line to become irrevocably changed and damaged.
These are yet more central concerns of Egan’s earlier novel
Look at Me, whose protagonist Charlotte is a model whose face
is dramatically transformed by a serious car accident and subse-

quent reconstructive surgery, such that even close friends some-
times do not recognize her. Look at Me in fact reads, in some
respects, as a more literal take on some of the concerns that
Egan later went on to work through in somewhat less direct
ways in Goon Squad. Consider, for example, the scene in which
a visiting journalist (later revealed to actually be a cultural stud-
ies professor engaged in research) lays out why she was eager to
interview Charlotte: “A model whose appearance has changed
drastically is a perfect vehicle, I think, for examining the rela-
tionship among image, perception, and identity.”17 Charlotte is
a test case for a radical experience of having one’s skin so
“marked” and scarred as to seem fundamentally to alter one’s
identity in the eyes of others.
A scars motif also runs through Look at Me, in which Char-
lotte is not the only character to feature distinctive scars. She
comments of a friend, for example, that “Oscar had begun his
life as someone else, but who that was seemed impolite to ask,
when Oscar had taken such pains to efface him. The only clues
I had were two thick scars on his left forearm [and] a tinge of a
Caribbean accent.”18 Scars, like an accent, can also linger as a
trace of an identity that one has otherwise “effaced” or moved
beyond. In a contemporary context in which identity is always
subject to revision and effacement, scars historicize, marking a
body and potentially affixing it to a certain identity, time, and
place, in a manner that some wish to evade: “Accents were his-
tory: an accent declared I come from someplace else. But for
Michael West, the past was gone, pulverized into grains of
memory too fine to decipher.”19
The distinction between marks or scars made by oneself (as
in a suicide attempt) and those that come from outside (as from
Charlotte’s accidental injury) becomes blurry when Dolly
discovers, to her shock, that some of those who were not present
at her now-infamous party have taken to self-scarring in order
to claim attendance. When Dolly notices scars on the movie
star (in decline) Kitty’s arms, Kitty admits, “I made them
myself. . . . You can’t find a person who wasn’t at that party. . . .
And they’ve got proof. We’ve all got proof—who’s going to say
we’re lying?” (150). A scar is a memento and can function as an
authenticating mark. We’ve seen that to “hoard” is to store and
preserve too much and that both Bosco’s apartment and his
body are marked by evidence of “hoarding” or saving to excess
(as in his fatness); scars are a means by which bodies “save” evi-
dence of their experiences, turn the body into a storage medium.
In this novel so concerned with the shift from analog or physical
media forms (for example, vinyl records) to digital (MP3s), scars
seem to represent an ineluctable physicality possessing, for bet-
ter or worse, an unquestionable authenticity— even if, as Kitty
reveals, this authenticating effect can itself be subject to falsifi-
cation. If gold albums can mark a “high point” in a career that
later declines, scars can, similarly, mark a low point or simply a
point of intensity or eventfulness in a body’s career through the
world: “proof ” of a particular moment or event.
Kitty’s self-made scars acquire some additional irony in a
subsequent chapter, which takes place years earlier, when Kitty
was still a very young and famous starlet near the beginning of
her career. The chapter is written in the form of a gonzo maga-
zine’s celebrity profile of Kitty by Stephanie’s brother Jules,
whose breakdown and assault on Kitty is gradually revealed in
the course of the chapter. Jules fixates specifically on Kitty’s
skin as a marker of her miraculous youth, beauty, and fame,
suggesting a vision of the human body as a writing surface
inscribed by time: “Because Kitty is so young and well nour-
ished, so sheltered from the gratuitous cruelty of others, so
unaware as yet that she will reach middle age and eventually die
(possibly alone), because she has not yet disappointed herself . . .
Kitty’s skin—that smooth, plump, sweetly fragrant sac upon
which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion—is
perfect” (180). Jules sees Kitty as miraculously “unscuffed” by
life, as far from “maimed” as one could be. In his metaphor of
life as “scrawl[ing] the record” of our failures on our skin, Jules
defines the body as a storage medium, a page on which time and
history leave a record. Beauty and youth are seen as the absence
of such marks—but to live in time is inevitably to begin to
acquire them (and the Kitty we meet some years later has cer-
tainly done so).
The flow of time and history are impossible to resist, but
individuals can achieve some agency in their choice of what,
when, and how to record and memorialize personal and public
history. This dynamic relates to art and aesthetics in the func-
tion of artistic works as one form of such memorializing. An
artwork is always strongly associated with the moment of its
production and can serve as a means to preserve or even to seem
to stop time.
Egan is especially fascinated by the paradoxical ways that a
given artwork or artifact can at once firmly mark a particular
moment in time but also offer an expansive access to a long his-
torical sweep. She seems especially interested in the ways such
special objects can seem both more firmly affixed to particular
moments and more freely untethered to temporality than objects
normally are. In “framing,” aestheticizing, or preserving special
artifacts, we both preserve the past, which can seem “com-
pressed” into or encapsulated into the artifact, but also permit
striking leaps of temporality. Indeed, Egan seems to aim for
this effect for her own novel, as in what I’ve described as a tem-
poral wormhole that Egan opens via the Samburu dagger that,
she tells us, will become a treasured artifact preserved for its
cultural, aesthetic, and familial memories and resonances.
Joe and Lulu’s dagger, “displayed inside a cube of Plexiglass”
in a Tribeca loft, strongly resembles some other “artifacts” we’ve
considered—Bosco’s pre-Columbian artifacts. As we’ve already
seen, acts of personal museum-like curating can be viewed at
once as a positive preservation of something valued, stored so
that it will not decay or be harmed, and as a potentially more
negative or excessive “hoarding” of fragments from the past.
This second example also underlines a slightly different aspect
of this dynamic: the meanings of cross-cultural exchange, col-
lecting, and the possibilities of cultural appropriation, conde-
scension, or fetishizing of the “primitive” or “premodern.” When
contemporary Western cultures preserve pre- or nonmodern arti-
facts, these memorializations always reveal complex motivations
and effects. Modern yearning for the simplicity or “purity” of ear-
lier cultures often is a form of patronizing bad faith, even if it may
also be motivated by genuine admiration. (See, for example,
modernist uses of forms from African aesthetics, as in Picasso’s
paintings.) Of course, a Samburu hunting dagger on display in a
Manhattan loft has a somewhat different meaning when its
owner is a descendent of the previous owner. If Sasha stole
(“appropriated”) the plumber’s screwdriver and so forcibly negated
its “use value,” its function as a useful tool for a worker, and if a
washed-up rock star’s veneration for Indigenous American cul-
tures also seems potentially appropriative, Joe memorializes the
dagger’s earlier functions for his own grandfather, arguably in an
altogether respectful manner. Egan tends to reserve judgment,
in any case, and simply emphasizes the sheer multiplicity and
force of the human drive to memorialize and preserve the past
in the form of artifacts and the fascinating ways that these
memorializations change and transform those artifacts— often
shifting them from a “use” function to a different one, such as

exhibition or “cult” value. She implies that human beings pos-
sess an endlessly renewing drive to preserve and commemorate
and to tell stories and rescript old stories based on those acts.
We are constantly creating new narratives, often reusing old
ones, and re-scripting new roles for objects and artifacts.
The novel is, of course, especially interested in one particular
category of aesthetic/cultural “storage”: the preservation of
music. The novel charts a shift from vinyl records, and the mas-
sively profitable pop music business of the 1970s and 1980s based
around the marketing of those records, to the much-diminished
early twenty-first-century version of that industry adjusting to a
new reality of digitization, compression, and dematerialization.
As we’ve seen in Egan’s remark on the way the form of Goon
Squad pays homage to the form of the long-playing album,
Egan values the ability of an artist to “conceive of large visions,”
to create substantial and coherent artworks with the knowledge
that an audience exists that is prepared to grapple with them.20
She seems to write Goon Squad with a somewhat diminished
and belated sense that the age of such aesthetic “large visions”
may have passed.
In those 2010 comments just referenced, Egan’s focus is primar-
ily on form and order, on the ways the “album” as a complete
artwork has been broken up or “defragmented” into pieces, as
consumers can easily buy or listen to individual songs and ignore
those songs’ placement and order in a coherent album. Another
aspect of the transformation of pop music and the album,
though, relates less to order and sequence than to the storage
medium used: as pop music has gone from inscription in vinyl
records and cassettes to immaterial or digital code in CDs,
MP3s, and finally streaming, which historically began to take
off in 2008 with the founding of Spotify.
The novel’s concern with “digitization” and dematerializa-

tion as a loss is most visible in the scene where Bennie, driving
to pick up his son after school, broods about his own dimin-
ished sex drive, which to him seems linked to a diminishment
in the power of music and his own ability to find pleasure in it.
As he plays old punk music by “the Sleepers and the Dead Ken-
nedys, San Francisco bands he’d grown up with” (22)—and that
Egan also grew up with—Bennie “listened for muddiness, the
sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an
actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usu-
ally an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape—
everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie
and his peers were churning out” (22). In this humorously self-
disgusted piece of free indirect discourse, Bennie strains to find
traces of the “actual” in musical recordings, suggesting that any
such indexical traces are now nothing more than “analogue sig-
naling,” “bloodless constructions,” abstract and unreal. To Ben-
nie and, indeed, to many of those of us who have lived through
these transitions, the shift from vinyl to MP3s and streaming
can feel like a fundamental transformation and loss— of the
“sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an
actual room,” of a conjured presence whose material inscription
grants it an aesthetic force and presence that we once took for
granted.21 As one scholar of the digital puts it, in terms that jibe
with Bennie’s, “our culture chooses the digital” because it is
“very efficient, predictable, transportable, ubiquitous.” But the
digital achieves these effects through abstraction, which is in
fact “the basis of the digital’s power”; “abstraction is the digital’s
glorious motor, but also its tragic deficit.”22
Bennie continues to think that he “knew that what he was
bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The prob-
lem was precision, perfection: the problem was digitization,
which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared

through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.
An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff
aloud” (23). Bennie’s midlife-crisis brooding, which Egan wit-
tily marks out as interior thoughts of the kind that could not be
uttered, lands in an over-the-top denunciation of the digitiza-
tion of aesthetic experience as deadly, a “holocaust” of art. (A
term that acquires particular resonances in this novel so focused
on the destruction of 9/11, also analogized to the “screams” and
“sliding ash” of the fire of Pompeii.) Bennie views pop music as
having been downsized, compressed, and also devitalized and
disembodied. His thinking somewhat resembles Moose’s mus-
ings, in Look at Me, about a “world remade by circuitry,” one
“without history or context or meaning . . . certainly headed
toward death.”23
Part of what seems to concern Egan about the fate of art in a
digital era is the way the digital offers a promise (even if perhaps
illusory) of complete forgetting or erasure. In this passage from
The Keep, for example, a character first defines digital erasure as
absolute or total but then slightly adjusts that claim: “Danny
had advanced skills when it came to not thinking: he would
picture himself deleting things, disconnecting them from his
brain so they disappeared the way digital stuff disappears—
without a memory. But sometimes he still felt them, the disap-
peared things, hanging around him like shadows.”24 Digital
recording seems “bloodless,” disembodied, yet it produces new
kinds of half-erased, half-present memories or remnants that
can acquire a somewhat ghostly or Gothic quality—as The Keep
suggests.
Bennie’s musings about music are intertwined with his
reflections on the “disappearance” of his “lust” or desire, and he
seems to associate the materiality or physicality of the music
with which he grew up with that erotic desire. “The deep

thrill of these old songs lay, for Bennie, in the rapturous surges
of sixteen-year-old-ness they induced” (23); it is as if, for Ben-
nie, music both used to have material form and induced desire,
in a manner strongly linked to “actual bodies in a room,” we could
say. We should not simply conflate Bennie’s very masculine
perspective with Egan’s, but even as she subjects him to a degree
of satire, she also evinces clear sympathy with his somewhat
catastrophizing vision of a world that has rendered aesthetic
experience diminished and desire free and that has “sucked the
life out of ” art by abstracting and dematerializing it.
Goon Squad contemplates the fate of art in an age of down-
sizing, when the bulky materials of aesthetic creations are so
routinely transformed into more-efficiently rendered informa-
tion. Claude Shannon’s insights into data compression from the
1940s have by now revolutionized our experience of nearly all
media and information forms. As James Gleick summed up this
transformation, “Satellite television channels, pocket music
players, efficient cameras and telephones and countless other
modern appurtenances depend on coding algorithms to com-
press numbers—sequences of bits.”25 Film and music, once
experienced via such gloriously inefficient and data-rich media
forms as 35 mm film and vinyl records, are now usually radically
compressed in digital forms that are fundamentally “lossy”:
where “lossless” compression records all original data, “lossy”
compression—as in a MP3 or JPEG—permanently deletes data
for the sake of greater compression and efficiency. When you
listen to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” (or the Dead Kennedys)
as an MP3 or streaming on Spotify or watch North by Northwest
streaming on Amazon, much of the original aural and visual
material has been jettisoned in order to render the final product
more easily transmissible.26 (We choose the digital because it is
efficient.) This means that a very literal form of “loss” is endemic

to much contemporary aesthetic experience—a sense of dimin-
ishment that seems to haunt Egan’s novel.
One could certainly pose counterarguments to Bennie’s, and
perhaps Egan’s, take on digitization and compression. Debates
over the relative value of “originals” and “copies” go back, of
course, through Walter Benjamin in the early twentieth century
all the way to Plato. It would be fair to point out that the digitiza-
tion and dematerialization of art does not necessarily represent
only loss, diminishment, and forgetting. On the contrary, some
might object that when art is digitized, it can be rendered more
accessible, widely distributed, and preserved (or remembered).
Spotify’s library is, on the one hand, compressed and of dimin-
ished audio quality—but on the other hand, and more positively,
it has also put an unimaginably huge musical archive into all of
our pockets. While such questions, at once pragmatic and philo-
sophical, are endlessly debatable, Egan’s novel is suffused by a
sense that as we digitize our artworks, we do experience not just
technical “lossiness” but also a broader and deeper sense of
diminishment. The dematerialization of art, its “abstraction”
from materiality, feels like disappearance, she suggests—so it
inevitably suggests forgetting. The disappearance of objects pre-
figures to us our own disappearance. For Bennie, the sounds
carved into actual vinyl discs are ineluctably linked to his teenage
self that listened to those sounds in a particular room. (And it is
in fact the case that “lossless” audio formats are defined in part by
a fidelity to the space of the original recording.)27 Even if some
version of the songs are now easily accessible on Bennie’s smart-
phone, that specific nexus of sound, materiality, and self from
1979, and its sense of replete fullness, is forever vanished.
As we conclude this section, it’s worth thinking further
about the way these reflections about memory and storage and
documentation on Egan’s part manifest themselves in the nov-

el’s self-awareness of prose fiction as one of many means by which
we preserve, organize, archive, and “display” artifacts of the
past. Behind Egan’s depiction of this history, as I’ve suggested,
can be glimpsed a less explicit, implied history of fiction, the
novel, and the publishing industry, which has grappled with its
own version of the crisis of the music industry and the broader
cultural shift toward digital storage. That is, we can read Egan
as using a “music-industry narrative” as a way to raise self-
reflexive questions about a kind of shadow or implicit parallel
“fiction-industry narrative.” Whatever is said about music and
pop songs in the novel asks to be considered as also applying, at
least potentially or in part, to fiction. Even if the traditional
predigital forms of fiction (print novels on paper) have survived
far more successfully, thus far, than vinyl albums—e-books
have, so far, failed to disrupt the publishing industry anywhere
near as thoroughly as MP3s and then streaming did the music
industry, and the language of fiction is arguably immune to
some forms of digital “compression”—Bennie’s denunciations of
the dematerialization and compression of art also speak to
Egan’s own medium.
It’s also worth remembering, too, that for a year, while an
undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the early
1980s, Egan dated a young Steve Jobs as he was bringing the
first Apple computers to market—giving her an unusually
inside view of an earlier crucial turning point in the modern
history of computing. Jobs viewed the technological revolution
he helped inaugurate as one that would displace the printed
book completely; he was even a skeptic about Amazon’s Kindle
and other e-readers, on the grounds that “it doesn’t matter how
good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read
anymore.”28 Egan became, through her relationship with Jobs,
an extremely early adopter of the Mac: “When they met, he was

inventing the Mac; he delivered one to her mother’s apartment,
which Egan took East to write her papers on.”29 Since then,
thinking about the fate of the printed word and of reading in a
world transformed by personal computers and smartphones has
been prominent in her fiction.
Egan is interested in the question of which writing we
choose to preserve in embodied form—and which we either do
not preserve or choose only to keep in digital form. In Look at
Me, the narrator, Charlotte, mentions, as one of the “few things
I’d brought with me when I first drove to New York,” “my
grandparents’ letters to each other from the summer my grand-
mother spent in New York before they married, letters full of
wit and play, her confidence in the safety of writing by the
lamplight at 135th and Riverside.”30 “But I’d lost them during
one move or another,” she goes on to say: “and now all I remem-
bered was the sepia tone of their ink and my grandmother’s
neat, ruled penmanship. I felt a thud of regret. Oh, for God’s
sake. . . . Weren’t keepsakes a wee bit quaint in a world where
you could . . . call Bangladesh from a pay phone at the beach?”
This personal memory evokes a broader concern with the loss of
writing itself in its material form and an entire culture of liter-
acy associated with it— one associated not just with physical
qualities, such as “the sepia tone of . . . ink” and “ruled pen-
manship,” but also with such values as “wit and play.” Egan’s
later Twitter story “Black Box”—written and published after
Goon Squad—represents an extended experiment with the pos-
sibilities of a purely online composition and publication;
described by one critic as considering “the reconceptualization
of the body as information,”31 “Black Box” suggests a (dysto-
pian) radicalization of a tendency Egan seems to observe as
writing becomes increasingly digitized and cut off from its
material history and grounding. In a world where you can “call

Bangladesh from a pay phone at the beach,” the spatial and
temporal specificity of writing by hand becomes old-fashioned
or “quaint,” residual. It is interesting to realize, however, that
Egan wrote the epigrammatic fragments of “Black Box,”
which were later published in the form of tweets and then “col-
lected” in the form of a New Yorker story, “by hand in a Japanese
notebook that had eight rectangles on each page”; 32 her own
writing practice, that is, remained fully embedded in “residual”
paper-based methods—she has said that she always writes in
longhand 33— even as she composed a seemingly dematerialized
and purely digital fiction.
Egan’s self-awareness about the application of questions of
“storage medium” is especially evident in Goon Squad ’s penulti-
mate chapter 12, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” written entirely
in the form of a PowerPoint slide presentation created by Sasha’s
twelve-year-old daughter, Alison, in the near future. Perhaps
the section of the novel most often commented upon, “Great
Rock and Roll Pauses” shares with “Black Box” an overt interest
in considering how the traditional forms of prose fiction might
adapt to or draw from new twenty-first-century technologies,
forms, and formats. The PowerPoint chapter is especially strik-
ing, perhaps, because of that presentation software’s reputation
for corporate banality. While it’s become conventional for
authors to incorporate email, texting, and various social-media
forms within their fictions, Egan’s use of PowerPoint stands out
because this software is so widely loathed, often seen as the ne
plus ultra of blandly stultifying business speak.
In mimicking or reproducing PowerPoint’s distinctly ugly
cascades of blocks, bubbles, and circles and triangles of text,
sometimes crudely connected via arrows or lines, Egan seems
among other things to be showing off her own— and the form
of the novel’s— capacity to assimilate and make use of virtually

any medium, any format or mode of inscription and preserva-
tion, to render compelling and meaningful the most dull or
banal form of language. James Wood comments that the “nov-
elist’s job is to become, to impersonate what he describes, even
when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring” (33); the cor-
porate discourse of PowerPoint allows Egan a bravura display of
the potential of even the most degraded and soulless idiolect or
format, in the right hands, to reveal unforeseen depths of feel-
ing and meaning.34
The chapter is a documentation, a recording of ideas and
experience in a particular form and medium, and it is also pre-
occupied with the drive to document and to record. Now, very
movingly, we reencounter a middle-aged Sasha who is no longer
the teenage runaway in Naples (chapter 11), or the NYU student
in her early twenties (chapter 10), or the New York City music-
industry employee in her twenties and early thirties (chapters 1,
2, and 6), but an older married mother living in the California
desert with two children. Having apparently eventually been
fired by Bennie for her shoplifting, Sasha has overcome that
compulsion, but she is still a collector and a personal archivist,
albeit in what seems a healthier and a less obsessive mode.
Sasha has quietly crossed over the line that runs through the
novel between art and publicity, art makers and art promoters,
by becoming an amateur artist. Alison documents “Mom, in
the doorway”; “She’s holding a handful of the little papers she
makes into collages after we’re asleep (Annoying Habit #22)”;
“She collages in her Writing Chair, in the living room. . . . I
don’t know why she loves junk so much. . . .‘Not junk,’ Mom will
say. . . .‘Tiny pieces of our lives’ ” (264). Now, in a slide entitled
“Mom’s ‘Art,’ ” Alison collages examples of the “little papers”—
shopping lists, flight confirmation numbers, reminders, and the
like—that her mother uses, along with explanations of how she

renders these household ephemera into art: “She uses ‘found
objects.’ . . . They come from our house and our lives. . . . She says
they’re precious because they’re casual and meaningless. . . .‘But
they tell the whole story if you really look.’ . . . She glues them
onto boards and shellacs them. . . . I look when she’s not there”
(265). These “found objects” recall, of course, our first introduc-
tion to Sasha in the novel’s introductory chapter, “Found
Objects.” The repetition of that phrase invites a consideration of
the evolution of Sasha’s collecting practices. She continues to
collect scraps of material objects, which acquire a private “cult
value” when taken from their original contexts and placed in
the new context of a collection or artwork. But where she once
acquired objects only by stealing them from others, she now
archives “tiny pieces” of her own family’s life and experience.
And now Sasha’s daughter in effect re-collects that collection
and practice and re-presents it in her own collection/assem-
blage/text (the PowerPoint slide, itself a collection of the many
text boxes). Sasha’s “found objects” follow a metonymic logic:
they are no more than fragments, seemingly “meaningless,” but
“they tell the whole story if you really look.” In this sense, these
artworks are not “lossy”: they resemble data-compressing MP3s
or JPEGs less than “lossless” media forms that preserve all the
original data, such that they “tell the whole story.”
For Sasha to “get well” (or “heal”) required turning a danger-
ous and shameful form of collecting or hoarding into a more
positive one: shellacking grocery lists and appointment remind-
ers for posterity is somewhat eccentric behavior but far safer
than pickpocketing wallets from purses. Sasha is arguably still a
“hoarder,” still someone with a compulsion to collect and to
preserve what would normally be thrown away and forgotten.
Yet part of what seems to distinguish her middle-aged
collection from her youthful one is a new willingness to accept

the limits of preservation and instead to allow what she has col-
lected eventually to decay. “Mom makes sculptures in the desert
out of trash and our old toys”; “Eventually her sculptures fall
apart, which is ‘part of the process’ ” (242). These sculptures are
a little like the mummified bodies of Pompeii, capsules of the
past—but whereas those mummies have lasted for thousands of
years, Sasha’s sculptures are designed for no more than a brief
preservation. If the ideal Romantic artwork is an object that
never ages, the mature Sasha has shifted to a new aesthetic
practice— one that accepts time’s decay and the eventual inevi-
table failure of preservation.
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, 5 H d Ăǭl 2 NĂǭ~ d-ĂǭNa~5Oll
G
oon Squad is preoccupied with a cluster of ideas and
images that it defines as closely related: personal fail-
ure or tragedy (vocational, sexual, cultural), the expe-
rience of trauma or shame (following tragedy or disaster, and
otherwise), and a sense of meaninglessness.1 The novel is per-
vaded by a sense of literal and figurative loss, a fear that we
(both the novel’s characters and the culture more broadly) have
somehow, without realizing it, abandoned or destroyed some-
thing essential to our being: “Sasha wished that she could turn
and peer in the mirror again, as if something about herself
might at last be revealed—some lost thing” (11). (Sasha is herself
defined by her uncle Ted as fundamentally “lost” [214].) This
sense of loss is frequently associated in the novel with a recur-
ring image of “emptiness” that is at once a figure and a nonfig-
ure (or the absence of one).2
SHAME
Goon Squad often associates shame with a sudden coming into

view of what was, or should be, private or secret. After Sasha,
72 = Side B, track 3
on a blind date with Alex, has impulsively stolen a wallet from

a woman’s handbag left sitting on the restroom floor, she is
overcome with shame, which produces a fantasy of the stolen
wallet suddenly becoming visible: “She had Xanax in her purse,
but she couldn’t open her purse. Even with it zipped, she feared
that the wallet would blurt into view in some way that she
couldn’t control, unleashing a cascade of horrors: arrest, shame,
poverty, death” (10). Her fear that the wallet might “blurt into
view” employs a variant on the more predictable “burst into
view,” as if the wallet’s emergence might take the verbal form of
a slip of the tongue.
Sasha’s own “shame” is echoed shortly thereafter, when she
and Alex return to her apartment. After sex, as Alex takes a
bath, Sasha rifles through his wallet.
A scrap of binder paper dropped into Sasha’s lap. It looked

very old, the edges torn, the pale blue lines rubbed almost
away. Sasha unfolded it and saw written, in blunt pencil, I
BELIEVE IN YOU. She froze, staring at the words. They
seemed to tunnel toward her from their meager scrap, bring-
ing a flush of embarrassment for Alex, who’d kept this disin-
tegrating tribute in his disintegrating wallet, and then shame
at herself for having looked at it.
(17)
She then compounds this shame by failing to return it to

Alex’s wallet—stealing it, possibly to add it to her shameful col-
lection of pilfered items. (The chapter ends with her silence in
response to her therapist’s question about whether she returned
the note to Alex.) Sasha and Egan mark a distinction here
between Sasha’s “embarrassment” for Alex and her own “shame.”
Embarrassment is a more minor or run-of-the-mill emotion
Failure, Shame, Tragedy, Emptiness = 73
associated with the unwanted revelation of private matters—

whereas shame implies, of course, a stronger moral judgment.
Alex’s note is especially interesting as a producer of shame in
its status as a piece of writing; it could, in fact, even be consid-
ered an instance of a “minimal” literary work, something like
Ulysses comes home to Ithaca or Marcel becomes a writer. The note,
“I BELIEVE IN YOU,” is a very concise “scrap” of writing
that, despite its unprepossessing simplicity (“written in blunt
pencil”), is quite powerful, its words seeming “to tunnel toward”
the reader. Of course, what makes this not a work of literature
is, among other things, its status as a text intended for only one
single reader—which is also why it produces shame in Sasha,
who has pilfered a purely personal note and inserted herself into
what must have been intended to be a private communication.
We never learn more about the note, which we can imagine
might have been written by one of Alex’s parents, or a girl-
friend, on some unknown occasion (perhaps his leaving for col-
lege or the like).
Although it could be considered to be a form of “hoarding”
of a memento from the past, Alex’s preservation of this note
does not have any of the hallmarks of the forms of “unhealthy”
hoarding we’ve considered; instead, what seems problematic or
even pathological is Sasha’s unmotivated theft of it. Throughout
the history of fiction, from Clarissa to The Moonstone and Drac-
ula and beyond, the novel has had a close relation to a variety of
other forms, genres, and types of private writing—most promi-
nently diaries and letters but also related forms such as tele-
grams and other “messages”—which it regularly “remediates,”
represents, and processes as part of its own materials. That is to
say, the novel as a form is crucially defined by a practice of seiz-
ing what is ostensibly private, or contained within a writer-
reader circuit of two, and rendering it more visible and legibly
public. Egan has observed, “Writing, for me, is like peeking

into windows and going inside houses and finding out what the
people there are like, what they think. I invade privacy imagi-
natively.”3 Egan does this here, in a way that emphasizes the
links between certain forms of writing and the most privately
held zones of the self: in depicting Sasha’s theft, Egan is also, in
a sense, participating in her unauthorized publicity of the secret
note. In doing so, she joins a long tradition of novels that capi-
talize on a reader’s voyeuristic curiosity to gain access to pro-
scribed or concealed writing.
Alex’s note has some qualities in common with Charlotte’s
grandparents’ lost letters in “sepia . . . ink” in Look at Me—as an
anachronistic and/but deeply meaningful reminder of the
power of writing on paper to preserve memory, to convey emo-
tion, to communicate. If we consider Alex’s note as a contrast-
ing analogue to the novel, it is also noteworthy that his memento
represents a kind of pure or radical sincerity or earnestness of
feeling. As we will consider in more detail later, Egan is inter-
ested in the unstable distinction between “pure” feelings and
language and their opposites (for example, language or feelings
that are insincere, fake, commodified, etc.). “I BELIEVE IN
YOU” is a quintessence of sincere feeling and expression, one
that could potentially seem ersatz or insincere in its simplicity—
like a greeting-card slogan—but that is marked out, partly by
its age and tattered condition, as genuine.
Alex’s scrap of radically sincere or earnest writing can also be
read in the context of debates in contemporary twenty-first-
century fiction regarding a supposed “new sincerity” or anti-
ironic fictional mode, often associated with the magazines The
Believer and McSweeney’s and the novelist David Foster
Wallace—whose 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and
U.S. Fiction” is now viewed as an early manifesto of a turn away
from the “snark” and irony of 1980s and 1990s postmodernism

(and whose prose style seems one likely model for Egan’s chap-
ter narrated by Jules from prison).4 As Lee Konstantinou smartly
diagnoses in his book Cool Characters, twenty-first-century nov-
elists seem required to position themselves in shifting ways on a
continuum from irony to sincerity, with “irony” often associated
with postmodern “difficulty” and “sincerity” always at risk of
being viewed as sheer “middlebrow” audience gratification.5 The
continuum can be clearly gendered, as well: notwithstanding
Wallace’s centrality to the “new sincerity,” the distinction between
postmodern rigor and irony and a postpostmodern sincerity can
easily fall into familiar long-standing distinctions between
(often male-coded) aesthetic innovation and difficulty and
(often female-coded) middlebrow sentimentality and wish ful-
fillment. In this context, “I BELIEVE IN YOU” can imply ref-
erence to the dilemmas of a contemporary novelist who may
desire to gratify, to some degree, an audience’s longing for ear-
nest or authentic “feeling” without sacrificing the complexity of
challenging literary modes— and without having her work
labeled as simply middlebrow or as “chick lit.”
Sasha’s pilfering of Alex’s note thus can seem overdeter-
mined in relation to Egan’s own authorial practice: Sasha and
Egan are both those who feel compelled to “steal” private lan-
guage for their own purposes, perhaps “taking advantage of ” or
getting the benefit of its purity and sincerity without entirely
taking it on as their own words. Putting the radically sincere
phrase in the form of a piece of anonymously authored writing,
Egan includes that language in her novel but keeps it slightly at
a distance, as someone else’s words and feeling.
A shared familiarity with shame is also one link connecting
Sasha with her boss Bennie, who confronts the diminishment
of both his own ability to experience sexual desire and pleasure
in music: in both areas, where he once felt life-giving passion,

he now feels almost nothing. Egan treats Bennie’s anguished
sense of loss of the ability to feel pleasure—“He was clobbered
by loss so severe that it took physical effort not to howl. He’d
had it, he’d had it. But where had it gone?” (33)— as at once a
slightly risible instance of cliché alpha-male midlife crisis and as
a genuine problem that the novel takes seriously.
We first learned of Bennie as a “character” in “Sasha’s
admittedly over-handled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss,
who was famous for founding the Sow’s Ear record label and
who also (Sasha happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into
his coffee— as an aphrodisiac, she suspected— and sprayed
pesticide in his armpits” (5). Alex’s note, “the edges torn, the
pale blue lines rubbed almost away,” could also be described as
(more literally) “over-handled.” The adjective raises larger
questions: how much or often should a “tale” be told, and for
how long? How much “handling” can a narrative bear? Does a
story wear down under excessive use? And who has the right
to “handle” or to retell others’ stories?
We’ve already considered some of the symbolic meanings of
gold in this novel, especially as linked to the gold records that
serve as memorials for Bosco’s music career. Bennie’s gold is
genuine—not just foil coated, as Bosco’s gold albums are—but
that authenticity only renders it the more absurd as a homeo-
pathic remedy for what Bennie experiences as his pervasive
experience of “loss” (he had “begun this regimen two months
ago, after reading in a book on Aztec medicine that gold and
coffee together were believed to ensure sexual potency” [21]).
There’s an amusingly ludicrous literalism to Bennie’s home cure,
which attempts to restore the lost luster of his career and life via
an ingestion of the most familiar symbol for value—and one
with especially strong resonances in the pop music world.
Egan begins Bennie’s chapter with shame, in a manner that

produces a kind of rhyming parallel between his daily experi-
ence and the chapter itself: “The shame memories began early
that day for Bennie, during the morning meeting” (19). “The
shame memories” begin early both for Bennie and for us as we
read the chapter; they are narratively foundational. (Could it
even be the case that for Egan, shame produces or leads to fic-
tion? That we turn to fiction as a means to process or narrate
shame?) Bennie’s shame is initially triggered here by what could
be categorized as a problem of aging, of the kind we often
encounter in the novel. He had signed “a three-record deal a
couple of years back” for an indie “sister band” called Stop/Go
that “had seemed like an excellent bet” at the time, partly
because “the sisters were young and adorable.” Now, however, in
what Bennie misremembers as a span of only two years later
(although Sasha soon reminds him that it was actually five
years), “the sisters were pushing thirty . . . and no longer credi-
ble as recent high school grads, especially since one of them had
a nine-year-old daughter” (19), and one of his colleagues is argu-
ing for “pulling the plug” (19) on the contract, a vivid metaphor
that conflates career and biological death— almost as if the sis-
ters, by aging several years, have leaped all the way from ador-
able childhood to end-of-life hospice care.
The story of Stop/Go can function as an allegory of aging in
a neoliberal society more broadly, with the pop-music-career
context intensifying a more usual process of individual decline
and loss of value in a marketplace. And it is easy to imagine
some reflection here on Egan’s part, too, about the way “bets”
are often placed on young authors in the publishing industry;
she has commented in an interview that she was lucky that she
was never “a hot, young writer” but instead “had a steady build”
in her career.6 To have a “steady build” suggests an enviable
consistency and continuity in career path— one lacking the

abrupt, sometimes mysterious crises or failures that upend so
many of the book’s characters’ life paths, and also one that more
resembles a “classic” nineteenth-century novel than a modernist
or postmodernist one. Egan seems to be thinking through a
range of different life paths and narrative modes or genres,
those marked by steady progression versus others characterized
by abrupt shifts and declines.
Bennie’s shame is triggered less by Stop/Go than by an asso-
ciation the conversation produces for him, which brings him
back to a long-ago “pure” aesthetic (musical) experience: “It was
then that the memory overcame Bennie (had the word ‘sisters’
brought it on?): himself, squatting behind a nunnery in West-
chester at sunrise after a night of partying—twenty years ago
was it? More? Hearing waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet
sound waft into the paling sky” (20). Benny remembers a time
when he had happened by chance to overhear the sunrise Mass
sung by a group of “cloistered nuns who saw no one but one
another, who’d taken vows of silence. . . . Even now, Bennie
could hear the unearthly sweetness of those nuns’ voices echo-
ing deep in his ears.”
The memory stands out as a peak aesthetic experience that
might conceivably have had the potential to become a career
highlight for Bennie as well; Egan may have been thinking
here, for example, of a surprise pop music phenomenon along
the lines of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, the recordings by the
Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir that became an
unexpected, massive international “world music” hit in 1986.7 As
very powerful aesthetic experiences—as well as traumatic
experiences—tend to do in Goon Squad, these “waves of pure . . .
sound” echo in his ears, “even now,” refusing to subside or fade but
persisting as part of the present. Bennie met with the mother
superior and worked out a recording deal “in a manner of min-

utes.” But he subsequently destroyed the deal by terribly offend-
ing the mother superior in a perverse, inexplicable act: he
lurched across the sill and kissed her on the mouth: velvety
skin-fuzz, an intimate, baby powder smell in the half second
before the nun cried out and jerked away. Then pulling back,
grinning through his dread, seeing her appalled, injured
face. . . .
Bennie was caught in a loop from twenty years ago: lung-
ing over the sill toward the Mother Superior like some hay-
wire figure on a clock, again. Again. Again.
“No,” he groaned.
(20 – 21)
Bennie’s shame seems to have two major components: first, an

erotic violation and misdirection—also an invasion of another’s
privacy and personal dignity, especially striking with a cloistered
nun—and a traumatically “loop[ing]” memory of that initial
violation. “He felt shaken, soiled. Bennie dropped artists all the
time, sometimes three in a week, but now his own shame tinged
the Stop/Go sisters’ failure, as if he were to blame” (21).
His humiliation makes him “stick” in time, unable to move
forward properly, “caught in a loop,” his shameful recollection
in effect infecting and “soil[ing]” his present experience. “Again.
Again” describes a state of tortuous repetition, of a memory that
Bennie cannot “get past.” Very different from, for example,
Sasha’s comments to Bennie through the car window: “ ‘See.
You. Tomorrow’ ” (38), which promises a comforting reassur-
ance of continuity in time, or from the “still echoing” beauty of
the nuns’ song. One could ask whether the caught-in-a-loop
quality of Bennie’s shame links it to or instead distinguishes it
from the narrative methods of Goon Squad. After all, Egan’s

novel refuses normal linear temporal progression, marking sur-
prising loops and returns back and forth in time. Could a case
be made that Goon Squad is itself “caught in a loop” in this
manner— even that Goon Squad ’s method depends on a “shame-
ful” or shame-produced temporality?
Goon Squad never, however, seems “stuck” or “caught in a
loop” at any particular point in time. Rather, Egan’s method
seems fundamentally unstuck, able to range freely through time
and the characters’ histories. That said, I do think that Egan’s
method has a particular connection to shame and to shame
memories or experiences, which often seem to exert a signifi-
cant pull or influence on the novel’s own temporality. One way
to think about the dynamic might be to see the novel as consid-
ering two paths for repetition: one, a “positive” sense of aes-
thetic, often sensory experiences as “echoing” or persisting, and
second, a more negative model of compulsive or shameful rep-
etition that can become damaging.
As the day progresses, Bennie’s mind returns to what seems
to be a personal greatest-hits—a gold record?— of his own
humiliations, most of which share, with his mother superior
memory, an erotic and embodied component. There’s the time
at an awards ceremony “where he’d tried to introduce a jazz
pianist”—whom he had “cherished a rash dream of getting . . .
into bed”—“as ‘incomparable’ and ended up calling her ‘incom-
petent’ before an audience of twenty-five hundred” (23). Here
the shame is both in the “blurting out” (to use Sasha’s phrase) of
the wrong word and in Bennie’s embarrassingly inappropriate
desire. There’s also an implication here about the unstable line
dividing aesthetic triumph and success—the “incomparable”—
from failure, the “incompetent.” Bennie has accidentally mis-
spoken and substituted the wrong term, but the slip also hints at
broader concerns about whether these two opposed terms can

ever be firmly distinguished, of whether the successful/accom-
plished is ever “safe” from failure.
Part of what made Bennie’s desire for the blond, Harvard-
educated pianist “rash,” it seems, is his own difference from an
ideal of prosperous and often “blond” wealth that dominates the
upscale New York suburban world in which he now moves: “He
was driving aimlessly among the Crandale mansions . . . every
one of which seemed to have four or five blond children in
Ralph Lauren playing out front. Seeing these kids, it was clearer
than ever to Bennie that he hadn’t had a chance of lasting in
this place, swarthy and unkempt-looking as he was even when
freshly showered and shaved” (26).
Bennie (Salazar) experiences his own “ethnic” physical being
as inherently shameful or at least as often shame producing.
(This topic also comes up, about a teenage Bennie, in chapter 3:
“Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes . . . Rhea, Ben-
nie’s a cholo. Isn’t that obvious?. . . Rich girls won’t go with
cholos” [40, 42].) He perceives his own ethnicity or “swarthi-
ness” as nearly uncanny, prone to “blurt out” at inopportune
moments. We can see this, too, in a painful shame memory that
suddenly enters his mind, interrupting another moment of peak
aesthetic experience (as he is briefly enthralled and even sexu-
ally aroused by the Stop/Go sisters’ performance for him, along
with Sasha’s physical proximity):
And from this zenith of lusty, devouring joy, he recalled open-

ing an email he’d been inadvertently copied on between two
colleagues and finding himself referred to as a “hairball.” God,
what a pool of liquid shame had pooled in Bennie when he’d
read that word. He hadn’t been sure what it meant: That he
was hairy? (True.) Unclean? (False!) Or was it literal, as in: he
clogged peoples’ throats and made them gag, the way Stepha-
nie’s cat, Sylph, occasionally vomited hair onto the carpet?
( 30)
Here again we see Egan updating certain long-standing

novelistic conventions. That she is doing this with self-awareness
is made clear by this observation by Bennie about Sasha from
the previous paragraph: she “had been too near Bennie all these
years for him to really see her, like in those nineteenth-century
novels he’d read in secret because only girls were supposed to
like them” (30). Bennie here is (much like Sasha reading Alex’s
note) very much like a character from a Victorian novel who
reads a note not intended for her—for example, Amelia in the
final chapter of Vanity Fair, reading the note sent from George
to Becky Sharp—interrupting the intended communicative cir-
cuit and, in this case, coming face to face with a sense of con-
tempt directed at him. Part of the charge in such moments
resides from our own sense, as novel readers, that we are prying
into private materials. About yet another shame memory linked
to the body (when his barber points out lice in his son’s hair),
Bennie thinks, “God, it hurt him to think of this now—hurt
him physically, as if the memory were raking over him and leav-
ing gashes. He hid his face in his hands” (31).
The shame memories culminate in a final one of a party from
Bennie’s earliest days in New York City. He had been chasing
“some delicious blond—Abby, was it?” but, having done several
lines of coke, had “been stricken with a severe instantaneous
need to empty his bowels”: “He’d been relieving himself on the
can in what must have been (although Bennie’s brain ached to
recall this) a miasma of annihilating stink, when the unlockable
bathroom door had jumped open, and there was Abby, staring
down at him. There’d been a horrible, bottomless instant when
their eyes met; then she’d shut the door” (32). Once again, Ben-
nie’s “shame” is linked to his sense of his own bodily excess and
capacity to disgust, a quality that possesses an uncanny poten-
tial to make public what should have been private. (When he
first heard the nuns’ singing, he was “squatting. . . . [w]et grass
under his knees” [20], perhaps vomiting?) As with the image of
himself as a “hairball” vomited up by a cat, Bennie’s shame is
linked to a visceral sense of others’ appalled sensory disgust at
his physical presence—a disgust that has class and racial ele-
ments in relation to his own sense of himself as an ethnic out-
sider in a realm of wealthy WASP/blond privilege—perhaps
with a psychological subtext implying that his body is the
“uncanny” thing that ought to have been repressed. With the
mother superior, Bennie was the one who transgressed a phys-
ical boundary in “lurch[ing] across the sill” to kiss her; with
Abby, the object of his desire opens the door to invade Ben-
nie’s private space. But in both cases, he claims the shame as
his own.
Along with Bennie, the novel’s other most prominent
“shamed” character is Dolly, or La Doll, the disgraced publicist
whom we first encounter as she is in the midst of a challenging
assignment running a PR campaign for a “genocidal dictator”
(139). It soon becomes clear that Dolly once had a high-profile
career, although it is not immediately apparent what led to her
decline: “The general and his team were under the impression
that she was the top publicist in New York, a woman whose fax
machine would be in a corner office with a panoramic view of
New York City (as indeed it had been for many years), not ten
inches away from the foldout sofa where she slept” (138). In this
world of rarefied Manhattan elites and those struggling to
maintain a foothold among them, one of the clearest proofs of
high status is access to a “panoramic view” (remember Alex’s
loss of his). Within a novel that is so interested in shifting per-

spective and point of view, access to such a clear and far-seeing
“view” is somewhat formally overdetermined—as if the eco-
nomically privileged are granted a power akin to that of a nearly
omniscient narrator or novelist, whereas the impoverished or
unlucky must inhabit a strictly “limited” point of view.
With her makeshift bed less than a foot from a noisy fax
machine, the once-glamorous Dolly has been “downsized” into
humiliatingly restricted circumstances—from near-omniscience,
seeing all, to a very limited view. Goon Squad again offers a soci-
ology of character, showing how and why certain characters take
a wrong turn and find themselves in hopeless circumstances—
somewhat like Hardy’s Michael Henchard, whose “state of
hopelessness had weakened him, and imparted to his shoulders,
as weighted by the basket, a perceptible bend.”8 We might also
think of a passage from an earlier Egan novel, The Keep, in
which the protagonist ponders “that thing that happened to
people when they lost confidence and got phony, anxious, weird,”
a “thing” he and his friends name “the worm”: “it crawled inside
a person and started to eat until everything collapsed, their
whole lives.”9
Egan often homes in on the moment when a character’s
shame or self-doubt in effect “eats away at” their sense of self
“until everything collapsed” and “A” slides quickly toward “B.”
Jules wonders, from jail: “At what precise moment did you tip
just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you
had been enjoying theretofore, cant infinitesimally to the left or
the right and then embark on the trajectory that ultimately
delivered you to your present whereabouts?” (173). Whether the
cause of such a “tipping” is labeled as “shame” or “the worm,”
Egan defines it as at once psychological and physical or embod-
ied, felt “inside a person” but affecting the public and social self.
Egan carries over from nineteenth-century fiction a sense of

“character” as in some sense destiny; her characters’ personal
qualities, decisions, and actions intersect with environments to
lead, eventually, to radically varying outcomes, with seemingly
minor differences in initial trajectory, a “tip” or “cant” in one
direction versus another, eventually leading to huge variations
(“we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I’m an ass-
wipe, why?”).
After several pages narrating Dolly’s communications with a
representative of the genocidal dictator, we finally learn the
backstory of her sudden decline: “La Doll had met with ruin on
New Year’s Eve two years ago” (141). “Two years” is a frequently
used timeframe in Goon Squad. Bennie misremembers the five
years that have in fact passed since he signed Stop/Go as two
years; Stephanie is overcome by fear that Bennie may be having
an affair “despite Bennie’s promise two years ago, when he
turned forty” (123); the young Sasha in Naples tells herself that
she “was better now, hadn’t stolen anything in two years” (194)
and that she’d “done more in two years” than her uncle Ted
“had done in twenty” (224). This pattern may be coincidental—
two years is hardly an unusual span of time—but a case can be
made that it functions within the novel as a particularly ambig-
uous length of time: long enough to mark significant changes
but short enough to seem located within the same era or period
of life and, perhaps for these reasons, a span especially suscep-
tible to misperceptions or psychological wishful thinking, along
the lines of Bennie’s false memory. Two years is long enough for
great changes to occur but too little for aging to be immediately
or obviously perceived.10 When we encounter Dolly, then, she is
still within striking distance of the moment when she “met” her
“ruin,” her moment of downward career plunge. Sufficient time
has passed that she feels fully “in” a new life stage, but the
memories of the previous period—and of the “ruin”—remain

painfully vivid.
Those vivid memories affect Dolly much as Bennie’s shame
memories torture him, in thoroughly embodied ways. Bennie’s
memory dwells on moments of physical humiliation that are
perceived in the body as much as in the mind. Dolly, too, “tried
to soothe herself at night when memories of her demise plowed
through her like a hot poker, causing her to writhe in her sofa
bed and swill brandy from the bottle” (141). “Demise” is now
often used synonymously with “death,” but in its etymology, the
word originally concerned the “conveyance or transfer of an
estate by will or lease” and especially the “transference or devo-
lution of sovereignty, as by the death or deposition of the sover-
eign.”11 Egan seems to be using the word in something closer to
that original sense: as a kind of social death that is also an abdi-
cation and a giving up of Dolly’s former power.
We’ve already considered the spectacular scene in which
Dolly’s makeshift light system for her A-list party (“The Party”)
collapses to disastrous effect, scalding and burning the celebri-
ties below. “Something shut down in La Doll as she stood
there”: “She gaped in frozen disbelief as her guests shrieked and
staggered and covered their heads, tore hot, soaked garments
from their flesh and crawled over the floor like people in medi-
eval altar paintings whose earthly luxuries have consigned them
to hell” (142). Once again we see shame connected to a violation
of others’ bodily integrity. Although Egan plays this scene
partly for outrageous laughs, it is also the case that the origins
of Dolly’s shame lie in her negligence and bad planning—“she’d
thought that because she could do something very, very well
(namely, get the best people into one room at one time), she
could do other things well, too” (141)—that leads to her guests
being “burned, scarred, maimed.” There is a fittingly Dantean,

medieval contrapasso logic to the way “memories of her demise
plowed through her like a hot poker”; it is in some sense a logi-
cal punishment for having burned her guests that she herself is
now tortured by memories that sear painfully.
This scene is hilariously grotesque, and it is notable as
another instance of Egan’s interest in contrasting or overlapping
temporalities and timescales in relation to aesthetic form. She
encourages us, in effect, to see, through the form of an early
twenty-first-century novel, a radically different and antithetical
form: that of medieval altar paintings and the orthodox Catho-
lic ideology they embody. Egan shows us a comparable tempo-
ral contrast in her description of the “vaguely threatening
youth” of Naples “who slunk around the decrepit palazzi where
their fifteenth-century forebears had lived in splendor” (213). In
such scenes, Egan stages an aesthetic confrontation with a fun-
damentally and deeply different order of time— although in this
case, also one that invites consideration of parallels. In produc-
ing this parallel or “rhyme,” she invites broader consideration of
the implications of this parallel: for example, are the wealthy
celebrities of pre-9/11 New York City indeed akin, in some
sense, to sinners “whose earthly luxuries” have doomed them to
terrible punishment? Egan presents her own novel as an aes-
thetic form—like a medieval altar painting or the “early Roman
wall paintings” (208) of Pompeii—that is positioned in one par-
ticular historical moment but that inevitably comments both
upon that moment and what preceded and will follow it. The
powerful artwork, somewhat like a major tragedy or other
event, both marks a particular time and defines a division
between what precedes and follows it. She implies that art is a
means by and through which to grapple with ideology, belief,
and judgment as they change over time, especially at moments

of crisis or sudden change. By invoking a much older aesthetic
form, she encourages us to think flexibly about historical paral-
lels, gaps, overlaps, and divergences.
TRAGEDY
Goon Squad, published in 2010, is distinctly a post-9/11 novel;

references to 9/11 and to the collapse of the World Trade Center
towers recur throughout the novel. These references can be con-
sidered in relation to a few different concepts or functions in
the novel, including dating and the specificity of a moment in
time, as a reflection on cultural response to tragedy more broadly,
and in relation to a more formal interest in gaps or absences—
that is, an interest in what “gaps” do within fiction or other art
forms.
September 11, 2001, operates in Goon Squad as one of a lim-
ited number of precise and irrefutable historical anchors or
reference points in the novel. Each of the novel’s 9/11 references
helps nail down the larger chronologies of the chapters in
which they occur, and therefore of the novel as a whole, reveal-
ing an internal temporal logic in what could potentially be a
confusingly nonlinear narrative. Other references perform this
work as well, but few do so as precisely. Consider this outburst
by Stephanie’s brother Jules, who has been staying with Steph-
anie and Bennie after five years in Attica Correctional Facility,
charged with the kidnapping and aggravated assault of the
starlet Kitty Jackson: “I go away for a few years and the whole
fucking world is upside down. . . . Buildings are missing. You
get strip-searched every time you go to someone’s office. Every-
body sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole
time they’re talking to you” (123). Jules is, like Egan, a literary
worker, a writer/editor/journalist; in prison, Jules “edited a
weekly prison newspaper, and his coverage of the impact of
9/11 on the lives on inmates won him a special citation from
the PEN Prison Writing Program” (119). (A little joke here, per-
haps, about the pervasiveness of the prize/reward system in
publishing—in a novel that would go on to win Egan the
Pulitzer Prize: a very “special citation.”) Jules’s rant to his sister
at once clarifies the chronology of the events we’re reading and
articulates a point that the novel seems to endorse: that 9/11 was
transformative, turning American life and culture “upside
down” in ways that constitute part of the book’s subject matter.
The question posed earlier in terms of an individual life—“At
what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment
with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying thereto-
fore . . . ?” (173)—is one that is more easily answered in relation
to U.S. society at the turn of the century; 9/11 is clearly the “pre-
cise moment” at which the “relatively normal” status quo was
profoundly disrupted (although those of us who have lived
through 2020 may now feel that it marks another such moment).
In Jules’s telling, “Buildings are missing” is an uncanny obser-
vation, even bringing to mind the manipulations of Photo-
shopped photographs or a Philip K. Dick story in which certain
altered details signal that something is wrong in the world.
Goon Squad defines itself as a “report” on a massive disruption
and realignment, one with some of the lasting impact of the
destruction of Pompeii (and one that also dovetails with the
novel’s depiction of the threats of climate change).
Another such moment occurs when Bennie is discussing the
band he’s signed, Stop/Go, with Sasha. In a discussion of how
“awful” and “unlistenable” they now seem to have become
(although minutes earlier, Bennie had listened to them
ecstatically), he reiterates his earlier claim that he signed them

just two years earlier:
“Two years ago they sounded . . . different.”

Sasha gave him a quizzical look. “It wasn’t two years,” she
said. “It was five.”
“Why so sure?”
“Because last time, I came to their house after a meeting at
Windows on the World.”
It took Bennie a minute to contemplate this. “Oh,” he
finally said. “How close to—”
“Four days.”
“Wow. I never knew that.”
( 33– 34)
That Bennie “never knew that” could be interpreted as

another minor piece of evidence for his narcissistic, masculine-
midlife-crisis-beset self-involvement and the degree to which
he takes Sasha for granted. (Although it is also simply a
reminder that each individual human being is locked into his or
her own life narrative and preoccupations, producing inevitable
blind spots in terms of recognition of others.) Perhaps for this
reason—but also because she is trying to shake Bennie out of
his depressed passivity—when Bennie continues, “Still, two
years, five years—” Sasha angrily snaps at him, “Who am I
talking to?. . . This is the music business. ‘Five years is five hun-
dred years’—your words’ ” (34). The most obvious denotation of
this equation is that in the world of pop music, five years (say,
from 1979 to 1984, from postpunk to the height of the MTV era)
is not a modest time span but an entire era during which careers
will rise and fall, stars will decline, new styles and genres will
emerge, etc. A further implication, however, relates to an over-

weening grandiosity of this world, in which the normal earthly
rules of temporality and history are thought to be malleable or
simply not to apply—as if in an overweening form of fictional
“omnitemporality.” Indeed, this novel seems to suggest the
insight that pop music (and perhaps fiction as well) defines a
realm or a world where worldly laws of temporality can seem not
to apply—but ultimately in fact do. In a context in which the
realist novel’s long-standing cultural task of telling a history of
the present day can seem to have become difficult, if not impos-
sible, partly because of the extremely rapid shift in fashion and
styles, 9/11 defines a moment with a precision otherwise difficult
to achieve.12 Much like the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the
shooting of JFK, “9/11” becomes a touchstone and a synecdoche,
an irrefutable temporal anchor.
A 9/11 reference also frames Goon Squad ’s final scenes. In the
novel’s last chapter, set in the near future, Alex and his wife and
daughter are heading to what is now called “the Footprint,” the
former site of the Twin Towers, for the concert by Scotty Haus-
mann that concludes the novel. “The Footprint” is an interest-
ing term, semiotically, in that a footprint is a “sign” that is also,
in a sense, a nonsign: a mark, but one that is defined here in
terms of absence— of the buildings that once stood in this
spot—rather than presence:
Before them, the new buildings spiraled gorgeously against

the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only
seen in pictures), more like sculptures than buildings, because
they were empty. . . . The weight of what had happened more
than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it
always was when he came to the Footprint. He perceived it as
a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old distur-

bance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep
thrum that felt primally familiar.
( 331)
Egan, a long-time Brooklyn resident, writing this scene perhaps

seven or eight years after the fall of the Twin Towers—in the
period between the beginning of construction of the 9/11
Memorial and Museum in 2006 and its dedication and opening
to the public in 2011— counterfactually imagines her own vision
of the future of this site, now rendered a partially aesthetic space
(the aesthetic as “mending the earth”?). Alex feels the “weight
of what had happened more than twenty years ago” here, “the
vibration of an old disturbance.” The imagery also recalls Ted’s
visit to “the ruins of Pompeii,” where he is “alert to lingering
reverberations of screams, of sliding ash. How could so much
devastation have been silenced?” (210).
Egan has designed Goon Squad at once as a kind of layered
fictional recording device, preserving evidence and experiences
from different historical eras, and as a self-reflective consider-
ation of the ways that we record, preserve, and re-narrate the
past. 9/11 and the destruction of the Twin Towers function as a
centering absence in the novel, both an irrefutable temporal
marker and a haunting, reverberating reminder of a past disas-
ter. One slightly troubling implication of Egan’s language of
“lingering reverberations” is that the power of art has quite a bit
in common with the power of shame or disaster: both operate as
transhistorical “vibration” or “lingering” or “echoing,” a contin-
uation forward in time, a potentially uncanny refusal to con-
clude or cease. This alliance is signaled here by the odd fact that
Alex perceives the new monument as “more like sculptures
than buildings.” Pompeii serves as an obvious analogue or
prototype for 9/11, a massive “silencing” by heat or fire, “sliding

ash,” that actually does not silence but instead in effect strikes a
note that will continue to “reverberate” far into the future (if
subliminally).
Egan also suggests that an event like 9/11 resembles, on a
larger and transindividual scale, a personal shameful memory
of the kind that pierces Sasha, Bennie, or Dolly like a hot
poker: a memory that cannot be filed away or rendered inop-
erative, one that becomes a pivot point, bisecting the past and
future into two eras. “Shame,” “disaster,” “ruin,” etc. are all dif-
ferent terms that can apply, albeit in different ways, both to an
individual and to a culture. The novel as a form has always had
a particular interest in aligning, and thinking about in relation,
the fates of individuals and of collectivities; Egan offers what
can be understood as an updating of the achievement of a novel
like Middlemarch or The Mayor of Casterbridge in its attempt to
offer a “mapping” of individual rises and falls, successes and
disasters— seen as always occurring in a dialectical relationship
to a society that is also experiencing its own trajectories.
EMPTINESS
Goon Squad is, as we’ve seen, preoccupied with the distinction

between a sense of “full” completeness or repletion and a very
different perception of emptiness or hollowness—and a “mean-
inglessness” often linked to that emptiness, sometimes associ-
ated with digital “lossiness” or forgetting. This distinction
between fullness and emptiness appears at several different lev-
els in the novel, operating both as a thematic concern (as in a
sense of life or experience feeling “empty”) and more formally,
in a more literal interest in emptiness or in empty shapes or
spaces, as in the “missing” buildings that disturb Jules after his

release from prison.
Both after Sasha has sex with Alex and in the immediate
aftermath of her shaming theft of the woman’s wallet, for
example, “All her excitement had seeped away, leaving behind a
terrible sadness, an emptiness that felt violent, as if she’d been
gouged” (16). This language resembles Dolly’s “memories of her
demise plow[ing] through her like a hot poker” in its viscerally
somatic representation of an emotion. To be in a state in which
memories can “plow through” one suggests an inner emptiness,
a lack of resistance to the outside, with what had made one feel
“full” “seeped away.”
Sasha’s sudden experience of “emptiness” is part of a pattern
of what could be called “downsizing” or reduction in the novel,
when characters experience a previously full, meaningful, or
replete existence as suddenly feeling drastically “reduced” or
“emptied.” The implication often seems to be that time pos-
sesses a fundamentally tragic power to hollow out meaning—
as well as that contemporary experience possesses anhedonic
tendencies that make strong passions or desires difficult to
maintain. A character in an early Egan story articulates this
especially clearly: “I’ve become a smaller version of myself, dis-
tilled from an earlier abundance I was not even aware of.”13
Emptiness is often associated with the dispossessions or losses
of the passing of time, as when Jocelyn visits a now aged and
sick Lou, the record company executive who seduced her as a
teenager: “So this is it—what cost me all that time. A man who
turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty” (87).
The image of the empty house also recurs, implicitly, in the
Proustian moment in the final pages when Alex stares at Sasha’s
old apartment and “imagined walking into her apartment
and finding himself still there” (339). The poignancy of Egan’s
image—as well as of Proust’s original one—lies in the noncor-

respondence of time and space: one can return to a location but
not to a location in time; what one looks for (one’s younger self
or experiences) is inevitably “missing,” producing an effect of
“emptiness.”
Desire and aesthetic experience are two occasions for the
possibility either of a sense of fullness and repletion or their
absence. We’ve already seen Bennie confronting the diminish-
ment of his “lust”:
At times Bennie didn’t even mind its disappearance; it was

sort of a relief not to be constantly wanting to fuck someone.
The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without
the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since
the age of thirteen. . . . And now: Sasha’s breasts in a thin
yellow sweater, and Bennie felt nothing. Not a shiver of
harmless excitement.
(22)
He experiences this diminishment as an emptiness, “nothing,” a

state of lifelessness akin to the aesthetic crisis of digitization
Bennie goes on to brood over. The fear is of a pervasive lifeless-
ness, what had been repletion or fullness emptying or hollowing
out or shrinking.
We see similar language in Ted’s consideration of his par-
tially strategic “reduction” of the sexual desire he once felt for
his wife:
Many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan
and folded it in half. . . . Then he’d folded it in half again, so
when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an
edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so
that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in

half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the
end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and for-
get about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accom-
plishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that
might have crushed them both.
(210)
As with Bennie, the downsizing or diminishment of Ted’s

erotic desire seems strongly linked with his aesthetic desire or
interest. Both men feel that they have, with varying degrees of
intentionality, “dismantled a perilous apparatus” by cutting off
the sources of their longing, thereby producing a more placid
but also less meaningful existence that feels like an empty or
seriously diminished space, one in which one “hardly feels.”
Ted’s act of “folding” his desire recalls the “the foldout sofa”
where Dolly slept after her “ruin.” What is “folded in half ” is
intentionally miniaturized, shrunk down for the sake of conve-
nience, to avoid taking up too much space. That something (an
object, feeling, or experience) can be so divided also suggests a
kind of nonintegrity; something that was powerfully whole
would presumably not be subject to such splitting in half.
That Ted’s desire is “so small in the end that [he] could slip it
inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it” figures it as
something akin to an iPod or thumb drive, as Egan implies
another possible parallel between the downsizing of erotic and
aesthetic experience—the latter strongly affected by technolog-
ical changes and especially the shift to digitization, perceived as
a loss, or virtualization, of material substance.14 Recall also that
shortly after publishing Goon Squad Egan wrote a short story
that was initially published in the form of tweets from the New
Yorker Twitter account, brief epigrammatic fragments that she
had first, however, written “by hand in a Japanese notebook that

had eight rectangles on each page.” She seems often to be think-
ing through the question of how much space an aesthetic work
takes up and about the difference between language that exists
“virtually” versus that which takes tangible material form on
paper or in a notebook. The character Moose, a historian, in
Look at Me “again and again . . . spoke . . . of things, watermel-
ons and grain and cattle. . . . Objects existing in time and space.
But things had lost their allure generations ago,” replaced by
“information,” which was “the inversion of a thing” (368); “the
world of objects was gone” (498).15 The length of Goon Squad
itself, as an extended prose narrative, perhaps attests to a desire
to hold off this fate, to retain the “tactile wholeness” of a novel
“as an object,”16 not just as bits of information, even as Egan also
experiments (as in her Twitter short story and her PowerPoint
chapter—a full-color version of which, including audio clips,
exists on Egan’s author website)17 with fiction that exists, at least
in part, in entirely virtual form. Egan dwells on the fate of art in
a context in which it becomes so radically shrunk, downsized,
or compressed that one can easily “slip it inside . . . a pocket and
forget about it.”
Language itself also threatens not just to diminish or down-
size but to empty of meaning; in the novel’s final chapter, set in
the near future of the 2020s, an academic, Rebecca, Alex’s wife,
makes her reputation on the study of “word casings, a term
she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside
quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—
‘friend’ and ‘real’ and ‘story’ and ‘change’—words that had been
shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks” (323). Egan
employs her usual light touch to offer a critique of a “postmod-
ern” evacuation of meaning: “Some, like ‘identity,’ ‘search,’ and
‘cloud,’ had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage.
With others, the reasons were more complex; how had ‘Ameri-
can’ become an ironic term? How had ‘democracy’ come to be
used in an arch, mocking way?” (324). As an author, Egan is
presumably invested in a quest to produce meaning, to choose
and arrange words in a manner that will seem “full” rather than
“empty” or meaningless. Throughout the novel, she seems to
think about the ways that this quest can fail or come up short—
about the ways significations can “seep away” or be “drained” or
“shucked of ” their content, “made meaningless by nothing more
than time” (215).
Egan, who has always maintained what she describes as “an
additional job” as a magazine journalist,18 depicts a range of dif-
ferent kinds of professional writing, including publicity or PR
work, and the magazine celebrity-profile form that Jules at once
produces and satirizes by turning into a criminal confession. (In
Look at Me, “the rationalization of human beings through mar-
keting, public relations, image consulting and spin” plays an
even more central role.)19 About the texts or pieces of writing
depicted in Goon Squad, we can ask the related, if not identical,
questions: how sincere are they (with how much authentic mean-
ing does the author invest them), and how much meaning do
they contain (a question that does not depend only on the inten-
tions or the sincerity of the author or speaker)? Dolly, who “was
a publicist” but “left the business” and now “lives upstate” (318),
can be viewed as someone who has finally rebelled against a
deeply compromised and, in her case, even corrupt relationship
to language and signification. Having been reduced to crafting
PR for a “genocidal dictator,” she retreats entirely from both the
heart of metropolitan publicity, New York City, and from lan-
guage manipulation as a career: she opens “a small gourmet
shop on Main Street, where she sold fine produce and unusual
cheese, artfully displayed and lit by a system of small spotlights
Dolly designed herself ” (165). (It’s noticeable, however, that

even as she escapes from the manipulation of language, she con-
tinues to use her skills—far less damagingly!—in the “artful”
management of image or presentation.)
Think once again of the note in Alex’s wallet, its message
written “in blunt pencil.” As we’ve considered, it can be taken to
represent an apex or “zenith” of absolutely, even embarrassingly
sincere “meaning”: loaded with emotion and so individually tar-
geted that the message becomes shameful for any other person
to read. The note’s meaning is deictic, highly dependent on con-
text—it would be a strange misreading, for example, for Sasha
to take its statement as applying to her. The full emotional
power of the note, when read by its intended addressee, may be,
by definition, unavailable to an artist crafting a text designed to
be delivered to many thousands of readers around the world.
So the note’s meaning, which might be revived every time
Alex looks at it, “drains away” in Sasha’s unauthorized reading
of it. Such shifts in meaningfulness are, of course, inherent to
language and messages, which will mean different things, and
amounts, for different audiences. But Rebecca studies, and has
named, a more particular version of this process, by which, it is
implied, words have become meaningless “outside quotation
marks,” through intensified new pressures. Terms like “iden-
tity” and “friend,” Egan implies, have been hijacked by the
internet and particularly by social media. She has commented
in an interview that “almost an obsession” throughout her work
has been “a question of how mass media invites a particular sort
of self-consciousness, or self-objectification.”20 Here she seems
to consider the possibility that not just the form of the novel but
language itself is being worn out, lossified, perhaps “over-
handled,” like the “tales of Bennie Salazar” that are part of
Sasha’s repertoire. An analogy also seems possible between
these “husks” of language and the various physical “ruins” of the

novel: “the ruins of Pompeii,” with their “prone bodies scattered
like Easter eggs among the columned courtyards” (208), and the
“missing buildings” where the Twin Towers once were—both of
which serve in different ways as displaced representations of
9/11 in the novel.
Perhaps the novel’s most memorable figuration of “empti-
ness” or of empty space, however, comes in the PowerPoint
chapter, in Sasha’s daughter Alison’s consideration of her autis-
tic brother’s obsession with “Great Rock and Roll Pauses”: that
is, of intentional gaps of silence within pop recordings. Alison
explains, about her brother Lincoln, that “right now, he’s
obsessed with rock songs that have pauses in them”; “A ‘full
rest’ is four beats long, a ‘half rest’ is two beats; He knows more
than grown-ups about certain things” (243). In a slide entitled
“Songs with Lincoln’s Comments,” Alison transcribes Lincoln’s
commentary on several “excellent early pause[s]” from classic
rock and pop from the 1960s and 1970s: “Bernadette,” by the
Four Tops; “Foxey Lady,” by Jimi Hendrix; “Young Americans,”
by David Bowie.21 In Alison’s rendition, Lincoln’s hobby of col-
lecting, recording, and commenting on these “Great Rock and
Roll Pauses”—he creates recordings in which he “loops the pause
in each song so it lasts for minutes” (246) and offers elaborate
commentary on each one—offers a window into the psychologi-
cal and relational dynamics of the family as a whole. Egan shows
us the affectionate patience and attention of Alison and Sasha,
the occasional incomprehension and worry on the part of Sasha’s
husband, Drew, and the stress placed on the family as a whole by
the demands of Drew’s job as a doctor running a medical clinic
that treats illegal immigrants. Drew’s vocation also suggests a
larger tension throughout the novel between actions or life
paths that “injure” or “damage” (135) others versus those that are
reparative or that aim for “mending.” It’s implied that Drew’s

altruism may be inspired, in part, by his lingering guilt over his
passive role in the death of his and Sasha’s college friend Rob.
The novel frequently returns to the questions of which wounds
or damage can, or cannot, be mended or healed; the young
Sasha looks to her uncle like “a girl whose feathery bones did
not quite heal” (217).
In a slide titled “Lincoln Wants to Say/Ends up Saying,” the
“unsaid” statement that Alison believes Lincoln “wants to
say”—“I love you, dad”—is “translated” by his cognitive process
through a series of thoughts—“Dad is from Wisconsin,” “Steve
Miller is from Wisconsin,” etc.—to Lincoln’s observation: “Hey
Dad, there’s a partial silence at the end of ‘Fly Like an Eagle,’
with a sort of rushing sound in the background that I think is
supposed to be the wind, or maybe time rushing past!” (249). We
have been primed to recognize this as more than just another
obsessive insight about a pause in a song. It is also a rather pro-
found observation about the aesthetic representation of the pass-
ing of time, one of the novel’s own central preoccupations.
Egan, who has observed that in writing Goon Squad she was
“really interested in gaps. Things that happen when you’re not
looking,”22 could even have been thinking here of Proust’s
famous commentary on Flaubert’s deployment of the technique
of narrative “silence”: “The finest thing, to my mind, in the
whole of Education sentimentale, is to be found, not in words at
all, but in a passage where there is a sudden moment of silence,”
an “implied ‘silence’ of vast duration.”23 Egan is, as we’ve seen, a
well-informed student of Proust, and Lincoln’s rock and roll
pauses can be plausibly read as a repurposing of Proust’s own
deployment of ellipsis. We might also remember the way the
first chapter ends, with Sasha and her therapist in “the longest
silence that had ever passed between them,” Sasha “claiming . . .
these minutes of Coz’s time: another, then another, then one

more” (18). Just as Proust declares that the finest passage of
Flaubert is to be found in a moment of entirely nonverbal
“silence,” so Lincoln homes in on and treasures the signifying
potential of “sudden moment[s] of silence” or gaps in pop songs,
which can evoke “time rushing past!” and other effects.
I have in this chapter been focusing primarily on more “neg-
ative” aspects of emptiness in Goon Squad: its links to shame or
failure or tragedy and specifically to the empty space of the for-
mer World Trade Center footprint. But Alison’s account of
Lincoln’s “pauses” also begins to offer a more “recuperative” or
positive account of the formal qualities of empty space or emp-
tiness. As so much visual art and sculpture of the past century
(Giacometti, Serra) and literature (Beckett) has explored, gaps
or negative space can produce meaning no less than “present”
marks or objects or words do. (Think of Ted listening to the
“crazy, empty silence” [208] at the ruins of Pompeii.) Alison
comments that “if my friends are around, I ignore Lincoln’s
music” (246) but that “when it’s just us, the pauses are my
favorite. . . . They sound like this: [image of a bubble].” (Her
comment also stresses the social construction of art perception;
one reads or listens differently in the presence of one person or
a group.)
Drew has trouble viewing his son’s interest as anything other
than a worryingly compulsive fixation. He more broadly, in
Allison’s view, “can’t understand Lincoln” (248) and cannot
make any sense of Lincoln’s pauses, which presumably sound to
him simply like emptiness or a vacancy. His response to Lin-
coln’s effusion about Steve Miller—which, recall, Alison tells
us actually translates to “I love you, Dad”—is a rather curt
“Good to know, Linc” (250), treating a (covertly) highly affec-
tive communication as a dry piece of pointless trivia. Alison and
her mother, however, are able to enter into the topic with more
understanding and empathy, as Alison demonstrates in a slide
titled “What I Notice During the Looped Pauses”:
• A whisper of orange on the horizon.

• A thousand black turbines.
• Miles of solar panels like a black ocean I’ve never seen
close up.
• You can’t get used to the stars, no matter how long you live
here.
(251)
Lincoln collects the pauses from the recordings and in effect

repurposes them, or turns them into his own creative assem-
blages: the “Looped Pauses.” The pauses are themselves a cre-
ation, then, as well as an invitation to a listener (or a reader): a
gap into which one’s own perceptions can be projected. This
critical/creative act in turn allows a listener—here, Alison—to
respond with her own interpretive act of listening in order to
generate a series of reflective images of the uncanny natural sur-
roundings of their home in the climate-changed California des-
erts of the 2020s.
It further becomes clear, when Alison and Drew take an eve-
ning walk, that the aural pauses have a specific relation— at
least in Alison’s perception—to this futuristic landscape:
• The desert is quiet and busy.

• I hear faint clicks like the scratchy pause in “Bernadette.”
• There is a hum like the pause in “Closing Time” by
Semisonic.
• The whole desert is a pause.
(287)
The concept of a “pause” broadens during the course of the

chapter from the seemingly trivial pop music obsession of an
autistic teenager to become a much more widely resonant figure
for both art and nature. “The whole desert is a pause” offers
illuminating insight into the natural (and unnatural) world and
our human perception of it, implying that absence can be under-
stood not simply as “nothing” but rather as a space for creativity
and imagination, just as a “footprint” at the site of a tragic
disaster is not merely an empty space but instead one of poten-
tially intense, albeit open-ended, meaningfulness— one into
which each individual viewer or interpreter will project her own
meaning. Danny in The Keep asks himself: “How had he ended
up with nothing? Did he always have nothing?”24 But Goon
Squad moves toward a nearly Buddhist acceptance of the non-
possession, or dispossession, of “nothing” as an opportunity for
different forms of meaning rather than loss.25
The chapter ends, movingly, in what can on a first reading
appear to be a surprisingly or crudely “literal” manner. First,
Alison gives us a sequence of two different visual images for
silence or “pause.” In “What I Hear as I’m Falling Asleep,”
Drew asks Lincoln to stand by the window to “listen with me.
What does that sound like to you?” (301). Next, we see a large,
page-sized outline filled entirely in black, followed by what is
presumably Lincoln’s comment, also on a black page, as he
understands his father’s intended meaning that the silence out-
side the window sounds like one of his pauses: “Okay. I know.”
Then, Alison provides a second PowerPoint visualization of
silence, emptiness, or absence—an empty gray circle fringed by
four smaller overlapping ones—that might have provided an
appropriate final slide for the chapter as a whole. The chapter
actually concludes, however, with a final series of four “charts”:
“Relationship of Pause-Length to Haunting Power,” “Proof of
the Necessity of Pauses,” “Discoveries About Pause Timing (in

Bubble Form),” and finally, “The Persistence of Pauses Over
Time.” These, with their comically precise graphs of various
data points related to Lincoln’s obsession, may initially seem
better suited to serve as an appendix than as the concluding
pages of the chapter.
But the real implication of these charts emerges only when
one remembers an earlier exchange between Alison and Drew,
after he had, frustrated by what he perceived to be Lincoln’s
compulsive fixation on song pauses, snapped at him and made
him cry. “I’ve got to do better with Lincoln,” Alison reports her
father as saying, followed by this exchange:
Me: Dad:
“He needs help graphing “I could do that.”
the pauses.
“But will you really?” “If I say I will, I will.”
“He’s been asking me, but “I might have to brush up a
I’m terrible at graphing.” little . . .”
(288)
When we remember this exchange, we recognize the actual

emotional content of those final four graphs, which are in effect
the father’s gesture of recompense and apology to his son and an
attempt at better communication and understanding. Drew
finally has come to recognize and accept the “necessity,” “persis-
tence,” and “haunting power” of pauses, gaps, silence, and
empty space. These graphs also finally ask to be considered as
another analogue for Goon Squad itself: as a formal means of
organizing, making sense of, and trying to face up to the pass-
ing of time.
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G
oon Squad, itself of course an artwork, also takes the
experience of art as a central theme and subject mat-
ter: the possibility of joy and transcendence that aes-
thetic experience can produce, the disappointment when art
fails to deliver the hoped-for effects, and the different ways that
an artwork defines itself as at once parallel to and distinct from
actual lived experience. A character in an early Egan story
watches films by Hitchcock, the subject of her dissertation:
“Diana often felt weirdly nostalgic as she watched, as if her own
life had been like that once— dreamy, Technicolor—but had
lost those qualities through some misstep of her own.”1 (Egan
often prominently features scholars as characters: among others,
Lou’s anthropology PhD student girlfriend Mindy in chapter 4
of Goon Squad, “Safari”; Rebecca, an “academic star” (perhaps a
linguist), in chapter 13, “Pure Language”; Moose, the historian,
and Irene the cultural studies scholar, in Look at Me.)2
Like Diana, the lapsed Hitchcock scholar, Charlotte in Look
at Me also has the habit of envisioning her own experience as
akin to a filmed spectacle: “As children, Grace and I liked to
pretend our life was a movie projected onto a giant screen before
an audience who watched, rapt.”3 As these examples suggest,
Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity = 109
Egan figures the aesthetic realm as offering possibilities for

escape from or transcendence of actual experience. Life is in
fact never really “dreamy, Technicolor,” but in retrospect, espe-
cially from a “point B” that one had not anticipated or desired,
one’s own past experience can acquire an aesthetic glamour,
suggesting unfulfilled possibilities—such as a life in which one
is an adored object of admiration and desire. (In Charlotte’s
case, however—as a professional fashion model—this fantasy
did, to a degree, come true— albeit temporarily.)
Art experiences can disrupt or pressure temporality, in part
because every artwork defines a particular relation to time,
potentially at odds with everyday experience. When Mindy, on
a safari in Africa with her older music executive lover Lou in
1973, enjoys the then-novel experience of listening to music in a
car on headphones—this is several years before the introduction
of the Walkman; Lou had “rigged a tiny cassette player with a
small set of foam earpieces to listen to demo tapes and rough
mixes”—the music produces an effect of a temporal displace-
ment and an aestheticization of perception for Mindy, as for
Charlotte in the passage just cited: “the experience of music
pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock
that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it trans-
forms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were
looking back . . . with Lou from some distant future” (65). Part
of what seems so to move Mindy is the unexpected, and histori-
cally innovative, privacy of this musical experience. This is
another moment of Egan taking particular note of the repercus-
sions, especially for the experience of art, of a moment of tech-
nological/medial change.
Some of the novel’s most intensively depicted scenes of aes-
thetic experience are those involving Sasha’s uncle Ted, the art
historian who travels to Naples on a Jamesian quest to locate and
bring home his wayward niece. Ted is swiftly distracted from his
assigned task by the art and culture of Naples; even as he vows to
himself that he will in fact start his search for Sasha in earnest the
next day, “he was reaffirming a contradictory plan to visit the
Museo Nazionale, home of an Orpheus and Eurydice he’d
admired for years: a Roman marble relief copied from a Greek
original. He had always wanted to see it” (209). That Ted’s brother-
in-law is “footing the bill” for Ted’s trip gives a guiltily illicit
charge to his art experiences in Naples, as Egan perhaps makes
an implicit joke about the subsidy of art by commerce. Ted’s
brother-in-law’s questions “boiled down to one very simple ques-
tion: Am I getting my money’s worth?” (209). The desired artwork
exerts a “contradictory” pull on Ted that seems to run athwart of
both explicit intention or will and of any instrumental purposes.
We’ve already considered Egan’s description of the process
by which Ted has “folded . . . in half ” his desire for his wife,
Susan, to the point that “his desire was so small . . . that Ted
could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it” (210).
Ted, also, like Dolly, has been both spatially and temporally
“downsized” such that he has a perilously tiny space and little
time to pursue his dedication to art and art history:
Ideally, he should have been thinking and writing about art at

all times, but a confluence of factors made such thinking and
writing both unnecessary (he was tenured at a third-rate col-
lege with little pressure to publish) and impossible. . . . The
site of his thinking and writing was a small office wedged in
one corner of his shaggy house, on whose door he’d installed
a lock to keep his sons out. . . . He would sit in his office, lis-
tening to the movements of his boys, imagining that he felt
their hot, curious breath. I will not let them in, he would tell
himself. I will sit and think about art. But he found, to his
despair, that often he couldn’t think about art. He thought
about nothing at all.
(212)
Like Dolly, whose fax machine is “ten inches away from the fold-
out sofa where she slept” (138), Ted must work in uncongenial and
“compressed” quarters, with his time similarly pressured.
But when Ted arrives at the Museo Nazionale, he undergoes
one of the novel’s most thrilled, and thrilling, scenes of aes-
thetic experience and appreciation. For Ted as for Bennie,
intense aesthetic experience produced “a physical quickening”:
He drifted among dusty busts of Hadrian and the various

Caesars, experiencing a physical quickening in the presence
of so much marble that verged on the erotic. He sensed the
proximity of the Orpheus and the Eurydice before he saw it,
felt its cool weight across the room but prolonged the time
before he faced it, reminding himself of the events leading up
to the moment it described. . . .
Ted stepped toward the relief. He felt as if he’d walked
inside it, so completely did it enclose and affect him. . . . Ted
stared at the relief, transfixed, for thirty minutes. He walked
away and returned. He left the room and came back. Each
time, the sensation awaited him: a fibrillating excitement
such as he hadn’t felt for years in response to a work of art,
compounded by further excitement that such excitement was
still possible.
He spent the rest of the day upstairs among the Pompeiian
mosaics, but his mind never left the Orpheus and Eurydice.
(21 4– 15)
Ted’s experience “verge[s] on the erotic” partly because it

involves desire but also because it is somatic, multisensory,
involving the “sens[ing]” of proximity and the feeling of “cool
weight.” Not just a cognitive or a purely visual experiencing (of
“fac[ing]” the artwork)—although it is also those things—this
is an experience of sensory intimacy and closeness. The artwork
seems to reach outward to him, creating a three-dimensional
effect, such that he seems to enter it, “so completely did it
enclose and affect him.” Most of all, Ted’s response is a “sensa-
tion,” described in almost medical terms as a “fibrillating excite-
ment.” Egan suggests a slight paradox in the play of presence
and absence in the artwork’s effects on Ted. It is insistently
present, something he can feel and that draws him “in” from
across the room—but part of its power derives from its mental
persistence even in absence: “his mind never left the Orpheus
and Eurydice” even when he moves physically away from it; it
“gradually relaxed its hold” (215) on him only as he walks
through Naples hours later in the day. For Ted, the artwork
seems, miraculously, to allow a rejuvenating inhabitation akin
to Proust’s fantasy of reentering a house and finding one’s
younger self: he once again “enters” an aesthetic space that
allows him to regain a sensation “he hadn’t felt for years.”
Ted’s “fibrillating excitement” about the relief stands in con-
trast to Bennie’s intense disappointment and frustration with
the “bloodless constructions” of the contemporary pop music
that he promotes and sells. To fibrillate is to make a quivering
movement in a muscle, especially in the heart—and so “fibril-
lating excitement” seems almost the precise opposite of blood-
lessness. Again, Proust’s “home” seems to hover as a figure for
an impossible desire that time might correspond with space,
such that one could “return” to the fullness or the satisfactions
of youth associated with a particular place. For Bennie, the
“actual room” in which “real” music is performed has disap-

peared or become a virtual simulacrum; whereas Ted’s excitement
is, in part, a realization that art does still have the potential, for
him, of reversing time, of restoring or replenishing his capacity
to respond to it, in part by defining a “space” in which he can
enter to reexperience the feelings he had not believed were “still
possible.” It is as if Ted has found a door that opens to a kind of
intense aesthetic experience that he thought was lost to him,
one that involves a sense of presence and being with the artwork
as an object. He had felt that in suppressing his erotic desire, he
had “dismantled a perilous apparatus” (210); now it is as if he
had found a “perilous apparatus” restored: art returned to its
(dangerous, risky—because bodily) full power.
The physical “hold” of the relief on Ted, which draws him to
it, makes its presence felt from a distance, and defines a space
into which he can step in and out, also contrasts with certain art
or collecting practices we’ve already considered in the novel—
those that “preserve” an item either literally or figuratively under
glass: Bosco’s collection of artifacts, “which he hoarded in pris-
tine glass cases and refused to sell” (126); Sasha’s collection of
stolen items, which “contained years of her life compressed”;
and Joe and Lulu’s Samburu dagger, “displayed inside a cube of
Plexiglass.” One could also point to certain parallels between
some of these artifacts and Ted’s Orpheus and Eurydice relief—
but the latter seems very different in the way it makes itself
available and open, in a dynamic and nonstatic manner, to an
observer’s experience. If the artifact “hoarded in . . . glass cases”
seems akin to the “bloodless constructions” of the contempo-
rary pop recordings that Bennie despises, the relief offers an
opportunity for a far more vital experience of art, one that is
made available to a beholder and not shut up, “compressed,” or
privatized. Ted’s ecstatic experience, which he gains with the
modest price of entrance to the museum (if it charges any fee)

and which involves neither possession nor sale, also hints at an
alternative to a contemporary neoliberal art system in which the
question “Am I getting my money’s worth?” (209) dominates any
question of value.
That bodily “hold” that the artwork exerts on Ted can also be
read as figuring an aesthetic effect that Egan desires for fiction.
We’ve already considered Egan’s various hints and comments,
both inside and outside of her fiction, about her love for the
great British nineteenth-century novelists. In 1840, William
Thackeray summed up the power of Dickens’s writing in these
terms: the “power of the writer is so amazing, that the reader at
once becomes his captive, and must follow him.”4 The popular
and somewhat disreputable Victorian subgenre of “sensation
fiction” (typically concerning crime, secret identities, and the
like) was notorious for its overt and powerful appeal to the read-
er’s body and “nerves.” But as Thackeray’s comment suggests,
even more respectable novelists, such as Dickens and George
Eliot, relied no less on the power of narrative to captivate the
reader, with a nearly physical grasp, and this quality remains for
many contemporary readers, I think, one of the primary appeals
of classic, premodernist fiction.
We have seen Egan’s preoccupation with the effects of the
dematerialization, digitization, and “compression” of art. The
scene of Ted in the museum stages a scene of what seems to be a
strong desideratum on Egan’s part for an aesthetic effect that
“encloses” a reader/viewer or takes him in its “hold” with an effect
that is more sensory than cognitive. Such effects of what Rita
Felski calls “aesthetic enchantment”—in which “you are sucked
in, swept up, spirited away. . . . hypnotized, possessed”5—seem
to be among those that Egan worries have been attenuated in
contemporary art and literature. Egan appears to view the scope
or size of a work and its hold on a reader as linked in nineteenth-

century fiction, which was often at once ambitiously “large”
and compellingly gripping in its effects. As a brief aside, it is
interesting to compare Goon Squad to the next novel Egan pub-
lished, Manhattan Beach, a more conventional work of illusory
realism— one that aims for a consistently “immersive” sense of
an alternative fictional “world,” in this case, that of World War
II–era New York City—without any of the breaks or gaps that
characterize Goon Squad. Many of the reviews of Manhattan
Beach, some of them perhaps implicitly referencing the novel’s
depiction of deep-sea diving, emphasize precisely that effect of
illusory realist “immersion”: “Manhattan Beach is the kind of book
you can immerse yourself in happily” (San Francisco Chronicle);
“Egan’s first foray into historical fiction makes you forget you’re
reading historical fiction at all” (Elle); “Egan’s prose . . . draws
absolutely no attention to itself . . . it’s immersive and compel-
ling” (Vox); the novel “will transport . . . every reader” (Booklist).6
In Goon Squad, however, Egan balances the realist technique
of illusory immersion in a fully fledged, plausibly depicted fic-
tional world— one positioned in a single, linearly developing
span of time—with a habit of breaking or shifting worlds and
making temporal leaps, possibly prompted in part by doubt that
one can ever fully leave one’s own “world” for another. Part of
the particular pleasure of Goon Squad, I would argue, emerges
from a dialectical tension that plays out between a drive toward
“immersion”—in other worlds and in other minds—and a con-
trasting recognition that any true escape into such alterity or
difference can only be temporary. A comment from Jules in his
magazine profile of Kitty Jackson—although it also refers spe-
cifically to the gulf between a famous celebrity and an ordinary
person— captures this broader ambivalence: “I would like
nothing more than to understand the strangeness of Kitty’s
world—to burrow inside that strangeness never to emerge. But

the best I can hope for is to conceal from Kitty Jackson the bald
impossibility of any real communion between us” (174). Ted’s
movement in and out of the orbit of the museum relief can even
be read as allegorizing the intended effects of Goon Squad,
which “encloses” a reader in a fully fleshed-out realist world but
then allows or compels her to “walk away,” producing an effect
that is more strobing or flickering than simply immersive and that
does not “let you forget” that you are reading a work of fiction.
The reader in effect “visits” Goon Squad ’s worlds, but always as a
temporary visitor.7
Aesthetic experience in Goon Squad is often defined and dis-
cussed in relation to the concepts of authenticity and purity, val-
ues at once ironized yet also, in some respects, treated as mean-
ingful. The evaluation of the relative “authenticity” of an
artwork or an art experience is presented as sometimes superfi-
cial or rote yet also as deriving from a genuine desire to find in
art something beyond commodified or virtual values. One pur-
pose served by the novel’s pop-music-industry context is to offer
a vision, parallel to an only implicitly referenced world of the
publishing industry, of a realm in which art’s value is insistently
judged in relation to these concepts (often in conflict with oth-
ers such as marketability or commercial viability). Rock and
especially punk music are freighted in Goon Squad, in some-
times contradictory ways, with the possibility or promise of
“authenticity,” of a “pure” experience free of co-opted compro-
mise, as well as with the disappointment of the failure to achieve
such aims—and the possibility of faking or simulating them or
of exploiting or corrupting them.
Egan depicts marketing and publicity as—in this respect,
like scholarship or criticism— defining a parallel, alternative
discourse of and approach to art. If a more “pure” aesthetic
experience, like Ted’s, exists outside of commerce and financial

value, then “marketing, public relations, image consulting and
spin”8 treat art as sheer commodity, with no meaningful value
beyond the economic. What arguably keeps Egan’s depiction of
such marketing from seeming like predictable or cheap potshots
is a sense that this more disenchanted or cynical vision of art is
true: art really has become, substantially and almost over-
whelmingly, a commodity, more so, and in new ways, in the
twenty-first century—a reality that Goon Squad grapples with
in several registers. Egan is well aware that a novelist is a cul-
ture worker within an art system that aims to monetize and
commodify all values as efficiently as possible. Her novels often
circle around the question of whether this contemporary art
system does still allow pockets of “authentic,” noncommodified
or at least less completely commodified experience— or whether
“authenticity” or “purity” are now little more than marketing
angles within a fully commodified experience.
Bennie’s trajectory from passionate teenage punk rock fan and
musician to disenchanted middle-aged music executive promot-
ing music he despises represents one prototypical “from A to B”
narrative in the novel, as if the booby prize for achieving only
limited success in an artistic field is inevitably to move to selling
that art. The anecdote about his attempt to sign up the “cloistered
nuns” (20) offers one vivid instance of the novel’s interest in what
could be described as dramas of selling out (or refusing to do so).
The nuns’ singing, “waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound,”
is so haunting partly in the context of their “vows of silence.”
Beyond its inherent beauty, the singing acquires particularly
“pure” resonances because the nuns’ voices are normally “clois-
tered,” even somewhat taboo. And this in turn makes Bennie’s
subsequent violation, when he “lunges” to kiss the mother supe-
rior, especially noteworthy. Bennie’s perverse gesture can be
taken as an unconscious performance of his own ambivalence

about the ways his work as a music executive is based on the
monetization—or even violation—of that which best conveys
purity and authenticity. (Remember, too, that a key selling point
for the band Stop/Go was their appealing youth.)
The novel’s linkage of punk rock to ideals of “authenticity” is
firmly established in the third chapter, narrated by Rhea, telling
the story of the formation and first public performance of the
Flaming Dildos. Some of the novel’s most explicit consider-
ations of authenticity come from Rhea, who reflects on her
attempts to decipher what she perceives as a somewhat opaque
authenticity code governing punk. (Egan has discussed her own
comparable teenage attempts at decoding such subcultural
codes, suggesting that Rhea’s perspective is based on her own in
that period.)9 Every weekend after the Flaming Dildos practice,
the friends go to the Mabuhay Gardens, an actual North Beach
punk club that closed in 1986 and that we can guess Egan may
have attended as a teenager.
We go to the Mab every Saturday night, after practice. We’ve

heard Crime, the Avengers, the Germs, and a trillion other
bands. . . . In the Mab’s graffiti-splattered bathroom we eaves-
drop: Ricky Sleeper fell off the stage at a gig, Joe Rees of Tar-
get Video is making an entire movie of punk rock, two sisters
we always see at the club have started turning tricks to pay for
heroin. Knowing all this makes us one step closer to being real,
but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real
Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?
(45– 46)
Rhea resembles a more ingenuous version of Mindy, the Berke-

ley anthropology student who wittily dissects her experience,
with her powerful lover on a safari with his children, according

to such theoretical categories as “Structural Resentment,” “Struc-
tural Affection,” “Structural Incompatibility,” and “Structural
Desire” (64–65). Mindy, who worries about “whether her insights
on the link between social structure and emotional response
could amount to more than a rehash of Lévi-Strauss,” is one of
many of Egan’s characters who worry about their own originality,
about whether their “insights” or creativity are more than simply
a “rehash” of others’ ideas.
Rhea too is a (nascent) cultural analyst, one who, although
she has not yet developed a full-blown analytical theory at the
level of Mindy’s taxonomy, is similarly confronting a cultural
code and attempting to analyze and make sense of it. That Rhea
and Jocelyn “eavesdrop” in a bathroom underlines that they are
not fully part of the discourse they are trying to understand;
they are positioned as marginal, listening in on those more fully
immersed in the subcultural world that fascinates them. The
gossip and information they take in is, in fact, plausibly extradi-
egetically “authentic”: the bands named did perform at the
Mabuhay Gardens, and “Ricky Sleeper” presumably refers to a
legend of the Bay Area punk scene, Ricky Williams, who was
the singer for both Flipper and the Sleepers (and who later died
at age thirty-six in the early 1990s).10 Egan thus deploys dis-
courses of authenticity at multiple levels, folding in actual
details from punk history as part of her characters’ puzzling
over authenticity as an aesthetic value.
Part of the problem with punk’s relationship to authenticity,
as Rhea partially grasps, is that it can seem futile or misguided
to try to locate any stable authentic core in a movement that is,
at least in its Sex Pistols/Malcolm McLaren lineage, fundamen-
tally a Warholian exercise in extravagant posing, self-styling,
and pop identity construction. Rhea’s test case of a Mohawk
suggests the problem: a “fake” Mohawk hairstyle would pre-

sumably be one acquired by a suburban poseur who has decided
to become a punk without having committed fully to the move-
ment. But given that the hairstyle is itself an appropriation or
repurposing of a hairstyle associated with the Mohawk nation,
any search among American teenagers for “a real Mohawk”
seems, as Rhea hints, ironic. Even the most authentic punk
rocker’s Mohawk is, at some level, fake; the most authentic
punk might simply be the one most committed to his pose, like
Bennie, who “irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a
virgin record” (42).
Rhea returns to questions of authenticity and style or fashion
after school at the home of Alice, another friend (and a roman-
tic rival to Rhea, as the object of desire for Bennie, whom Rhea
pines for), after Jocelyn has run away with the much older Lou.
A thematic pattern runs through the chapter regarding clothing
and uniforms, introduced in the chapter’s opening scene:
The first time we went to Sea Cliff, where Alice lives, she
pointed up a hill at fog sneaking through the eucalyptus trees
and said her old school was up there: an all-girls school where
her little sisters go now. K through six you wear a green plaid
jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and white
sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Scotty goes, Can
we see them? and Alice goes, My uniforms? But Scott goes,
No, your alleged sisters.
( 39)
That the chapter’s final sentence returns to Alice’s younger

sisters and their outfits—“They turn to us, laughing in their
green uniforms” (58)—hints at the uniforms’ symbolic reso-
nances. The uniforms seem to relate to Rhea’s struggle with
adolescence and the confusing and sometimes frightening

process of the shift from childhood innocence to adult experi-
ence: “Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth
grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure,
Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaalu-
des” (43). In a novel so concerned with the passage of time and
with memory and nostalgia, clothing operates as a visible signi-
fier of life stages as well as a vehicle for creative self-styling.
When the teenage friends enter Alice’s sister’s bedroom, Rhea
thinks, “I’m afraid they’ll wake up and be scared of us in our
dog collars and safety pins and shredded t-shirts.” Rhea subse-
quently observes, “Alice wears ripped jeans and drippy black eye
makeup, but her hair is long and gold. She isn’t a real punk,
either” (47). A green uniform emblematizes childhood, defined in
part as an “innocent” phase—both erotically and semiotically—
in which one simply wears the “uniform” assigned to you by
parents or authority figures. Rhea narrates the chapter from
within adolescence and the challenges of a later life stage, when
one must choose one’s own style and mode of self-representation.
Punk fashion, with its deliberately ugly and abrasive signifiers, is
at once an externalization of adolescent turmoil and a complex
engagement with a shifting target of an impossible “authenticity”
(impossible in part because to be an adolescent is to feel the
ground of one’s identity continually shifting). Part of the chal-
lenge for Rhea, who feels ugly and unattractive, it seems, is
the difficulty of navigating desire and specifically female codes
of eroticism. Alice flaunts punk signifiers but also has “long
and gold” hair, and she, unlike Rhea, finds erotic satisfaction
(with Scotty) in the course of the chapter. When Alice asks,
“Who wants to wear a uniform?” Rhea answers, “I would”
(47); wearing a prescribed uniform has become a perquisite of
pre-erotic (“green”) childhood innocence, as if it would offer the
opportunity to dial back in time, from sex and “pot, coke,

quaaludes” to jump rope and charm bracelets as the activities of
friendship.
It’s also important to note, here, that Rhea’s consideration of
what it means to move from “innocent” childhood activities to
sex and drugs occurs in the specific context of the sexual exploi-
tation of a teenage girl by an older, powerful man in his forties.
Egan is often concerned with emotions and experiences—
shame or failure, the desire for authenticity, the fears of aging
and of missing out on life—which she depicts as affecting men
and women in similar ways. Yet it’s also the case that the argu-
ment Egan is making about work and life and the search for
meaning in the world does look and play out very differently for
men and women—and that the novel contains many instances
of female ambition or creativity thwarted, disrupted, or side-
lined by men, so much so, in fact, that it can be plausibly read as
a (pre-)#MeToo novel.
The thoroughgoing sexism of the rock music world is a given
in the novel, and Egan seems interested in punk as offering
some initial feminist potential that goes mostly unfulfilled.
Rhea’s narrative of the formation and first public performance
of the Flaming Dildos begins with hints of possible gender
equity: although the two boys, Bennie and Scotty, perform
while Jocelyn and Rhea do not (there is also—as is so often the
case— a somewhat anonymous drummer, this one named Joel),
Rhea points out that “Jocelyn and I write all the lyrics and work
out the tunes with Bennie and Scotty.” They are, then, in fact,
part of the band, as lead songwriters— even if “we sing with
them in rehearsal, but we don’t like being on stage” (41). The
band’s name, presumably derived from the Sex Pistols (cf. the
actual Australian band the Celibate Rifles), is interestingly
ambiguous when considered in terms of gender. Like so much
early punk music, the name “the Flaming Dildos” can be plau-
sibly interpreted either as a parody or an instance of triumpha-
list phallic aggression. (Perhaps it depends on one’s sense of to
what purpose the dildos have been set on fire . . . and by whom.)
And if the band begins with a degree of gender parity, the
chapter develops into a tale about disturbing sexual predation in
the music industry, as the seventeen-year-old Jocelyn is sexually
exploited by the middle-aged music executive Lou. Rhea’s
description of the (up to this point) joyously rage-filled Flaming
Dildos show at the Mab takes a nightmarish turn:
I turn to Jocelyn, but she’s gone . . . I see Lou’s fingers spread

out over her black hair. She’s kneeling in front of him, giving
him head, like the music is a disguise and no one could see
them. Maybe no one does. Lou’s other arm is around me,
which I guess is why I don’t run, although I could, that’s the
thing. But I stand there while Lou mashes Jocelyn’s head
against himself again and again so I don’t even know how she
can breathe, until it starts to seem like she’s not even Jocelyn,
but some kind of animal or machine that can’t be broken. I
force myself to look at the band.
( 53)
Two weeks after this, Jocelyn runs away and moves in with
Lou. In a subsequent chapter, set about twenty-five years later,
as the forty-three-year-old Jocelyn and Rhea visit the dying
Lou, we learn of some of the longer-term consequences of this
episode: Jocelyn is now living with her mother, “trying to finish
my B.A. at UCLA Extension after some long, confusing detours,”
her “lost time” (86). “So this is it,” she thinks, gazing at Lou
lying in bed hooked up to colostomy bags and tubes for IVs,
“what cost me all that time” (87). Here is another representation
of a particular subjective experience of time: Jocelyn’s encounter

with Lou robbed her of purpose and stability at a vulnerable
moment in her life and knocked her into one of those unantici-
pated, less positive A-to-B trajectories. She now contemplates
murdering Lou, and she tells him, “you deserve to die” (90), but
realizes that it’s “too late” to exact revenge.
Jocelyn’s experience with Lou also complicates the reading
I’ve been offering of punk music as linked to ideals of purity or
authenticity. For Bennie and Scotty, performing allowed an
expression of emotional abandon and “fibrillating excitement”:
that figurative and literal kick in the chest. But Jocelyn and
Rhea never felt comfortable performing publicly in what were
aggressive and very male-dominated punk spaces (it was only
especially trailblazing young women who did so in 1979, years
before Riot Grrrl),11 and while they were initially able to partici-
pate in the band’s creative process by coauthoring the songs,
Lou’s intervention presumably transformed the meaning of the
music for both Rhea and Jocelyn. We can assume that having
had to “force [herself] to look at the band” while Jocelyn per-
formed oral sex on Lou while kneeling at both of their feet most
likely prevented Rhea from continuing to feel a sense of owner-
ship or agency in the music. Jocelyn’s delayed fury at Lou also
recalls Rhea’s earlier remark that of their circle of friends,
“Scotty is the truly angry one”; there’s an implication now that
certain forms of female rage are slower building but no less
potent or authentic than the form of overt anger that Scotty can
perform.
We also learn that Lou subsequently became Bennie’s men-
tor, setting the inept teenage musician on a path to becoming a
powerful and wealthy (albeit unfulfilled) music executive. The
events of this chapter, that is, anatomize a thoroughly misogy-
nistic music world in which certain forms of authenticity and
the rewards associated with them are made available to some

while utterly denied to others, in a textbook instance of what
Gayle Rubin famously called the shoring up of male privilege
through “the traffic in women.” Lou in effect talent-scouted the
members of the Flaming Dildos, plucked out Jocelyn for his
own sexual use, and set Bennie on a prominent career path; he
nurtured one’s creative “flame” while snuffing out the other’s.
And to consider Bennie as Lou’s protégé can also make his
“lunge” at the mother superior and his mentorship and then
abandonment of the (no longer as) “young and adorable” women
in Stop/Go appear in a more troubling light. Sexual harassment
and mistreatment of young women seems, in Egan’s telling,
built structurally into the music industry.
This backstory also bears upon our interpretation of Sasha’s
subsequent career as Bennie’s secretary and assistant and of her
own “lost” period in her twenties. Sasha often does not act deci-
sively herself as much as she assists others; she is, for years, a
taken-for-granted and highly effective gal Friday and assistant
to Bennie as she grapples with her own theft compulsion. Sasha
somewhat resembles Jocelyn, in fact; they both feel, for a time,
stymied, stuck, knocked off from any purposeful career or life
path. Sasha has attempted suicide and grapples with her college
friend Rob’s death. And in her interlude in Naples, living in a
“seedy palazz[o]” with ominous, unseen “friends” (217) who
fence stolen goods, there are implications of possible sexual
exploitation. All of this even suggests a possibility that Sasha’s
especially fragmentary and scrambled chronology in the novel,
as well as her stuckness, may relate in some way to sexual
trauma.
It is especially satisfying, therefore, when we eventually
encounter a middle-aged Sasha having broken away from Ben-
nie, living with her husband and two children in the desert,
making her own art rather than “assisting” in the production

and selling of others’. From this perspective, we might even
reconsider Sasha’s seemingly senseless and unkind theft of the
plumber’s “beautiful screwdriver,” which is inescapably phallic
(“the silvery shaft sculpted, sparkling” [7]—almost a “flaming
dildo”?), as unconsciously driven by a desire to claim the privi-
lege, often denied to women in this novel, of both purposeful
work and of sexual agency.
In the novel’s final chapter, “Pure Language,” set in a near-
future Manhattan, Egan considers “authenticity” and “purity”
in relation to both language and music. We’ve already consid-
ered how Alex’s wife Rebecca has made her reputation through
the study of “word casings . . . words that no longer had mean-
ing outside quotation marks . . . that had been shucked of their
meanings and reduced to husks” (323). The chapter includes an
extensive, very funny discussion of the new forms of “handset”
texting that seem to be displacing standard English, at least
among the young—perhaps as one reaction to the perception
that English generally is becoming “reduced to husks” (but also
a possible causal agent in that change). When Alex is talking
with Lulu, Bennie’s new young (of course) assistant— and also
Dolly’s daughter; we previously encountered her as a middle-
schooler in the chapter about Dolly and the dictator—Lulu
interrupts their conversation to express frustration with the
limitations and pitfalls of spoken language:
“I’m fine. I just get tired of talking.”

“Ditto,” Alex said. He felt exhausted.
“There are so many ways to go wrong,” Lulu said. “All
we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You
can’t ever just Say. The. Thing.”
( 321)
Egan has commented that she was “theory nut” as an under-

graduate student and that “theory-lust still guides me as a fic-
tion writer,”12 and this exchange can be read as manifesting
poststructuralist insights about the impossibility of moving
beyond metaphors, in language, to any stable or inherent mean-
ings. Both Alex and Lulu experience a sense of “exhaust[ion]”
in their use of English. Lulu’s surprising solution, however, is to
pivot away from spoken language:
“Can I just T you?” Lulu asked.

“You mean—”
“Now. Can I T you now.” The question was a formality;
she was already working her handset. An instant later Alex’s
own vibrated in his pants pocket.
( 321)
From this point on, the chapter is punctuated by occasional

exchanges in handset language (the novel’s version of texting):
U hav sum nAms 4 me? he read on the screen.

hEr thA r, Alex typed, and flushed the list of fifty contacts,
along with notes, tips on angles of approach, and individual
no-nos, into Lulu’s handset.
GrAt. Il gt 2 wrk.
They looked up at each other. “That was easy,” Alex said.
“I know,” Lulu said. She looked almost sleepy with relief.
“It’s pure—no philosophy, no metaphors, no judgments.”
( 321)
Lulu, in a nearly postcoital state of “relief,” suggests that

these handset communications are “pure,” a surprising term
that brings to mind Alex’s note, “I BELIEVE IN YOU.” Like
that note, these messages are “minimal,” compressed, stripped

down—but these are even more so than the note, in that many
letters have been dropped and numbers substituted for words.
And this handset language’s close alliance to the language of
young children—“I do dat!”—Alex’s daughter declares as she
reaches for the handset, risking getting her father in trouble
with his wife, as the parents have agreed to keep the toddler
from the devices—further associates it with a nearly nonverbal
baby talk. (Rock music, too, which always seems to stand in for
art more generally in this novel, has been infantilized: toddlers
armed with handsets have become tastemakers, and bands
therefore “had no choice but to reinvent themselves for the pre-
verbal” [313]).
Egan here is interested in the expressive possibilities of a
minimal expression, one that evades many of the complexities
and ambiguities of English and aims for a more direct commu-
nication. (“Even though I would be sad if all communication
were reduced to the kind of T-ing I was creating,” Egan has
observed, “one thing that struck me was that there’s a kind of
poetry to the fragmentation.”)13 To view this language as “pure”
seems rather perverse, however, considering the nature of the
verbal exchange here, which involves Alex “flush[ing]” a list of
contacts into Lulu’s phone: potential “parrots” who can be hired
to spread fake word-of-mouth publicity for Scotty Hausmann’s
comeback performance. Goon Squad continually positions char-
acters and their actions on one side or another of the divide that
runs through the novel between art and commerce/publicity—
but often ambiguously or laterally and frequently shifting their
positions. So, for example, Bennie begins as a teenage punk
rocker and becomes a music executive who vampirically searches
out young artists whose talent he can monetize; Sasha, in the other
direction, spends her young adult years working for Bennie but,
by the novel’s conclusion, makes her own sculptures and other

artworks (not intended for sale); La Doll retires from her comi-
cally exploitative PR/publicity business to run a small “fine pro-
duce and unusual cheeses” (164) shop; Jules goes from writing
cynical glossy-magazine celebrity profiles to editing “a weekly
prison newspaper” that wins him “a special citation from the
PEN Prison Writing Program” (119); and so on.
In this final chapter, the worlds of art and culture have
become almost completely commodified, with any potential
meanings or values, aside from financial or economic ones,
“shucked” or “reduced” to nothingness. Egan slips seamlessly
into what is in effect a just slightly science-fictional mode as she
chronicles Alex’s desperate attempt to maintain his family’s
financial stability by going all-in on a thoroughly compromised
social media campaign to promote Scotty’s comeback concert.
This slightly future America (as of the novel’s production circa
2008; it feels much closer now as I write, in 2020, under a pan-
demic lockdown) is one in which “the suspicion that people’s
opinions weren’t really their own” is pervasive and “ ‘Who’s paying
you?’ was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm”
(315). Companies and brands compete to hire effective “parrots,”
the term for a paid influencer on social media. Once again,
Egan mordantly jokes both about her long-standing interest in
“how mass media invites a particular sort of self-consciousness,
or self-objectification”14 and perhaps about the representations
and “bout[s] of enthusiasm” of authors in particular, those who
aim to imbue verbal representations with emotion and meaning.
That Alex was, earlier in the novel, the recipient of that memo-
rable, bold-faced message adds to the irony that he is now
reduced to “devising a system for selecting potential parrots
from among his 15,896 friends,” based on his calculation of
“how much they needed money (‘Need’), how connected and
respected they were (‘Reach’), and how open they might be to

selling that influence (‘Corruptibility’)” (315). Goon Squad here
seems again to be considering new formal-technical means—
other than novels—by which the fates and life paths of large
groups of loosely connected individuals might be “tracked” or
assessed. As we’ve seen, as early as in her depiction of the pre-
scient “Ordinary People” app in Look at Me, Egan has been
interested in the means by which social media have remediated
this function, which previously the novel more exclusively
served. Something like this might be said about Alex’s “system
for selecting potential parrots” and “graph[ing] the results on
his handset in three dimensions” (315); Egan might be taken to
imply that the former cultural role served by the novel has been
usurped by such social media “graphs” or charts of social con-
nection that—more efficiently than Balzac or Dickens ever
could?—represent elaborate social networks as a graspable
network.15
Alex’s quest seems very much like one final instance in the
novel of what I’ve called a drama of selling out, of a kind that
Egan depicts as endemic to the pop music industry but also as
increasingly pervasive in the culture broadly. In a society that
rushes to convert or translate all values into economic ones and
in which any culture worker must always sell her labor, Egan
seems to wonder, at what point does a necessary selling becom-
ing a corrupted selling out? Alex ponders the paradox that he
“was a purist” (316) who had a history of avoiding compromising
temptations in both work and romance but that he had now
“caved to Bennie Salazar without a fight.” In part, he thinks,
this was because “every byte of information he’d posted
online . . . was stored in the databases of multinationals . . . that
he was owned, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly
at the very point in his life when he’d felt most subversive.” He
snaps himself out of these reflections by concluding that what

he needed now “was to find fifty more people like him, who had
stopped being themselves without realizing it” (317).
We’ve considered the ways that versions of the question
“What happened to you?” recur throughout Egan’s work:
“Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit?” (85).
This question— of how someone continues or stops “being
themselves”—is at once psychological (to what degree do we
feel like the “same” person, or a different one, as we change
through time?), ethical (what are the variations in ethical con-
sistency or principle, as opposed to “corruptibility”?), but also
formal/aesthetic: under what conditions, in the course of a novel
or other narrative, do we perceive a “character” as maintaining
consistency? One of the basic laws of realist fiction that certain
postmodern fictions abandon or gleefully undermine is the
assumption that a literary “character” should be represented as
possessing the same general consistency through time that we
presume actual human beings do. In David Mitchell’s Cloud
Atlas, for example, characters like Luisa Rey or Timothy Cav-
endish in effect toggle between the status of “realist,” plausible
human characters and “characters” in increasingly baroque non-
realist fictions within the novel. Egan’s Goon Squad can and has
been compared to Cloud Atlas for its comparable play with “multi-
protagonist” novelistic form and character—both novels seem to
push or rebel against conventional conventions governing the
novelistic representation of character—but Egan never quite
makes a full leap away from a baseline realist presumption that
her characters should be understood as plausible human beings
rooted in specific historical contexts. Here is one classically
realist core to Egan’s method: she is always interested in the
ethical dramas of characters who feel some responsibility for
continuing to “be themselves,” to avoid (in Bennie’s ironic
articulation of the idea to Alex), “compromising the ideals that

make you, ‘you’ ” (310). To Lulu and others of her rising genera-
tion, such an approach is laughably outdated, “part of a system
we call atavistic purism, [which] implies the existence of an
ethically perfect state . . . used to shore up the prejudices of
whoever’s making the judgments” (319). In Lulu’s ironic twist
on “I BELIEVE IN YOU”: “if I believe, I believe. Who are you
to judge my reasons?” (320).
For Alex, this personal/ethical “compromising” and “selling
out” (or acknowledgment of “being owned”) is tightly bound up
with aesthetics and art; like Sasha and Jules, Lou and Bennie,
Dolly and Lulu, Alex has become a publicist/salesperson, pro-
moting an artist through dubious or insincere means. The con-
cluding chapter of Goon Squad revolves around Alex’s “strong
marketing action” on behalf of Scotty and the suspense regard-
ing Scotty’s comeback performance, which seems likely to be a
disastrous failure, especially when Alex finally meets the reclu-
sive artist in person:
Alex had been about to move closer, to ask what the fuck
Bennie thought he was trying to do: put this decrepit roadie
on in Scotty Hausmann’s place? To impersonate him? A guy
with gutted cheeks and hands so red and gnarled he looked
like he’d have trouble playing a hand of poker, much less the
strange, sensuous instrument clutched between his knees?
But when Alex’s eyes fell on the instrument, he suddenly
knew, with an awful spasm in his gut: the decrepit roadie was
Scotty Hausmann.
( 332)
Scotty very much resembles Bosco in chapter 7, a has-been

former rock musician (although Scotty was never a star or even
a success) who has been ravaged and utterly transformed by

time, landing at a hugely diminished “B” from the heights of a
youthful “A,” such that he now no longer even seems to be him-
self, but an impersonator. The figure of the washed-up rock
musician operates in Goon Squad as a quintessence of the gen-
eral tendency of youthful beauty, creativity, and vividness to
fade and decay.
But Egan now sets the stage for Scotty’s triumphant per-
formance at the 9/11 memorial “footprint,” her moving conclu-
sion to the novel as a whole: a scene that risks but, in my view,
avoids a too-easy or sentimental valuation of the persisting force
and vitality of “authentic” art. As we’ve seen, Goon Squad has
returned throughout, in various guises, to intertwined aesthetic
and ethical dilemmas regarding authenticity and the experience
of art. At times, especially in this chapter, the novel seems to
suggest, with Lulu, that any longing for a powerfully authentic
aesthetic experience— one that is valued in terms distinct from
the financial or career yardsticks of the marketplace—is little
more than a form of judgmental “atavistic purism,” a leftover
formation associated with old media and aesthetic forms, such
as the rock LP or the long realist novel, that have now become
nearly as anachronistic as medieval altar frescos or “early Roman
wall paintings” (208).
But now, Scotty’s music—the “twanging filigree of his slide
guitar, its gushy metallic complexity,” and his singing—emerges
with an unexpected force:
It may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history cre-

ates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first
Human Be-in and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may
be that two generations of war and surveillance had left peo-
ple craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form
of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever the rea-

son, a swell of approval palpable as rain lifted from the center
of the crowd and rolled out towards its edges, where it crashed
against buildings and water wall and rolled back at Scotty with
redoubled force, lifting him off his stool, onto his feet (the
roadies quickly adjusting the microphones), exploding the qua-
vering husk Scotty had appeared to be just moments before and
unleashing something strong, charismatic, and fierce.
( 335)
Egan seems to show, here, in Lee Konstantinou’s words, that

“new forms of authentic experience can still emerge unexpect-
edly even in a world whose social life is fully enclosed within
corporate platforms.”16
As we’ve seen, Goon Squad is interested, throughout, in pow-
erful countercultural forces, such as punk in the late 1970s, that
seem to be linked in Egan’s mind with her own adolescent feel-
ing of having “missed the 60s.”17 Rhea and Jocelyn aspire to be
“real” punks but can only “eavesdrop” on those who are more
fully part of the movement; Egan implies that truly world-
historical aesthetic and cultural eruptions are fleeting and
tightly knitted to very particular historical moments, such that
one can easily “miss” them when they occur. And then, just as one
may wish to return to a particular dwelling to recapture one’s
past self, one might long fruitlessly to recapture that certain
moment— of 1967, or 1977, or whenever it might be—when art
seemed to speak powerfully for a larger totality.
A character in Don DeLillo’s Mao II (published in 1991, a
decade before 9/11) declares that “Beckett is the last writer to
shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work
involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the
new tragic narrative. . . . In societies reduced to blur and glut,
terror is the only meaningful act.”18 Egan seems to share DeLillo’s

concern that the novel (and perhaps art more broadly) has lost
its capacity “to shape the way we think and see,” to seize hold of
a moment, and to define and mold it. “A crowd at a particular
moment creates the object to justify its gathering” is a DeLillo-
esque declaration that suggests that the artwork is fundamen-
tally and dialectically tied to its democratic mass audience. By
situating Scotty’s concert at the 9/11 memorial site, Egan makes
nearly explicit an implication that, pace DeLillo’s character’s
claim, perhaps art still can rival terrorism as a source of “mean-
ingful acts,” as a force that can serve as an “embodiment” (not
just a representation) of its audience’s “unease.”
Scotty’s performance recalls Ted’s intense experience with
the Orpheus relief and suggests a broader, albeit subtle Orpheus
pattern in the novel. Orpheus was the first rock star, the arche-
type of all subsequent sexy, irresistible, doomed musicians. His
song not only charmed all human listeners but also, in Ovid’s
words, “allured the trees, the savage animals, and even the
insensate rocks.”19 While the power of Orpheus’s music to har-
monize and enchant is central to the classical myth, most of us
may now likely be most familiar with the story of Orpheus’s
attempt to win back his wife, Eurydice, from the land of the
dead. Orpheus travels to the underworld and pleads with Hades
and Persephone to allow her more life. “While [Orpheus] sang
all his heart said to the sound of his sweet lyre, the bloodless
ghosts themselves were weeping.”20 Just as he was able to move
the trees and rocks with his song, so he overcomes the dread
rulers of hell and gains permission to restore his wife to the liv-
ing. Yet on their journey back up to the surface of the earth,
Orpheus looks back at Eurydice too soon. “Instantly she slipped
away. . . . With no further sound she fell from him again to
Hades.”21
Orpheus’s song is defined both by the power of its near-

universal appeal and by its weakness: in the end, his music cannot
truly or fully restore life. Nor can it save Orpheus. Following
Eurydice’s death, Orpheus is attacked by the jealous Ciconian
maidens, who try to kill him with spears and stones. At first,
their weapons are disabled by the “true harmony of [Orpheus’s]
voice and lyre” and fall harmlessly to the ground. But then the
maidens drown out his song. The “clamorous discord of their
boxwood pipes, the blaring of their horns, their . . . Bacchana-
lian yells, with hideous discords drowned his voice and harp,”
and their stones and spears finally reach their mark.22
Orpheus’s death can even be read as an allegory of broad-
casting, as “his torn limbs were scattered in strange places,” per-
haps as reminders of a lost original harmony. We are left only
with fragments of Orpheus’s song.23 Egan subtly weaves
Orpheus references through the novel, figuring the twinned
fear that powerful art has disappeared and the hope that it still
survives, albeit perhaps in fragmentary or diminished form.
Scotty is an Orpheus figure: an eccentric figure clutching a
“strange, sensuous instrument”—remember that he constructed
his own lap steel guitar as a teenager—he shockingly produces
music that is enchanting, transformative, “exploding the qua-
vering husk [he] had appeared to be just moments before and
unleashing something strong, charismatic, and fierce.” As with
Ted’s experience with the Orpheus relief, this is an aesthetic
experience that is not “bloodless” but fundamentally “embod-
ied,” something felt as much as cognitively perceived.
Scotty performs “ballads of paranoia and disconnection”
that seem to emerge physically from him,
ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had
never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was
part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these
years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered
as pure. Untouched. But of course, it’s hard to know anymore
who was really at that first Scotty Hausmann concert—more
people claim it than could possibly have fit into the space, capa-
cious and mobbed though it was. Now that Scotty has entered
the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they
should. Doesn’t a myth belong to everyone?
( 336)
The characterization of Scotty’s music as “full of rage” recalls

Rhea’s earlier description of Scotty’s performance at the rowdy
Flaming Dildos show at the Mab. Rage or anger seems to be
one of the forces that Egan fears is at risk of diminishment or
extinction in a contemporary world in which there is little appe-
tite for powerful emotion. When Lizzie says “fuck you” to Rob,
he responds (writing in second person): “ ‘You too,’ you say,
grinning with satisfaction at the sight of real anger on a human
face. It’s been a while” (190). A major source of the power of
Scotty’s music is its expression or “embodiment” of an authentic
“rage” that Egan depicts as a proof of humanness and as one
necessary component of powerful art.24
Scotty’s concert becomes, a bit like Dolly’s disastrous New
Year’s party, a cultural talisman: one that everyone, whether or
not they were actually in attendance, wants to claim. But where
that quality of the earlier event functioned mostly as an amus-
ing commentary on the ludicrous nature of in-group Manhat-
tan status competition, now Egan depicts Scotty’s concert, in
much more earnest terms, as connecting to “the realm of myth.”
Scotty becomes a modern Orpheus whose song and “sensuous
instrument” can set the “bloodless ghosts” to weeping and
“shape the way we think and see.”
And the performance also becomes, I think, an ars poetica for

Goon Squad itself, as Egan seems to allegorize a desire for litera-
ture, or the novel specifically, to regain the special power and
force that we often fear it has lost: a longing that the novel
might once again become an irresistible, widely shared demo-
cratic “myth,” one that “belongs to everyone” and that grabs
hold of us and won’t let us go, as “palpable as rain”—or as a kick
in the chest.
NOTES
INTRO / BONUS TRACK:

WHEN ART DEMATERIALIZED
1. “Lossless audio is the unmodified output of the recording process.
It’s the most accurate representation of output of the recording
process that exists.” Jamie Carter, “Lossless Audio Explained:
Sorting the FLACs from the ALACs,” Techradar, August 3, 2018,
https:// w w w . techradar . com /news / lossless - audio - explained
-sorting-the-flacs-from-the-alacs.
2. Qtd. in Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Madonna at Sixty,” New York Times
Magazine, June 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com /2019/06/05/maga
zine/madonna-madame-x.html.
3. I am not alone in so valuing Egan’s novel, which has already achieved a
canonical status within twenty-first-century U.S. fiction: it won the
2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle
Award and in 2015 was ranked no. 7 in the BBC’s list of the twenty-
first century’s twelve greatest novels. Jane Ciabattari, “The 21st Cen-
tury’s 12 Greatest Novels,” BBC Culture, January 19, 2015, http://www
.bbc.com/culture/story/20150119-the-21st-centurys-12-best-novels.
4. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me: A Novel (New York: Anchor Books,
2002), 498, 368.
5. Alec Michod, “The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Egan,” The
Rumpus, June 23, 2010, https://therumpus.net /2010/06/the-rumpus
-interview-with-jennifer-egan /.
140 = Intro / Bonus Track: When Art Dematerialized
6. David Lidsky, “The Definitive Timeline of Spotify’s Critic-

Defying Journey to Rule Music,” Fast Company, August 8, 2018,
https://www.fastcompany.com /90205527/the -definitive -timeline
-of-spotifys-critic-defying-journey-to-rule-music. In defining Goon
Squad as a “Spotify novel” I intend a nod of the hat to Mark
McGurl’s ongoing investigations into “fiction in the age of Ama-
zon.” Mark McGurl, “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of
Amazon,” Modern Language Quarterly (2016) 77, no. 3: 447– 71.
7. Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (New York: Knopf,
2010), 30. All subsequent references to this novel provided in text.
8. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 11, trans. Brookes Moore, Theoi Clas-
sical Texts Library, http://www.theoi.com / Text /OvidMetamor
phoses1.html.
9. Jennifer Egan, quoted in Rachel Cooke, “I Was Never a Hot,
Young Writer. But Then I Had a Quantum Leap,” The Guardian,
September 24, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com /books/2017/sep
/24/jennifer-egan-quantum-leap-manhattan-beach-visit-from-the
-goon-squad.
10. Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach: A Novel (New York: Scribner,
2018), 375.
11. See, however, Margaret Cohen, who, while noting that Egan
associates Anna’s dive with a wide range of literary and mythic
depictions of travels to an underworld, argues that the emphasis on
“technical details of diving” also “enable[s] the novelist to reclaim
the depths from their long-standing metaphoric status as mythic
underworld.” Margaret Cohen, “A Feminist Plunge Into Sea
Knowledge,” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 375.
SIDE A, TRACK 1: TIME’S A GOON:

FROM A TO B
1. Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eigh-
teenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2018), 7.
Side A, track 1: Time’s a Goon: From A to B = 141
2. Egan’s intertwining the form of the novel with rock and roll is
not, of course, unique: see Florence Dore’s “The Rock Novel” for
an argument that “rock and roll became a salient aesthetic category
in the American novel at the turn of the twenty-first century,”
even ushering in “a new cultural fantasy: [that] the American novel
has transmogrified, has become an album.” Florence Dore, “The
Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude,”
Nonsite.org, January 20, 2013, http://nonsite.org/article /the-rock
-novel-and-jonathan-lethems-the-fortress-of-solitude. For a broader
argument about a “genealogical overlap between literature and
rock” in American fiction of the second half of the twentieth
century, see Florence Dore, Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the
Age of Rock and Roll (New York: Columbia University Press,
2018), 122.
3. Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the
Contemporary Literary Marketplace (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2016), 183.
5. The relation of Egan’s novel to Proust has been a frequent object of
critical discussion to date. David Cowart offers usefully detailed
consideration of the ways that “Egan’s characters, like Proust’s
Bergotte, Elstir, Vinteiul, Swann, Madame Verdurin, and Baron
Charlus, undergo various reversals of social standing” in The Tribe
of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2015), 179.
6. Jennifer Egan, cited in Thessaly La Force, “Jennifer Egan Fever,”
Paris Review Daily, July 12, 2011, https://www.theparisreview.org
/ blog/2011 /07/12/jennifer-egan-fever/.
7. Michod, “The Rumpus Interview.”
8. Cathleen Schine, “Cruel and Benevolent,” New York Review of
Books, November 11, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com /articles/2010
/11 /11 /cruel-and-benevolent /.
142 = Side A, track 1: Time’s a Goon: From A to B
9. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne and

Christopher Prendergast (New York: Viking, 2004), 94.
10. I take the term “omnitemporality” from the novel theorist
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 78. See also Christina Lup-
ton’s suggestion that “reading makes events that have been
ordered one way into things that still can be accessed and reor-
dered in time, and that therefore come with a surfeit of possi-
bility that real life lacks.” Lupton, Reading and the Making of
Time, 121.
11. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 8.
12. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 101.
13. OED, s.v. “goon.”
14. Elvis Costello, “Goon Squad,” https://genius.com / Elvis-costello
-goon-squad-lyrics.
15. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 30.
16. On a potentially “minimal” version of a long novel, consider Joseph
Conrad’s cranky response to a critic who remarked of his novel
Chance that “if I had taken a little more trouble the tale could have
been told in about two hundred pages.” Conrad’s response (in his
“Author’s Note” to the novel): “No doubt that by selecting a certain
method and taking great pains the whole story might have been
written out on a cigarette paper.” Joseph Conrad, Chance (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 331.
17. Jennifer Egan, The Keep: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2006), 128.
18. Egan, The Keep, 28– 29.
19. Jennifer Egan, Emerald City: Stories (New York: Picador USA,
1997), 6.
2002), 132, 374.
21. Egan, Look at Me, 178, my italics.
22. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 2004), chap. 43.
Side A, track 1: Time’s a Goon: From A to B = 143
23. Jeremy Rosen reads Egan’s novel as an instance of what he calls a

new kind of twenty-first-century “multi-protagonist fiction” that
“affirm[s] that any figure that enters their fictional worlds, no mat-
ter how fleetingly, has a rich interiority and a radical particularity
that could serve as a novelistic center of consciousness.” Rosen,
Minor Characters, 183. (Rosen views this seemingly “democratic”
potential with some skepticism, however.)
24. Jonathan Arac, “What Kind of History Does a Theory of the
Novel Require?” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2 (2009): 193.
25. Arac, “What Kind of History,” 194. I was led to Arac’s essay, and
to his phrase “a melancholic novel lover,” by Nicholas Dames’s
contribution to the “Theory of the Novel Now” roundtable at the
Society of Novel Studies, Ithaca, NY, June 2018.
26. Jennifer Egan, cited in Stephen M. Deusner, “Proust and Punk:
Jennifer Egan, ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ at Politics and
Prose,” Washington Post, June 27, 2010.
27. Compare Mark McGurl on “Philip Roth’s Modest Phase,” in
which “traditional literary forms” such as the novel “are no longer
understood, as they were in Roth’s youth, and in the youth of liter-
ary modernism itself, as forms of enclosure that need to be shat-
tered in the search for an authentic expression of desire. Rather,
they are offered as fragile, already-failing vehicles that can carry
us, but only for a short while, through the encompassing onslaught
of time.” Mark McGurl, “Philip Roth’s Modest Phase,” Post45,
April 12, 2019, http://post45.research.yale.edu /2019/04 /philip-roths
-modest-phase/.
28. See Alexander Alter, “TV’s Novel Challenge: Literature on the
Screen,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2013.
29. Michod, “The Rumpus Interview.” As Florence Dore points out,
Michael Chabon’s 2012 Telegraph Avenue implies a similar alliance
between novel and LP: Chabon’s novel “comes complete with a
perfectly scaled record label, offset to appear glued as on a vinyl
LP, listing its chapters as if they were recorded tracks.” Dore,
Novel Sounds, 98.
144 = Side A, track 1: Time’s a Goon: From A to B
30. Egan, Look at Me, 120– 21.

31. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 78, 41. Genette (85) argues that
Proust made clear, “more than anyone had done before him and
better than they had, narrative’s capacity for temporal autonomy”—
that is, an author or narrator’s ability to play God by rearranging,
grouping, reordering events in divergence from the way that they
in fact chronologically occurred (according to the logic of the
fiction).
32. Michael W. Clune describes as the artwork as a “technology for
defeating time”; the “ideal art object of the Romantic tradition,” he
suggests, is an object “that never gets old.” Michael W. Clune,
Writing Against Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2013), 6, 60.
33. On the backward consideration of life paths not taken and their
representation in literature and film, see Andrew H. Miller, On
Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2020).
34. The “optative” is a term Miller uses to sum up the consideration of
paths not taken, or “lives unled”: see Andrew H. Miller, “ ‘A Case
of Metaphysics’: Counterfactuals, Realism, Great Expectations,”
ELH 79, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 773.
SIDE A, TRACK 2: STORAGE, PRESERVATION,

MEMORY, RECORDING
1. See Lauren Berlant’s suggestion that depression and obesity have
been linked in U.S. discourse as twinned and comorbid national
“epidemics.” Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011), 109. Berlant points out that in the medical
literature, obesity is often defined as a “chronic condition,” “ety-
mologically a disease of time” (103).
2. See also, in Egan’s Manhattan Beach: A Novel (New York: Scribner,
2018): “a gristle of pistons and turbines and pulleys all juddering
Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation, Memory, Recording = 145
toward some mysterious purposes,” and “it was followed by a jud-

dering rumble deep inside the ship” (365).
3. OED, s.v. “Judder,” https://www-oed-com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/view
/ Entry/101880.
4. OED, “Fibrillation,” https://www-oed-com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu
/view/ Entry/69761.
5. See “Gold & Platinum,” https://www.riaa.com /gold-platinum
/story/.
6. “Music recording certification,” https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki
/ Music _recording_certification.
7. “Chasing History: The World of Collecting, Gold, Platinum and
Diamond Records,” Billboard, https://www.billboard.com /articles
/news /7550080 /chasing -history -the -world - of - collecting - gold
-platinum-and-diamond-records.
8. Zara Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial’: An Interview with Jennifer
Egan,” Post45, May 20, 2016, http://post45.research.yale.edu /2016
/05 /this-is-all-artificial-an-interview-with-jennifer-egan /.
9. Both Bosco and Sasha can be understood as “hoarders” perform-
ing what Scott Herring describes as a form of “material deviance.”
Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern Ameri-
can Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2014, 6.
10. Michael W. Clune, Writing Against Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2013), describes as the “addictive object” as a
model for a “truly effective work of art—the work of art that will
destroy habit and arrest experiential time” (62); he argues that “lit-
erature wants to become like an addictive object,” wants to preserve
“vivid phenomenal experience” and to seem “always new” (59).
2002), 253.
12. Bosco’s Suicide Tour idea recalls Don DeLillo’s Bucky Wun-
derlick, the Dylanesque rock-star-in-hiding in his 1973 Great Jones
Street (New York: Penguin, 1994), who comments, “Suicide was
nearer to me than my own big toe. It was the natural ending. I mean
146 = Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation, Memory, Recording
it was right there. No one would have been surprised or shocked. I

really think it was expected of me” (86); “Suicide’s the best answer
all around. . . . It’s what everybody expects of you, right down to
the littlest scribbler of fan mail” (284). Dana Spiotta’s 2012 Stone
Arabia is another recent novel (postdating Egan’s) that is espe-
cially interested in the mythology of the rock-star suicide.
13. “I Have to Ask: The Jennifer Egan Edition,” Slate, October 26,
2017. http://www.slate.com /articles/podcasts/i_have_to_ask /2017
/10 / jennifer_egan_on_writing_fiction_amid_technological_dis
tractions.html.
14. Jennifer Egan, “The Thin Red Line,” New York Times Magazine,
July 27, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com /1997/07/27/magazine/the
-thin-red-line.html.
1997), 30.
17. Egan, Look at Me, 95.
21. Florence Dore makes a related point about Michael Chabon’s Tele-
graph Avenue: “We might consider Telegraph Avenue to be a par-
ticularly apt comment on obsolescence and note that the teen-aged
character Jules switches from eight-track to iPod at the point in
the novel where Archy gives up vinyl to become a real estate agent
in 2008.” Florence Dore, “The Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem’s
The Fortress of Solitude,” Nonsite.org, January 20, 2013, http://nonsite
.org/article /the-rock-novel-and-jonathan-lethems-the-fortress-of
-solitude.
22. Aden Evens, Logic of the Digital (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1– 2.
24. Egan, The Keep, 105.
Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation, Memory, Recording = 147
25. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New

York: Vintage, 2012), 344.
26. “A Spotify listener who clicks on a favorite old song may hear a
file in a compressed audio format called Ogg Vorbis. That file was
probably created by converting an MP3, which may have been
ripped years earlier from a CD, which itself may have been cre-
ated from a suboptimal ‘safety copy’ of the LP master— or even
from a dubbed duplicate of that dubbed duplicate. Audiophiles
complain that the digital era, with its rampant copy-paste ethos
and jumble of old and new formats, is an age of debased sound:
lossy audio files created from nth-generation transfers; cheap
vinyl reissues, marketed to analog-fetishists but pressed up from
sludgy non-analog sources.” Jody Rosen, “The Day the Music
Burned,” New York Times Magazine, June 11, 2019, https://www
.nytimes .com /2019 /06 /11 /magazine /universal-fire -master-record
ings.html.
27. “The Studio Master—the original recording file laboured over by
the artists and producers—perfectly captures the sound, the tex-
ture, the detail, and the space required to express the feeling and
the emotion of the original performance.” Jamie Carter, “Lossless
Audio Explained: Sorting the FLACs from the ALACs,” Techra-
dar, August 3, 2018, https://www.techradar.com/news/lossless-audio
-explained-sorting-the-flacs-from-the-alacs.
28. John Markoff, “The Passion of Steve Jobs,” New York Times, Bits
blog, January 15, 2008, https:// bits.blogs.nytimes.com /2008/01 /15
/the-passion-of-steve-jobs/.
29. Alexandra Schwartz, “Jennifer Egan’s Travels Through Time,”
New Yorker, October 9, 2017.
31. Amelia Precup, “The Posthuman Body in Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black
Box,’ ” American, British, and Canadian Studies 25, no.1 (2015), 171.
32. “Coming Soon: Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box,’ ” New Yorker, May
23, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com / books/page-turner/coming
-soon-jennifer-egans-black-box.
148 = Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation, Memory, Recording
33. Schwartz, “Jennifer Egan’s Travels Through Time.” It’s also inter-
esting to note that Egan says that her first attempt at writing Goon
Squad ’s PowerPoint chapter “was trying to write a presentation on
legal pad by hand, without actually owning PowerPoint,” although
“I didn’t get too far with that.” Cited in Stephen M. Deusner,
“Proust and Punk: Jennifer Egan, ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’
at Politics and Prose,” Washington Post, June 27, 2010.
34. Egan’s adoption of PowerPoint can be viewed as a version of what
Zara Dinnen has dubbed “the digital banal.” Zara Dinnen, The
Digital Banal: New Media in American Literature and Culture (New
York: Columbia University Press), 2017. And as Lee Konstantinou
argues, Egan suggests in this chapter “that reified forms (such as
PowerPoint) allow for genuine artistic expression and emotional
involvements for her characters, and, by allegorical extension,
for . . . [the] contemporary novelist.” Lee Konstantinou, Cool
Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016), 42.
SIDE B, TRACK 3: FAILURE, SHAME,

TRAGEDY, EMPTINESS
1. “An almost mystical conviction of individual and collective failure
pervades A Visit from the Goon Squad. . . . And yet there is energy,
even exuberance, in its despair.” Pankaj Mishra, “Modernity’s
Undoing,” London Review of Books, March 2011, 27.
2. Allan Hepburn remarks on the centrality, in Egan’s work, of the
theme of “disappearance” and the way those who “disappear” leave
an empty space: “In Egan’s novels, characters tend to disappear,”
drawing “on the novelistic potential built into the trope of disap-
pearance.” Allan Hepburn, “Vanishing Worlds: Epic Disappear-
ance in Manhattan Beach,” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 386.
3. Jennifer Egan, quoted in Zara Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial’: An
Interview with Jennifer Egan,” Post45, May 20, 2016, http://post45
.research.yale.edu /2016/05 /this-is-all-artificial-an-interview-with
-jennifer-egan /.
Side B, track 3: Failure, Shame, Tragedy, Emptiness = 149
4. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S.

Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993):
151– 94.
5. Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
6. Jennifer Egan, quoted in Rachel Cooke, “I Was Never a Hot,
Young Writer. But Then I Had a Quantum Leap,” The Guardian,
September 24, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com / books/2017/sep
/24/jennifer- egan- quantum-leap-manhattan-beach-visit-from
-the-goon-squad.
7. Chris May, “Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares: How This All-Female
Bulgarian Folk Choir Became a Timeless Cult Phenomenon,”
Vinyl Factory, February 28, 2017, https://thevinylfactory.com /featu
res/mystere-des-voix-bulgares-4ad-story/.
8. Florence Dore makes a broader claim that applies well both to
Bennie and La Doll: “rock novels offer a deflated version of self, a
human whose diminishment is a key feature of its new signifi-
cance.” Florence Dore, “The Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem’s
The Fortress of Solitude,” Nonsite.org, January 20, 2013, http://nonsite
.org/article /the-rock-novel-and-jonathan-lethems-the-fortress-of
-solitude.
10. And it’s worth noting that in Genette’s discussion of narrative
“ellipsis” in Proust, one of his prime examples is a gap of precisely
this length: “between the end of Gilberte and the beginning of Bal-
bec a two-year ellipsis occurs that is clearly definite.” Gerard Gen-
ette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
11. OED, s.v. “Demise.”
12. This moment also brings to mind Theodor Martin’s observation,
about so-called contemporary fiction of the twenty-first century,
that “at a time when manners and conventions are changing so
quickly that it is impossible to record them accurately,” “the con-
temporary comprises dates but is not datable” and that the very
notion of the “contemporary” begins to seem so mutable as to be
150 = Side B, track 3: Failure, Shame, Tragedy, Emptiness
impossible to grasp. Theodor Martin, Continental Drift: Genre,

Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018), 31, 47.
1997), 115.
14. “The world one touches at the computer is not the same as the
material world at one’s fingertips. It is another world, constituted
by the digital code, a world generated by processes of abstrac-
tion.” Aden Evens, Logic of the Digital (London: Bloomsbury,
2015), 69.
2002), 368, 498. Moose could be citing C. Wright Mills’s classic
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002): “Contemporary divisions of labor involve
a hitherto unknown specialization of skill: from arranging abstract
symbols, at $1000 an hour, to working a shovel, at $1000 a year. . . .
As a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate
things, more handle people and symbols” (65).
16. I am here citing Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time
in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 2018), 126.
17. Jennifer Egan, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake,”
http://jenniferegan.com /excerpt /a-visit-from-the-goon-squad /.
18. Egan, quoted in Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial.’ ”
21. In what seems an oversight on the author’s part, considering the
chapter’s historical placement in the 2020s, all the pop songs refer-
enced in the chapter are actual songs from the 1960s through to
about the time of the novel’s composition; it seems unlikely that
Lincoln would listen only to music at least fifteen years old. The
spelling “Foxey” also indicates that Lincoln was in possession of an
early U.S. or Canadian pressing of the song, either the single or on
the album Are You Experienced?.
Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity = 151
-interview-with-jennifer-egan /. Egan also commented, “I had a
failed chapter with an academic, writing about the pauses in music
but it was incredibly boring! I was fascinated by the idea of the
pause, what it means and how it can function in music, but it was
only when I was able to finally use PowerPoint that I could bring in
the pauses.” Quoted in Zara Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial.’ ”
23. This passage is cited in Genette, Narrative Discourse, 98. Genette
points to Proust’s commentary on Flaubert in Genette’s own dis-
cussion of narrative “ellipses,” or temporal gaps, as a crucial novel-
istic tool; Genette distinguishes between different kinds, ranging
from “explicit ellipses,” in which a narrator specifies a particular
period of time that has passed (e.g., “two years later”), to “implicit
ellipses, that is, those whose very presence is not announced in the
text and which the reader can infer only from some . . . gap in nar-
rative continuity” (108), and then to “hypothetical ellipses”
(“impossible to localize . . . and revealed after the event” (109).
24. Egan, The Keep, 128.
25. I am thinking here partly of what Ann-Lise François defines as a
quality of “empty-handedness,” a willingness to accept inaction,
nonpossession, and nonagency. Ann-Lise François, Open Secrets:
The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford
SIDE B, TRACK 4: AESTHETICS, PURITY,

GENDER, AUTHENTICITY
1997), 92.
2. Egan notes that “In Look at Me, the character Moose has a corre-
spondence with an Art History professor called Barbara Mundy.
She exists; actually she is one of my oldest and closest friends
and a celebrated art historian. I wrote letters to Barbara in the
152 = Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity
character of Moose and she responded as she would have responded

had someone actually written her those letters.” Quoted in Zara
Dinnen, “ ‘This Is All Artificial’: An Interview with Jennifer
Egan,” Post45, May 20, 2016, http://post45.research.yale.edu /2016
/05 /this-is-all-artificial-an-interview-with-jennifer-egan /.
2002), 168.
4. Jesse Rosenthal cites Thackeray’s vivid image as one instance of a
widespread belief, among Victorian novelists and critics, “that
narrative mechanics such as suspense and delay could have a physi-
cal effect on a novel’s reader.” Jesse Rosenthal, Good Form: The
Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
5. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Oxford: Blackwell,
2008), 55.
6. These snippets are all cited in the opening pages of the paperback
edition of Manhattan Beach.
7. What I call a strobing quality here resembles what C. Namwali
Serpell calls narrative “oscillating.” Of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot
49, Serpell declares that “reading Lot 49 entails an oscillation
between an immersion in an other’s consciousness and a self-
awareness of the artifice of both that consciousness and that
immersion.” C. Namwali Serpell, Seven Modes of Uncertainty
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 71.
9. “In some ways I was a lot like Rhea; I wanted desperately to be
“real,” without really knowing what that meant. A cosmology
existed in my mind: some people were real, and had intense, vivid
lives, and some—like me— did not and might never. I was ashamed
of my unreality, and I tried to conceal it from those around me.
Punks seemed real, so I was afraid of them; or rather, my dealings
with them consisted of trying very hard to act as if I, too, was real.
It was a nervewracking performance.” Christopher Cox, “Jennifer
Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity = 153
Egan,” Paris Review Daily, June 25, 2010, https://www.theparis

review.org/ blog/2010/06/25 /qa-jennifer-egan /.
10. “Flipper Redux,” SF Weekly, February 10, 1999, http://www
.sfweekly.com /music /flipper-redux /.
11. See, e.g., Viv Albertine, who went on to found the trailblazing all-
women punk band the Slits, on her teenage 1970s reflections on the
possibility of playing guitar in a band: “Every cell of my body was
steeped in music, but it never occurred to me that I could be in a
band, not in a million years—why would it? Who’d done it before
me? There was no one I could identify with. No girls played elec-
tric guitar. Especially not ordinary girls like me.” Viv Albertine,
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys: A
Memoir (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2014), 49.
12. Cox, “Jennifer Egan.” Egan also recently commented, “During my
undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania and after-
ward, as a postgrad reading English literature at St. John’s Col-
lege, Cambridge, I found the practice of literary analysis and argu-
ment every bit as urgent and creative an enterprise as writing
fiction. Though I’ve ended up throwing in my lot with fiction, my
novels still tend to begin with abstract questions that might seem
equally— or better!— suited to academic writing.” Jennifer Egan,
“Notes from an Academic Interloper,” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 416.
15. “Evincing what several critics have called ‘network aesthetics,’
Egan’s stories mimic the form of an online social network, dis-
bursed across time, reimagining the form of the novel as a sort of
Facebook wall.” Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and
American Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2016), 260.
16. Konstantinou, Cool Characters, 266.
154 = Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity, Gender, Authenticity
17. Carly Schwartz, “Jennifer Egan on Growing Up in San Francisco,

Finding Inspiration, and Experiencing the ‘Sixties Hangover,’ ”
Huffington Post, October 10, 2011, updated January 30, 2012, https://
www.huffpost.com /entry/jennifer-egan-my-sf_n_1001091.
18. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1992), 157.
19. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 11, trans. Brookes Moore, Theoi
Classical Texts Library, http://www.theoi.com / Text /Ovid Meta
mor phoses11.html.
20. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 10.
23. I draw some language here from my “Harmony and Discord,”
Public Books, June 15, 2014, https://www.publicbooks.org/ harmony
-and-discord /#fn-1085-2.
24. Compare Sarah Brouillette’s observation about Kazuo Ishiguro’s
Never Let Me Go: “Our wish for Kathy to scream and cry, to
express indignation, is our wish for an art outraged by human suf-
fering.” She suggests that Never Let Me Go allegorizes a contempo-
rary world in which “the possibility of this sort of release” may
no longer be available in art. Sarah Brouillette, Literature and
the Creative Economy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2014), 204.
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INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to figures and tables.
absence: aesthetic, 44, 95, 112; 26– 29, 77, 85; of earth, 35;
beauty and youth as, 57; shame and fear of, 4, 17, 77, 122
emptiness as, 71, 105; formal Albertine, Viv, 153n11
gaps as, 88; 9/11 footprint as, Amazon (corporation), 45, 62, 64
91– 92, 105 Ambassadors, The (James), 51
adolescent, 121, 134 American: Egan’s characters
adult, 28– 29, 121, 128 described as, 31– 32, 50; fiction
aesthetics: African, 31– 32, 58; identified as, 4, 15, 141n2;
character, 131; digitized, 114; Indigenous, 58; 9/11’s impact
disappointment of, 108, 112, on the, 89; teenage, 120; as
116, 136, 154n24; ethics of, term, 98
132– 33; joys of, 108– 9, 111, analog, 31, 56, 60, 147n26
113, 136, 138; memorializing, Apple (corporation), 64
57; temporality of, 109, 113 Arac, Jonathan, 29, 30
(see also time); terrors of, archive: autobiographic, 51; digital
135; transcendence of, music, 63; fiction as, 64;
108– 9 personal object, 46, 67. See also
Africa, 31– 32, 58, 109 collecting; hoarding
aging: bodily, 23, 35, 52–53, 57, 77, Are You Experienced (album),
94; development through, 21, 150n21
162 = Index
Armed Forces (album), 19 Booklist (magazine), 115

artifact: artwork as, 2, 7, 10, 57–59; Brouillette, Sarah, 154n24
collected object as, 43–45, 50,
57–59, 113; pre-Columbian, 32, California, 67, 103
39, 43–44, 58; prose fiction Cambridge University, 153n12
as, 64 cassette, 1, 59, 109
authenticity: aesthetic, 7, 116–17, CD, 5, 31, 42, 59, 147n26
133; emotional, 122; music Celibate Rifles (band), 122
industry and records as, 6– 7, Chabon, Michael, 143n29,
56, 76, 116– 22, 124, 126 146n21
Avengers (band), 118 Chance (Conrad), 142n16
Chase, David, 15
Bad Brains (band), 1 Christgau, Robert, 3
Balzac, Honoré de, 130 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 36
Bay Area, 14 chronology, 15, 88–89, 125, 144n31.
Beckett, Samuel, 102, 134 See also time
Believer (magazine), 74 Ciabbatari, Jane, 139n3
Benjamin, Walter, 46, 63 Clarissa (Richardson), 73
Berlant, Lauren, 144n1 climate change, 14, 89, 103
“Bernadette” (song), 100, 103 “Closing Time” (song), 103
bildungsroman, 24, 28, 29 Cloud Atlas (Mitchell), 131
Billboard (magazine), 43 cloud (server networks), 4, 97
Black Flag (band), 1 Clune, Michael W., 144n32,
Bleak House (Dickens), 28 145n10
body: data preservation as analog Cohen, Margaret, 140n11
for the, 56–57, 65, 70; erotic, collecting, 40, 113; cross-cultural,
62; novel as analog for the, 17, 39, 43, 58 (see also artifact);
56; readerly, 144; scarred and litter, 25; music, 100, 103; self-,
maimed, 52–55, 70, 100; 51; stealing as 45–49, 51–52,
sensory, 5, 35, 40, 82–83, 86, 67– 68, 70, 72, 103
153n11; time’s imprint on the, Coltrane, John, 62
53, 55–56. See also commodity: art as, 2, 7, 44–45,
embodiment; scars 116–17, 129; everyday object as,
Bolaño, Roberto, 51 34, 44, 46; self as, 51, 74
Index = 163
compressed: art as, 97, 114; 65– 66; streamed music as, 5,
artifacts as history, 57, 113; 59– 60, 62– 64
data, 62; human life, 47–48, 67, demise, 43, 86, 87
111, 113; music, 19, 59, 61– 64, depression, 41, 90. See also
68; narrative form as, 19, 64; melancholy
texting language as, 128 (see development, 21, 120– 21, 131
also texting; handset) Dick, Philip K., 89
Conrad, Joseph, 142n16 Dickens, Charles, 28, 114, 130
continuity, 21, 79, 151n23 digitization, 4; aesthetic crisis of,
Costello, Elvis (singer), 18 95– 96; music, 31, 56, 59– 63,
Cowart, David, 141n5 147n26; streaming, 4–5, 59– 60,
Crime (band), 118 62– 64; writing as, 65– 66
Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), Dinnen, Zara, 145n8, 148n34
152n7 disaster, 9, 71, 92, 105, 132, 137
discontinuities, 22
Dames, Nicholas, 143n25 Dore, Florence, 141n2, 143n29,
Dantean, 87 146n21, 149n8
Darwin, Charles, 27 downsize, 5, 61– 62, 84, 94, 96– 97,
Dead Kennedys (band), 60, 62 110
death: art’s transcendence of, Dracula (Stoker), 73
33– 34, 50–52; Egan’s characters duration, 17, 19, 101
and their preoccupations with,
32– 33, 51, 61, 72, 119; myths of, eBay, 45
136; realist character’s, 27; ecological, 34
self-inflicted, 101, 125 (see also Egan, Jennifer, references to the
suicide); social demise as, 77, persona of: adolescence, 118,
86, 125 127, 134, 152n9, 153n12; careers,
decay: preservation versus, 58, 70 98– 99; personal relationships,
(see also preservation); time as, 64– 66, 151–52n2; reflections on
17, 22– 23, 44, 133 writing, 51, 74, 77, 101, 128,
DeLillo, Don, 134– 35, 145n12, 151n22
154n18 Egan, Jennifer, works of: “Black
dematerialization: art as, 2, 4, Box,” 65– 66, 96– 97; Emerald
62– 64, 114; digitized books as, City, 24, 53, 94, 108; “Found
164 = Index
Egan, Jennifer, works of (cont.) Facebook, 49–50, 153n15

Objects,” 13; “Great Rock and failure, 71, 102; acceptance of, 70;
Roll Pauses by Alison Blake,” avoidance of, 78; character’s
97; The Invisible Circus, 51–52; developmental, 25, 78–81, 98;
The Keep, 23, 24, 53, 61, 84, 105; collective, 148n1;
Look at Me, 26, 31, 49, 54–55, entertainment industry, 19, 57,
61, 65, 74, 97– 98, 108, 130, 78–81, 116, 132; feminine versus
151–52n2; Manhattan Beach, masculine, 122; urban, 24
10, 115, 144–45n2; “Sacred Father Knows Best (television
Heart,” 53; “The Thin Red show), 30
Line,” 53; “Why China?,” 24 Faulkner, William, 30
elegiac, 8. See also nostalgia Felski, Rita, 114
Eliot, George, 7, 18, 28, 114 Ferrante, Elena, 51
Elle (magazine), 115 fiction: autobiographic, 51;
embodiment: fiction’s impact on, baroque, 131; digitized, 64, 97,
114, 152n4; harming of, 52–53, 114; experimental, 11, 15;
55–56, 86, 94, 100–101, 136 (see historical, 115; modernist, 11,
also scars); information as, 65; 30; narratives about, 64;
music experienced through, 5, nineteenth-century, 85, 114–15;
60– 62, 75– 76, 112, 133, 136– 37, nongenre, 29; nonrealist, 131;
153n11; novel as analogue for, postmodernist, 11, 15, 131;
17; sexual and erotic, 60– 62, premodernist, 114; prose, 7, 29,
75– 76, 80, 112–13, 121– 23; 64, 66, 97, 115; realist, 131 (see
shame of, 82–84, 86; storage also literary modes: realist;
inside of, 56; time’s imprint novel: nineteenth-century);
on, 52–54, 56–57, 77, 133; visual science fiction, 129; sensation,
art’s impact on, 114 114
Empire State Building, 8, 14 film: aesthetics of, 29, 108;
emptiness, 71, 93– 96, 98, 100, 102, digitized, 4, 62, 64; dramatic,
105, 107 30; physical medium of, 1, 2,
environmental, 34– 35 61, 62
Eurydice (mythic figure), 110–13, Flaubert, Gustave, 101– 2
135–136 Flipper (band), 119
Evens, Aden, 60, 150n14 “Footprint, The,” 91, 133
Index = 165
Four Tops (band), 100 Hartley, L. P., 3

“Foxey Lady” (song), 100 HBO (Home Box Office), 30– 31
François, Ann-Lise, 151n25 headphones, 109
Freud, Sigmund, 16 Hendrix, Jimi, 100
future: characterological, 34; Hepburn, Allan, 148n2
distant, 109; fiction’s Herring, Scott, 145n9
prediction of, 32; impossible historian, 23, 51, 97, 108–109, 151n2
visions of, 36; near, 8, 23, 28, history: art, 110, 151n2; art’s
66, 91, 97, 126; slightly, 129 memorializing of, 39, 40, 43,
57, 87, 92; bodily scars as, 55;
gender, 62, 75, 90, 122– 23 computer, 64; destruction of,
Genette, Gerard, 19, 32, 142n10, 52; earthly, 91; fiction’s, 7–8, 11,
144n31, 149n10, 151n23. See also 64, 73, 91; material, 65– 66;
“omnitemporality” music, 43, 59, 109, 119; personal
Germs (band), 118 and particular, 40, 87–88,
Giacometti, Alberto, 102 130– 31, 133– 34
Gleick, James, 62, 147n26 Hitchcock, Alfred, 108
Go-Between, The (Hartley), 3 hoarding: bodily, 56; deviance of,
Go-Betweens (band), 3 40, 56, 68, 145n9; healthy
gold albums, 41–43, 48, 50, 56, forms of, 73; object, 40, 43, 44,
76, 80 51, 58, 113; stealing as, 68. See
goon: American meaning of, also collecting; preservation
18–19; temporal significance Hoboken, New Jersey, 40
of, 18, 21, 31– 33, 36 Homeric, 19
“Goon Squad” (song), 18 Hudson River, 40
Gothic, 61 Human Be-in, 133
Great Jones Street (DeLillo),
145–46n12 impermanence, 22
Guermantes Way, The (Proust), 16, In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 16
142n9 Invisible Man (Ellison), 29
Gunsmoke (television show), 30 iPod, 96, 146n21
Ishiguro, Kazuo, 154n24
handset, 126–28, 136. See also texting Italy, 14, 52
Hardy, Thomas, 27, 84 It’s a Wonderful Life (film), 36
166 = Index
James, Henry, 51, 109 loss: collecting objects as marker

Jane Eyre (Brontë), 2 of, 48; digitization as, 4, 34,
jazz (music), 80 96, 99; ecological, 34; Egan’s
JFK, 91 novel characters and their
Jobs, Steve, 64 perception of, 9, 23, 71, 76, 84,
journalist, 55, 89; Egan as, 44, 98 105; time and aging as, 23, 34,
JPEG, 62, 68 35, 94, 123, 125
“juddering,” 40, 41, 144–45n2 “lossiness,” 62– 63, 93
lossless audio, 62, 63, 68, 139n1
Kael, Pauline, 2 “lossy,” 62, 68, 147n26
Kindle, 4, 64. See also Amazon “Love Supreme, A” (song), 62
(corporation) LP (long playing) records, 1, 5, 25,
Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 51 31, 59, 147n26; Conduit
Konstantinou, Lee, 75, 134, albums, 39, 41; novel form’s
148n34, 153n15 affinity to, 143n29
Lupton, Christina, 12, 140n1,
Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares 142n10, 150n16
(album), 78
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 119 Mabuhay Gardens, 6, 18, 118–19,
linearity, 12, 32, 115. See also time 123, 137
literature: aesthetics of, 7, 138; Mac (computer), 65
broad category of, 48, 73, 102; Madonna (singer), 3
private writing, 73. See also Manhattan, 14, 58, 83, 126, 137
fiction Mao II (DeLillo), 134
literary modes: diaristic, 73; Martin, Theodor, 149n12
Egan’s mixture of, 78; epic, 19; Mayor of Casterbridge, The
epistolary, 73; lyric, 11 (see also (Hardy), 27, 93
time, single moments of); McGurl, Mark, 140n6, 143n27
mythic, 140n11 (see also myth); McLaren, Malcolm, 119
realist, 11, 14–15, 19, 25, 27, 91, McLuhan, Marshall, 29
115–16, 131; ironic versus McSweeney’s (magazine), 74
sincere, 74– 75, 98– 99 medieval, 86–87, 133
live music, 5 melancholy: collecting objects out
Lolita (Nabokov), 29 of, 43, 48; fiction’s reflection
Index = 167
and transcendence of, 29, 32, Mohawk: hairstyle, 118–120;

143n25; time as, 4, 23, 38 nation, 120
memento, 45, 51, 52, 56, 73– 74; Monterey Pop, 133
bodily scar as, 56 Moonstone, The (Collins), 73
memento mori, 23. See also decay Moviegoer, The (Percy), 2
memorialization: art and fiction MP3, 56, 59– 60, 62, 64, 68, 147n26
as, 49, 50–51; music as, 12, 42, Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 11
43; 9/11, 133, 135; object MTV, 90
collection as, 39, 40, 43, multiplot novel, 28– 29. See also
47–48, 58 Victorian
memory, 4; bodily scarring as, 54; “multi-protagonist fictions,” 13,
false, 85; music as, 78– 79; 131, 143n23
objects as 39, 46, 58; Proust on, museum, 46, 58, 92, 114, 116. See
16, 32; reader’s experience of, also archive; preservation
22; shame, 79–82, 86–87, 93; myth: classical, 9–10, 135; novel
stealing as, 49; written form form as, 137– 38. See also
as, 22, 31, 49, 63, 65, 74 Eurydice; Orpheus
metafiction, 22
metonym, 2, 42, 68 National Book Critics Circle
#MeToo (movement), 122 Award, 139n3
Middlemarch (Eliot), 7, 18, 24, 28, Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro),
93 154n24
Miller, Andrew, 144nn33– 34 New York City, 8, 24, 67, 82, 83,
Mills, C. Wright, 150n15 87, 98, 115
minimal: narrative form as, New Yorker (magazine), 2, 13, 66, 96
19– 20, 22, 25, 73, 142n16; New York Times Magazine, 53
texting language as, 128 (see 9/11: disastrous analogs of, 61,
also handset; texting) 91– 93, 100; memorial of,
Minor Threat (band), 1 133– 35; post-, 88–89; pre-, 87
Mitchell, David, 131 nineteenth century: literary styles
mixtape, 1 of the, 16, 85; novels of the
Moby-Dick (Melville), 29 27– 31, 78, 82, 114–15. See also
modernism: literary, 11, 30, novel, nineteenth-century;
143n27; painterly, 58 Victorian
168 = Index
nonlinearity, 14, 22, 88, 125 Orpheus (mythic figure), 6, 9,

North by Northwest (film), 62 110–13, 135– 37
nostalgia, 4, 121 Ovid, 6, 135
novel: confessional, 74; cultural
displacement of the, 8, 64, 130, pause, 18, 66, 100–103, 104, 105,
135; developmental, 28 (see also 106, 107
bildungsroman); form of, 99, Peace Corps, 24
131, 138, 153n15 (see also fiction; Pearl Harbor, 91
literature); modernist, 78; Penguin (publishing house), 2
nineteenth-century, 27, 28, 31, Percy, Walker, 2
78, 82, 114; postmodernist, 78; photography, 61, 89
realist, 12, 27, 133 (see also fiction, Picasso, Pablo, 58
realist; literary modes, realist); platinum records, 42. See also gold
twenty-first century, 87; albums; silver albums
Victorian, 7, 28, 82, 114, 152n4 Plato, 63
NYU, 14, 67 Pompeii: disastrous analogs for,
61, 89, 92– 93, 100–101; ruinous
objects: collectively created, 133, site of, 52, 92, 100, 102; visual
135; commodified versus art of, 70, 87; 102, 111
personal, 46, 50–51, 96; pop: career in industry of, 76– 78,
humans as, 83, 99, 109, 120, 90– 91, 130; fiction industry as
129; memorializing, 39–40, 44, analog for that of, 64, 116;
47–49, 50–52, 57, 59; music formal features of, 100, 102,
recordings as, 10, 42–44, 59; 105, 119, 133; history of, 43, 59,
present versus absent, 102; 61; music genre of, 3, 14,
stolen, 46–47, 68-69, 71– 73, 94, 112–13, 150n21
125– 26; temporal postmodernism: fictional, 11, 15;
transcendence of, 34, 57; irony of, 75; meaninglessness
temporary allure of, 4, 63, 97; of, 97
visual and literary artworks as, poststructuralist, 127
7, 48, 70, 97, 113 PowerPoint, 35, 66– 68, 97, 100,
Odyssey (Homer), 19 105, 151n22; visual
“omnitemporality,” 16, 21, 32, 91, representations of, 37, 69,
142n10. See also time 104– 7
Index = 169
pre-Columbian, 39, 43 purity, 58, 75, 116–18, 124, 126

predigital, 2, 8 Pynchon, Thomas, 152n7
presence: aesthetic, 1–2, 60, 111–13;
architectural, 91; bodily, 83, 102 radio, 3
preservation: aesthetics and Ralph Lauren (corporation), 81
artwork as, 9, 50, 57, 65, 92, 113; realism, 115. See also fiction;
artifacts and tokens as, 39, 113; literary modes
collecting and storing as, 40, records, 1, 14, 41–44, 50, 56, 59,
56, 58–59, 68– 70; digitization 62, 76
as, 65; fiction’s powers of, 31, reels, 1. See also film
64, 74, 92; musical records as, relic, 10, 43, 50, 51, 52
42, 59; perverse forms of, 40, repetition, 22, 45, 49
44, 56 residual, 8, 45, 66
progression: characterological, 21, retrospect, 26
49, 78; temporal, 20; narrative, RIAA (Recording Industry
80 Association of America), 42
Proust, Marcel: Egan as inspired Ricoeur, Paul, 16, 17
by, 14–15, 30, 73, 101; novel Riot Grrrl (movement), 124,
characters who align with, 153n11
94– 95, 102, 112, 141n5; rock: albums of, 133; amateur
epigraphs by, 16, 32– 33; musicians of, 132; fans of, 117;
Genette on, 19, 144n31, 149n10, fiction as an analogue for, 12;
151n23 music genre of, 2, 5, 8, 100–101,
Proustian, 33, 36, 94 116–18, 128; other art genres
Pulitzer Prize, 30, 89, 139n3 versus, 7, 12, 33; “rock novel,”
Pulp Fiction (film), 15 141n2, 146n21, 149n8; rock
punk: fans of, 14, 117, 120– 21, 128, stars, 18, 22, 39, 50, 135; sexism
152n9; fashion, 121 (see also of, 122
Mohawk); feminist potential Roman, 52, 87, 110, 133
of, 122, 153n11 (see also Romantic, 33, 70, 144n32
RiotGrrrl); male-dominated, Rosen, Jeremy, 143n23
122, 124; music genre, 1, 5, 6, Rosenthal, Jesse, 152n4
12, 116–18, 119, 123– 24, 134; Roth, Philip, 143n27
musicians, 14; post-, 90 Rubin, Gayle, 125
170 = Index
ruins, 52, 100. See also decay; loss; social media, 49, 66, 99, 129, 130,
Pompeii; preservation 153n15. See also Facebook;
Twitter
San Francisco, 6, 14, 18, 60 solar panels, 35, 36, 37, 103, 104.
San Francisco Chronicle See also environmental;
(newspaper), 115 ecological
scars, 52–56, 87 Sopranos, The (television show),
Schine, Cathleen, 16 15, 30
Scott, Walter, 17 Spin (magazine), 25
sculpture, 7, 70, 91– 92, 110–113, Spiotta, Dana, 145–46n12
116, 129, 135– 36. See also Spotify, 3, 5, 59, 62, 63, 140n6,
visual art 147n26
Semisonic (band), 103 Stone Arabia (Spiotta), 145–46n12
Serpell, C. Namwali, 152n7 storing, 39, 40, 51, 56, 57, 58, 63,
Serra, Richard, 102 64, 66; novel as aesthetic form
sequence, 21 of, 59
sexism, 122, 124– 25. See also success: lifetime of, 16, 25– 26, 81;
#MeToo; punk memorialization as, 43, 48, 64;
Sex Pistols (band), 119, 122 music industry, 14, 25, 41,
shame, 71; aging as a source of, 17; 80–81, 117, 133; narrative
art’s power as an analog for, representations of, 20, 93
92– 93; feminine versus suicide, 50, 51, 53, 55, 125,
masculine, 122; fiction as a 145–46n12
narration of, 77; private
moments as a source of, talisman, 2, 137
50, 71, 79–84, 86, 99; tape, 60, 109. See also mixtape
stealing as a source of, 48, 68, Tarantino, Quentin, 14
71– 73 Technicolor, 108– 9. See also film,
Shannon, Claude, 62 aesthetics of
silver albums, 41. See also gold Telegraph Avenue (Chabon),
albums 143n29, 146n21
Sleepers (band), 60, 119 television, 30, 49, 50, 62
Slits (band), 153n11 texting, 126– 28
smartphone, 63, 65 Thackeray, William, 114, 152n4
Index = 171
time: aesthetic representation of, trajectories, 26

101, 144n32; echoes across, 52, trauma, 23, 71, 78; sexual, 126
87–88, 92–93; fiction’s ability to Tribeca, New York, 32, 58
reverse or undo, 16, 24–27, 29, Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 15
32, 38, 144n31; fiction’s turning point, 20, 25
compression and dilation of, 19, Twin Towers, 91– 92, 100
31; fiction’s leaps and jumps of, Twitter, 65, 96– 97
14, 31–32, 36, 80, 88, 115, 125;
fiction’s stopping and resisting Ulysses (Joyce), 11
of, 29, 31–34, 38, 48, 91; forward Ulysses (mythic figure), 19
movement of, 11, 15, 20, 31, 79; uncanny, 81, 89, 92, 103
genres defined by their Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Beecher
relationships to, 20, 87; Stowe), 29
irreversibility of, 23, 25, 33, 36, University of Pennsylvania, 64,
38, 57, 70; memory’s backward 153n12
loops of, 11, 79–80, 121–22, 134;
modern (industrial), 12; Vanity Fair (Thackeray),
narrative gaps in, 15, 88, 115, 82
151n23; overlaps of, 87–88; VCR (videocassette recorder), 2
passing of, 12, 23–27, 36, 94, 98, Victorian, 7, 28, 82, 114, 152n4
101, 107, 121, 151n23; readerly Village Voice, 3
experience of, 12, 26; scales of, visual art, 7, 102, 128– 29; Italian,
32, 35; sensation of static, 110–13, 133, 135– 36; literature
20–21, 41, 79, 125; single and music versus, 48, 116.
moments of, 11, 57, 88–89; spans See also sculpture
of, 26, 57, 77, 85, 87, 90, 115 vinyl: cultural shift away from, 31,
time’s arrow, 16, 29, 33 56, 59– 60, 62, 64, 146n21,
time travel, 16, 33, 36, 148n33. See 147n26; displaying, 42; fond
also wormhole memories of, 1, 25, 63; novel
token, 2, 39, 43 form as an analogue for,
Tokyo, 14 143n29; scarring as an analog
tool, 46–47. See also objects for, 52. See also LP (long
tragedy, 22, 33, 71, 87, 94, 102, 105; playing) records; records
post-9/11, 134 Vox (magazine), 115
172 = Index
Walkman (media player), 109 “Young Americans” (song),

Wallace, David Foster, 74– 75 100
Warhol, Andy, 119 youth: age versus, 28– 29, 35,
Waverley (Scott), 18 56–57, 87; fiction’s power to
Williams, Ricky, 119 restore, 24, 112–13; illusions
Wood, James, 67 of, 23– 24; memory’s
Woodstock, 133 recapturing of, 16; music’s
World Trade Center, 88, 102 appeal to, 12, 118
World War II, 115
wormhole, 31, 57 Zuckerberg, Mark, 49

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A Vi s i t f ro m t h e

Goon Squad Reread

EDITED BY NICHOLAS DAMES AND JENNY DAVIDSON

Vineland Reread, Thomas Coviello

I VAN KREIL KAM P

COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

Intro/bonus track: When Art Dematerialized 1

Side A, track 1: Time’s a Goon: From A to B 11

Side A, track 2: Storage, Preservation,

Side B, track 3: Failure, Shame,

Side B, track 4: Aesthetics, Purity,

It’s exciting to be part of the new Rereadings series, and I am

also to my graduate student Jordan Bunzel for some help pre-

parents’ shelves or bought at the many used bookstores—all of

luxury ads for jewelry and perfume— copies of which piled up

really matter to my experience that, in movie theaters now—

an homage to a form that’s sadly gone—the LP, even the CD.

The novel is suffused by a fear that aesthetic experience, as

novel’s main characters, Scotty Hausmann. We’re first intro-

pastoral harmony, Scotty’s music is always emphatically present,

can maintain its long-time cultural role as the provider of an

When [Alex] stood close to the middle window and looked

building their own overlooked had been bought by a devel-

This situation is, in one sense, an obvious disaster and an impov-

I take this image as self-reflective on Egan’s part— as a com-

the basis of different approaches to the aesthetic problem of the

Egan’s novel has received a lot of attention and posed some

a humorous sketch about a neurotic record producer. . . . But

Neither Sasha nor Bennie focalize more than their allotted

primary through lines for the whole. Amid continual temporal

I thought about it . . . as a novel about time, and I did think

prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of compo-

of his historical novel Waverley) or the forty-year span from

“The album’s called A to B, right?” Bosco said. “And that’s

The title phrase recurs when Bennie says to Scotty (another

album Armed Forces: “Goon squad / They’ve come to look you

seems to be thinking on the page about the questions she raised

I read this as a subtle echo of the earlier “another, then

melancholy in this novel, such that a version of that sentence

corollary of that insight is that this power is never available for

like Goon Squad, that considers and depicts extended spans of

“I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his

In a contemporary world in which the outcomes of individ-

descent. . . . It took several more years before I was truly a cata-

strong and weak or happenstance links. A classic nineteenth-

familiar old novelistic forms—the bildungsroman, the multip-

I think that, at least in the United States, there was an age of

Citing a comment by Marshall McLuhan about the way the

speak to and to represent the nation as a whole, Arac observes

optioned for production as a TV series by HBO, but the project

a dagger that becomes a treasured artifact. A Samburu African

Sasha, “imagined walking into her apartment and finding him-

A similar point about the “sweetness” of a recognition of the

• I’ve never walked this far.

We might recall Jocelyn’s questions for Lou: “How did you

• That the solar panels were a time machine.

Subsequently, she enters their house: “Inside there’s a light.

a time-defying device, a means by which aesthetically to stop,

significant role in a key passage later in the novel [72]); that

Bosco’s albums are also interesting in their ambiguous rela-