"And now for something completely different"

After reading Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad I had to ask myself a few questions about the ending and, honestly, I would like to ask the author herself some of them. Time skips occur frequently throughout the book, in one chapter characters two characters date, in the proceeding the characters would have already have long since broken up. Egan usually does a fantastic job of explaining this, she writes in a very matter-of-fact tone, directly giving character's true emotions, fates, and intentions. However, in the end  the time-skip paired with a primary theme of the book confused me about the intentions of Egan's work as a whole. In the thirteenth and final chapter, the narrator heavily implies a sort of dystopian future, matter-of-factly revealing a future containing "two years of war and surveillance" (335). This massively long war and Orwellian surveillance may come as a hyperbole to further enhance the restrictions and troubles of living in modern America. However, if taken literally, this completely changes the genre of the book. Egan makes one of her major themes from the vert beginning the blandness and lifelessness of modern music. She expresses this through one of the primary characters, Bennie, who looks for "muddiness, the sense of actual musicians, playing actual instruments, in an actual room" (22). Now, I took this as a warning to stay away from the digitized, perfect, and staged music that has come spewing out of the music industry today. Egan further supports my views by constantly alluding to real, more muddy bands throughout her text, that one of the characters listen to, or talk about. This may seem a bit far-fetched, but this dystopian future could act as a final warning against the evils of music turned into an industry. This could serve as an implication of both the importance of music in our lives, and the influence corporations have on the world. If Egan actually intended this as a sort of message from the future, final warning then it changes A Visit from the Goon Squad into a dystopian novel set primarily in the actual downfall of society, unnoticed by the average citizen, from a character study of a group of friends over a massive time span that happens to end in a dystopia. So, if I wanted to ask Jennifer Egan a question on A Visit from the Goon Squad, I would ask her about the possible dystopian message, and genre she may or may not have intentionally put into her book.

Writing. Differently.

The first thing I and, as I suspect, many of my peers did when I began to read Jennifer Egan's award winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad was flip through the pages to see how many pages our new book had in it. On our way to page 340 my peers and I noticed a startling anomaly beginning at page 234, seemingly titled "Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake" and ending at page 309 (234). This chapter, or story, comes as a PowerPoint presentation from Sasha's daughter, Alison, about her brother Lincoln's obsession with pauses in rock music, her father's effect on his family, and the abnormalities in their day to day life. The anomaly certainly served as a blessing to me, and others if I may infer so much about my fellow classmates, due to, not only the lack of writing, but also exactly how Egan wrote it. While most people, including myself, enjoyed the former due to the lack of reading required, I personally enjoyed the typography used by Egan to evoke her character's emotions. The pathos that heavy typography can evoke can not compare to any other type of writing, no matter how proficient the author. I have a deep seeded love for this kind of intense typography after experiencing it in the entirety of another book (actually the best example of typography I have ever seen or heard of) Mark Z.Danielewski's House of Leaves. The book's writing evokes so much emotion and creates much more immersion than if Danielewski had merely wrote the novel like any other (an example of his text below). In the picture, he breaks the text into five different sections, gives the reader no indication of which to read first, and worst of all they all relate to entirely different subjects; The farthest left simply is a list of houses, the two squares are a list of supplies for some unknown project (the left one is the list on the previous page mirrored, as if it had bled through the page), the middle text comes as a argument between two friends over their current situation inside the titular house, the footnote is an anecdote about explorers trapped in a cave in Borneo, and the extreme right column is a list of unknown names upside down. This text style occurs for about twenty pages, adding columns, taking some away, until a final statement at the end of the section states "Picture that. In your dreams"(House of Leaves, 141). This section parallels the characters fright and confusion at their situation and genuinely leaves the reader feeling the exact same way. While Danielewski's book operates this way the entire time, Egan's only happens for one chapter, but I still enjoyed that chapter very, very much. The section about what Alison hears when falling asleep made itself my favorite in the chapter, the simple diction between her and her brother expressed through fragmented, monosyllabic (what an ironic word), sentences creates a sort of empathetic bond and parallel between the narrator and the reader. I personally have had some midnight discussions about nothing, just tossing one word out at a time, to waste time before falling asleep, it evokes a sense of nostalgia. This bright feeling, Egan then juxtaposes with the eerie "' Okay. I know'" (302). These statements have multiple interpretations, one coming as the last thing said before Alison fell asleep, the other coming as some kind of omission from Alison herself. The former just creates more nostalgic pathos, while the later, when paired with the logos given prior about her families problems, most notably her father's drinking, implies something much darker. The alteration of both delivery, as plain text, not speech bubbles, and font support the later, shifting the tone to care-free to tense, in my opinion, and made me very sympathetic toward both Lincoln and Alison. This use of typography by Egan certainly improved my relation to the book, and gave her some significant merit in my further adventures in book reading; I greatly admire her typography due to the pure emotion and immersion it brings while reading A Visit from the Goon Squad.

The Joker and The Thief

In the preliminary chapter of Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer winning fiction novel A Visit from the Goon Squad she introduces the protagonist of the Found Objects, the first chapter (or short story, pending on whether one views the work as a compilation of interwoven stories or a novel told from many perspectives): Sasha. Sasha, to me, defines a person I want to embody. Her job with Bennie proves to be interesting, enjoyable, and laid back. Also, her kleptomania has me intrigued. If I were to embody Sasha, I would turn my mental handicap into something useful, I'd make it seem like a talent. Sort of like those insomniac detectives in old Noir Films, only instead of inability to sleep I would turn my kleptomaniac self into a sort of Robin Hood type figure. Sasha appears throughout the book, popping in everywhere in character's lives as either a fringe memory of someone they met once or a major influence in the chapter's protagonist's life, and she has the main focus of the beginning chapter. The title, "Found Objects" works as a sort of double entendre; one interpretation relates to the objects themselves, getting 'found' by Sasha, the other interpretation comes from a place, the 'Lost and Found' a place where people take lost objects to help their rightful owners to find them(3). If one further examines the later take on the title one can see a very prominent aspect into Sasha's constant thievery. If the objects she steals are the "Found Objects" then they were considered lost before the pilfering. This implies that Sasha views herself above others, above their material wealth, and above their rights and opinions; she steals almost without remorse for those who she steals from, and recognizes that '" this isn't a great way to live'" but continues on with her lifestyle (8). These characteristics paint Sasha as cold, apathetic sociopath who only looks out for themselves. These personality traits come as a major surprise to me was that she would care so little for the people and things she stole from, but claims she steals more things to preserve people. However, Sasha's character deepens as more personality traits come into play. When Coz, her psychologist, is speaking with her, he suggests talking about her father, this provokes an extreme shut down in Sasha, foreshadowing the coming events. She even thinks about the possibility of conversation, but comes to the conclusion that "in [my father's] direction lay only sorrow" (9). This makes Sasha seem vulnerable, empathetic, and emotional through the pathos evoked via emotional connotations with sorrow. Finally, in the next chapter, focused on Sasha's boss, Bennie, she comes off as very assertive, sarcastic, and competent. She blatantly states her opinion of a band that Bennie signed and enjoys, stating "'They were awful. That was the problem."' whilst contradicting her confrontation later by "following [Bennie's] musical rant to its grim conclusion", stating his exact opinion before he got to it (37). All in all, I believe Sasha to be an amazingly complex character, she can stand up for herself, know when to open up, and most of all, is a cold-hearted master thief. I would love to meet her and pick her brain, just to see how far I could go with a rudimentary understanding of psychology. I would also trade for the thieving stuff too, I could be like some awesome Batman villain.