Bennie Salazar, a recurring character in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), fi rst fell in love with music for its raw energy. The band of his youth, The Flaming Dildos, roamed the San Francisco punk scene listening to others and hoping to be discovered.
Decades later he is a jaded music executive trying to salvage the once-bright talents of a folksy sister duo. Having sold his start-up label to
‘multinational crude-oil extractors’, he listens to the duo play in a makeshift, basement studio and realises that the sisters’ realness runs counter to so much else in his industry and life: ‘Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean.
The problem 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!’ (Egan 2011: 23). Bennie’s frustration that technology is making everything too glossy, too sanitised extends from an ongoing anxiety about a loss of authenticity. Recording processes get more precise, and the studio’s idiosyncrasies get lost. Life is messy; music should be too.
Anxieties about the seen and unforeseen losses that attend prog-ress are a great source of angst in modern and contemporary litera-ture. Bennie, in a story set in 2006, thinks this creeping loss is new or, at least, more terrible than what came before. The history of the short story cycle exposes that a desire for a lost authenticity occurs in its earliest moments and remains persistent. Kirkland, in 1837, laments that settlement ruins the natural beauty of Michigan and worries that increasing settlements will diminish the community of small-town Montacute. Jewett decries how increasing urbanisation makes small shipping towns such as Dunnet Landing obsolete. The mothers of Tan’s Joy Luck Club worry that their daughters lack strong family ties because of transnational migrations. The astronauts in Bradbury’s
futuristic Martian tales long for small-town Illinois across the mas-sive distance of space. Bradbury’s cycle renders the holocaust actual and not only aesthetic when humans destroy Earth with the technol-ogy meant to keep them safe. Bennie’s nostalgia for a lost process of production fi nds its most powerful analogue in Anderson’s treatment of the incursion of the railroad onto the farms and town of Wines-burg. The characters’ anxieties about loss, the passage of time, and authenticity register in their alienation, inability to communicate, and desperation. Bennie Salazar would be at home in Winesburg.
As in Winesburg, nostalgia is powerful but ultimately false and even dangerous. Longing for the past is a career-killer in music, an industry committed to youth. As Bennie puts it, ‘Nostalgia was the end – everyone knew that’ (37). And yet, Bennie cannot escape nos-talgia. He longs for a bygone era of undigitised ‘Film, photography, music’ (23). What Bennie does not realise is that the advent of each industry he names, seemingly aesthetically pure, ushered in anxieties about the loss of authentic expression. Film endangered booksell-ers and the stage. Photography threatened to make painting obso-lete. The mass production of music rendered local arts vulnerable.
Bennie’s nostalgia for lost art parallels Anderson’s treatment of the characters’ responses to the railroad and industrialisation. Residents of Winesburg worry that life as they know it will be over and that there will not be anything real left, while the stories intimate that the perfect community they remember never existed. Throughout the history of the cycle, authors engage shifts in time to expose the per-sistent yet artifi cial sentimentality for the past.
That Bennie is a has-been punk kid is apt: he works in a genre that loses authenticity the moment it gains an audience. Bennie con-structs a vision of the past conditioned by his disappointments in the present. A desire to restore what he has lost personally and pro-fessionally drives his present and future. Subsequent stories move into the past and future and undermine his feelings in this passage by exposing his memories as fl awed and incomplete. Bennie’s state-ment expresses an elestate-mental impulse of Egan’s volume: the passage of time renders our lives meaningful and meaningless. Or, as one of Bennie’s ageing rock stars puts it: ‘Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?’ (127).
Ultimately, the faulty logic embedded in Bennie Salazar’s lament for a lost aesthetics is made possible by form: as the stories layer onto each other, they reveal nostalgia as false but do not simply dismiss it. When asked about her commitment to unity, Egan said,
‘I was not concerned at all about tying up loose ends – Goon Squad
is full of them! . . . the structural idea behind Goon Squad as a whole [is that . . .] – the reader knows more about the characters than they do about themselves, or each other, which (hopefully) adds a kind of resonance and poignancy – and sometimes irony – to their stories’
(Wambold 2010). The stories’ resistance to forming a unifi ed whole mirrors the characters’ inability to form legible identities. They are made of parts and pieces that gain meaning together but never unite to create coherent, stable identities. They are made up of fragments of memories that they have only partial access to, even as they think they know the entire memory; in much the same way, the stories offer glimpses into these characters’ memories, lives, and desires only to later reveal those glimpses were fragmented and partial. The cycle allows the stories to actualise the ongoing, contentious mak-ing of meanmak-ing and identity from memory. Egan has described the book and its stories as atomised – in the vein that music production and consumption have atomised. The stories are discrete yet inter-connected. That atomisation is sad, as it signals the limitations on producing a whole (album, vision, book, or product). But, it is also liberating. In a book about time, music, and identity, nothing could be more important than the pauses that happen in the in-between.
Atomic implies that isolating the most basic part generates power, and it implies a logic in which a proposition, sentence, or formula cannot be analysed into a coherent structure. In this fi nal chapter, I show how the short story cycle is an atomic genre as it gains explo-sive energy from individual stories.
The Problem with Labels
When Goon Squad was published in 2010, most of the reviewers laboured to defi ne and name the ostensibly genre-bending volume.
Most commonly called a novel, reviewers also named it a tale, mosaic, hybrid, novel-in-stories, linked story collection, not-quite-linked story collection, or simply book. It inspired a wild debate about what to call it in part because Egan had already developed a reputation as a writer who resists classifi cation having published gothic, thriller, and realistic fi ction. Egan admits, ‘I have a hatred of familiarity . . . If I feel like I am doing something I’ve done before, it feels old and done’ (Ciabattari 2010). She makes working in a new way the goal of each project. There is a generative principle in her very mode of conceiving and developing projects. Goon Squad repre-sented for critics the apotheosis of her formal innovation.
Interviewers consistently ask Egan what to call the volume. She gives always insightful, occasionally confl icting answers. In one instance, she says,
what I was trying to do – tell compelling stories about a multitude of characters whose lives intersect over many years – is as old as the novel form itself. I did realize that I was deviating from the standard model of ‘connected stories,’ though, because those books have a uniformity of voice and tone, and I wanted exactly the opposite – total diversity and variety of voice and tone and technique, yet fused together by the stories themselves into something with a big range.
(Wambold 2010)
In this and other comments, Egan dismissed the idea that Goon Squad is a novel-in-stories or linked collection. This dismissal is, however, built on a false impression of the monotony of story cycles, which often include a great deal of range in voice, technique, and tone. Her comments illustrate the diffi culty in discerning modes of fi ction.
The link between the book’s genre and decentralisation is a per-sistent theme in interviews and reviews during the immediate critical reception of Goon Squad. Stephan Lee (2011), for instance, asked,
‘It seems as though the novel of loosely connected stories is on the rise. What is appealing to you about that structure? And do you think you will ever return to it?’ His question implies that the vol-ume consists of loosely connected stories. Egan’s response is pro-vocative: ‘The structure itself has no innate appeal for me, honestly.
I only used it because it made sense for this particular story about a group of decentralized people over many years. If the story I’d been writing had been more centralized, I would have gravitated toward a structure that manifested that’ (Lee 2011). In this moment, she does not dismiss Lee’s label but instead talks about centralisation.
This comment aligns with a general tendency to turn to the form of the short story cycle when wanting to tell a big but decentralised set of stories.
Genre holds a fascination for readers and writers that is equal parts frustrating and exhilarating. Egan acknowledges, ‘Actually, I don’t really care too much about genre. I think it’s a selling tool. Basically, it creates a kind of shorthand that makes some people’s lives easier’
(Michod 2010). And yet, Egan understands too that genre shapes readers’ and the book industry’s reactions: ‘I felt more doubtful than usual with Goon Squad, because I knew that the book’s genre wasn’t
easily named – Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? – and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it’ (Lee 2011). Egan echoes a long-held anxiety that the bigness of novels equates to large ambitions. Her comments result from a common presumption that short stories, short story collections, and short story cycles are limited in ambition and artistry. Egan worries that the volume’s resistance to neat categorisation would work against it for literary recogni-tion and readership. That anxiety registers in the lengths interview-ers and reviewinterview-ers go to label it in nearly every publication following the cycle’s release. In the case of Goon Squad, Egan’s and others’
initial worries could not have been more wrong. A Visit from the Goon Squad, among many others accolades, won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, landed on The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times bestseller lists, and was optioned by HBO.1
In searching for a descriptor, Egan often turns to metaphors. In 2009 before the publication and completion of Goon Squad, Egan said, ‘What I would like to do is write a book of stories that leave some things open-ended but are connected in a sort of web’ (Reilly 2009: 459). After the volume’s release, she said that the characters are ‘ “little islands far apart – I didn’t see the land mass that con-nected them till later” ’ (Tillotson 2011). On another occasion, she modifi ed one interviewer’s label: ‘The metaphor in my mind wasn’t
“linked,” but “entangled” ’ (Ciabattari 2010). Metaphors of webs, land masses, and entanglement imply a deep structural model – even if it eludes typical genre labels. Because of the book’s simultaneous deep, connecting structures that do not result in unity, short story cycle is the best, if imperfect, term for a volume that is novelistic and not. Calling it a short story cycle, Josh Lukin (2010) likens Egan to a
‘punk Proust, hippie Dos Passos, a rock-and-roll Faulkner’, placing the volume in a lineage of writers concerned with creating sprawling, diverse works based in a central cosmos but told in short forms both discrete and interconnected.
In addition to debates about genre, Goon Squad sparked conver-sations about the role of innovation in contemporary fi ction. In a speech to the Northeastern Modern Language Association in March 2012, entitled ‘Experimentation in Fiction: Notes from a Reluctant Practitioner’, Egan states that she does not like the idea of experimen-tation because it seems to imply novelty and contemporariness. She argues that earlier centuries saw great experimental works like Don Quixote (1605–15) and Tristram Shandy (1759), which are wild,
fl exible grab bags. These and other early novels are postmodern in their rejection of verisimilitude, engagement with self-consciousness, interest in surfaces, and concern with their own creation. She locates the nineteenth century as the premiere period for such fl exibility and swagger. Early novels address the reader directly and include voices from unlikely candidates, such as animals, that would today get them hailed as postmodern and new. Rather than focus on who pio-neered these forms, Egan insists that there has been a longstanding mandate for writers: to tell stories in fl exible ways. She argues that there is a false divide between convention and experimentation. The best works have synthesis.2
Placing herself in a lineage of sprawling, multivoiced novels, Egan’s comments also inform the problems of naming and defi ning the short story cycle. The tension between independence and interde-pendences is especially crucial to short story cycles, because the form reinforces the insuperable divides we construct with each other and within ourselves – a theme central to Egan’s volume and the genre as a whole. Egan has been reluctant to call Goon Squad a linked story collection or novel-in-stories because she argues that such volumes, whatever one calls them, are too tonally similar. This assumption fails to see the incredible diversity in the genre, which resembles in scope and form the diversity and experimentation she notes in the history of the novel.
The Messiness of Intention and Infl uence
Egan cites three guiding principles in crafting Goon Squad:
One of them was that each piece had to stand strongly on its own: it had to be forceful individually. I wanted the whole to be more than the sum of its parts, but I didn’t want them to lean on each other:
I wanted them to enhance each other. The second was that each piece had to be completely different in terms of mood and world and voice.
It ranges from sad to outright farce, and I really wanted to encom-pass all that in one book. And the third rule was that each piece had to be about a different person. There could be overlapping people, but there’s only one chapter in which we look through a particular person’s set of eyes. (Lukin 2010)
These three rules stress the autonomy – in terms of form, tone, and perspective – of each story. She resists the idea that the stories explain
each other but instead claims that they complicate and extend each other. This commitment to diversity challenges the possibilities of narration as well as puts the burden of comprehension on the reader.
Goon Squad resulted, in part, from Egan’s own experiences as a reader. When she conceived of the project, she had been reading Marcel Proust’s seven-volume In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) and watching The Sopranos (1999–2007). Reading Proust over many years with a group, all of them experiencing life changes, Egan, then in her late thirties, questioned whether she could write about time in the twenty-fi rst century. ‘Proust accomplished his heroic task in a sort of real time way’, Egan notes. She ‘especially loved Proust’s ability to capture the transformation and reversals that happen over time, the way that outcomes are so often unex-pected and in fact almost the opposite of what you would expect.
The biggest question for me was how to capture the sweep and scope of those transformation and reversals without taking thou-sands of pages to do it. It’s a technical question – how do you do that?’ (Alford 2012). The Sopranos modelled how to write time on a large scale in a contemporary mode that is both decentralised and compelling. The Sopranos engages time to show the charac-ters’ development and stasis, as well as the sometimes illuminat-ing, often capricious, and always unrelenting force of time. Both Proust’s opus and The Sopranos are about investigating the effects of the passage of time on people. In Goon Squad, Egan draws from their treatment of fragmentation, antiheroes, surface and subtext, and trenchant historical contextualisation – all done through long narrative arcs told in discrete segments.
A third major infl uence on Egan’s conception was that of the concept album – a big musical story told in parts, each of which is tonally different but shares suffi cient recurring themes and motifs.
Egan divides her volume into A and B sides. There is no table of contents, and the stories are both numbered and titled. In the fi nal story of the A side, Bennie’s former band mate, Scotty, who was once the most charismatic and talented of The Flaming Dildos but is now impoverished, visits Bennie at the height of his success. In this moment of reunion, Scotty ‘experienced several realizations, all in a sort of cascade: (1) Bennie and I weren’t friends anymore, and we never would be. (2) He was looking to get rid of me as quickly as possible with the least amount of hassle. (3) I already knew that would happen. I’d known it before I arrived. (4) It was the reason I’d come to see him’ (Egan 2011: 100–1). Egan confi rms that youth cannot be regained. There exists now a gap in their
ability to connect. The list gives the appearance of clarity but its contents and the metaphor of the cascade reveal an utter, over-whelming lack of mutual and self-understanding. Scotty attempts to make sense of the gaps through an analogy to music: ‘ “I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B.” ’ Scotty explains, ‘ “A is when we were both in the band, chasing the same girl. B is now” ’ (101). The implication is that the A side of life is brief and full of memories but that the B side, the longue durée of their personal histories, is more meaningful. This divide between A and B lends the story an apparently clear framework, but the stories themselves belie that easy unity. Often, Egan dra-matises the A side of experience in the B side of the book. Thus, Egan’s temporality obscures a clear progression. Scotty longs for a legible causality that is occasionally possible but always partial, because of the great expanse of time and the fallibility of memory.
The cycle’s epigraph announces Proust’s infl uence and the cycle’s overriding concern with how the past shapes the present:
‘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 fi nd those fi xed places, contemporaneous with
‘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 fi nd those fi xed places, contemporaneous with