A Visit from the Goon Squad

Centered on the music industry, music comprises much of the narrative content of A Visit from the Goon Squad, primarily from the perspective of the listener rather than that of the songwriter. In “The Gold Cure,” Bennie has difficulty expressing his thoughts, but when he plays songs in the car with Sasha, he imagines that he is “confessing to her his disillusionment” (36). In “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” Sasha’s son, Lincoln, attempts to communicate with his father by talking about the pauses in rock songs, a form of communication his father fails to understand. For both Bennie and Lincoln, music is not an act of creation, but rather a process of reappropriation. These characters are not writing music; instead they are using the music written by others as a means of devising their own forms of expression.

In A Visit from the Goon Squad, silences and empty spaces are not negative quantities, but rather positive entities, containing story and character. The most pointed example of silence as a theme occurs in “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” where Lincoln’s fascination with pauses in the middle of rock and roll songs has him creating graphs, splicing audio clips of the silences together, and comparing the various qualities and durations of each pause.

Silence also speaks to the influence of time, where it serves as a memento mori, a reminder of death. Sasha articulates the significance of the pauses when she says to Drew, “the pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved” (281). Such pauses take place within relationships. Although nothing is said explicitly about the circumstances around the pause in Sasha’s relationship with Drew, we know through the progression in the narratives that they dated in college, that Sasha was single and dating when she was 35, and that they eventually get married and have two children. This pattern of stopping and restarting, death and renewal, destruction and recreation repeats throughout the novel. 

In Goon Squad, Egan uses technology as a marker of time. In “You (Plural),” Jocelyn remembers Lou “outside by the pool where he lived with a red phone on a long cord” (88), an image that strikes us as antiquated in an age of mobile technology. Similarly, in “Out of Body,” Bix predicts that “computer-message sending is going to be huge—way beyond the telephone” (190). Scotty’s obsessive interest in the binary code of computer programming in “X’s and O’s” suggests the possibility that physical presence may eventually become obsolete, thus placing Scotty’s nihilism in a technological context. In “Pure Language,” we as readers are provoked to anxiety as we see the development of Starfish, communication devices designed especially for toddlers.

While technology creates a feeling of anxiety in the characters and in readers, Egan also ameliorates this anxiety by depicting the humanity of these future characters. The anxiety we sense in the final chapters, where people are more comfortable texting than talking, is alleviated in the scene where Lulu engages in a conversation with Alex, who evokes in her “the most extreme blush” (320). In “Safari,” when Mindy first experiences music through headphones, “the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums . . . is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a giant montage” (65). This experience of hearing music through headphones for the first time evokes in us, as readers, a romantic appreciation for technology that has now become commonplace. By the end of the novel, the combination of anxiety about the future and nostalgia for the past leaves us with a sense of equilibrium, an understanding that decay and renewal are held in balance by the passage of time.

The word star is used in numerous ways throughout Goon Squad. Most obviously, as it relates to fame and publicity, the word is used to refer to rock stars, movie stars, and even to the publication known as The Star. The word refers to the fruit Lulu tastes in “Selling the General,” and it refers to the mobile device in “Pure Language” known as the Starfish.

As literal celestial bodies, stars occur in the novel in those spaces where, literally, the sky is not obstructed, whether by expanding cityscapes, by light from the earth, or by cloud cover. As such, stars in the sky are associated with simplicity and innocence. In “Safari,” Rolph sees that the sky “is crammed with stars” (63) and is determined that he will remember the night for as long as he lives.

In “Selling the General,” the moment when Lulu tastes the star fruit for the first time becomes a moment of bonding with her mother, a symbolic return to innocence. We have a sense that this innocence is tainted, however, as we read that “the star fruit had left a shiny ring around her mouth” (153), suggesting rather a loss of innocence, which later becomes explicit as she encounters the General. It is notable that it is Lulu, in “Pure Language”, who facilitates Cara-Ann’s first experience with the Starfish, the hand device that Alex and Rebecca had agreed to keep away from her. 

The sun is a universal symbol of the passage of time, and in Goon Squad, the moments of sunrise and sunset are particularly significant. The sunrise in “Out of Body” marks the day of Rob’s drowning, but because Rob is so closely associated with Sasha’s past life, the same sunrise marks Sasha’s symbolic rebirth beyond her troubled past. In “The Gold Cure,” Bennie remembers finding himself outside a nunnery “at sunrise after a night of partying” (20) and hearing the nuns singing inside. The idea of a sunrise occurring while Bennie is still living out the previous day suggests decadence, and a sense that time moves on in spite of him. That he is in the yard of a nunnery, and that he kisses the Mother Superior, further adds to the potency of the sunrise as a symbol for innocence, and Bennie’s role as its violator.

The sunset, by contrast, gives the sense of an ending. In “Safari,” the sun is about to set as Rolph tells the story about Mindy’s behavior toward Albert, and “he senses the story landing heavily, in a way he doesn’t understand” (78). This exchange between father and son provokes a new attitude in Lou, an attitude to women that Rolph cannot accept; thus, the setting sun marks a symbolic loss of innocence for Rolph, as he will no longer believe everything his father says. In “Pure Language,” we see the sun set on New York City from the WATERWALK, a newly-built walkway at the edge of the water. The image of the setting sun of course creates a sense of closure for the novel.