"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.