The only negative review of "A Visit From The Goon Squad" ever written

At first, I thought my title was hyperbolic. (Yes, Egan won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, yes, the first three pages of the paperback—as well as the back cover—are filled with praise from seemingly every publication of significance, but what else would you expect? Obviously, no one advertises their negative press.) Then I googled “negative reviews of a visit from the goon squad,” which somehow only turned up more adulation, including a breathless story from The Paris Review by a writer suffering from “Egan Fever.” The only dissenting opinion I could find (besides the one posted on wackymommy.org) came from a reviewer for The A.V. Club, who disparaged rock ‘n’ roll books as a genre before tepidly concluding that Goon Squad is good but not great.

So let me begin by stating that I disagree with everything that’s been written about Egan, even by The A.V. Club—not only is Goon Squad not great, it’s not even good. The novel presents us with a string of flat characters based on clichéd types (a rich, middle aged record executive who feels like a sellout; a woman who steals because she has yet to deal with her traumatic past; a teenage girl who thinks it’s cool to party with an older man, then looks back on her life with regret).

The lack of character development is a direct result of the novel’s gimmicky structure; gimmicky because rather than providing multiple perspectives on the central characters—how do the sections about Dolly or Jules Jones enhance or complicate our understanding of Sasha and Bennie, for example?—or exploring a theme that can only be understood through the experiences of multiple characters—the primary themes of the novel are "compromise" and "regret," which each character experiences in the exact same way: everyone compromises on their dreams or ideals or artistic intentions; and everyone regrets that compromise—Goon Squad's structure serves only to build artificial momentum, pulling the reader along with the promise of a new character and style to discover in the next chapter.

Which brings us to the variations in style. There are subtle shifts between the narrative tone used for Sasha (ch. 1) and Bennie (ch. 2). Then there are the pronounced stylistic shifts into second person (ch. 10), absurdist imitation (ch. 9), idiomatic minimalism (ch. 3), first-person unreliable (ch. 6), and image rich travel writing (ch. 11). And then there are chapters that veer into the familiar territory of great fiction past: the over the top social satire of, say, Tom Wolfe (ch. 8); the Hemingway-esque African safari that reveals the unacknowledged cracks in a relationship (ch. 4); the quiet desperation of a husband and wife in the suburbs that evokes the likes of Cheever or Richard Yates (ch. 7). The critics have praised Egan’s virtuosity, but in reality the author has merely produced an amalgamation of the techniques and voices forged by her predecessors, which she then packages as innovative fiction. But there is nothing innovative about Goon Squad.

The only chapter that could rightfully be called inventive—the power point presentation—is a flop. This narrative device serves no purpose, diminishes the affect of the information it conveys, and stretches our willing suspension of disbelief (a twelve-year-old girl expresses the distress she feels about her family by creating a sophisticated presentation about the subtle tension between her mother, father, and brother? What did she do after that, create a flow chart to plan a conversation with her parents about buying tickets to a Justin Bieber concert?). By botching this chapter, Egan leaves us with a dissatisfying conclusion to the arc of Sasha, one of the two characters that hold everything together. Of course, the laughable final chapter—even the positive reviews have criticized Egan’s lazy, distopian take on the near future—compounds the dissatisfaction. Bennie, the other recurrent character, is equally forgotten in his final appearance in the novel. These clumsy final chapters only succeed in emphasizing that Goon Squad is not a grand epic about the destructive passage of time, but a series of low impact stories that rely on a loose (and ultimately meaningless) level of association to build a semblance of significance.

One final note: Egan’s decision to quote Proust in her epigraph not only signaled her intention to place Goon Squad in conversation with In Search of Lost Time, it also gave readers instruction on how she intended the novel to be approached. A bold move. Obviously, I think the association is ludicrous. For an excellent example of a Proustian reflection on the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century, read Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (the 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner). Also, just read Swann’s Way.

Shape Shifting: Facing Fantasy in Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You

In Miranda July’s collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, July’s protagonists live, almost always unsuccessfully, in imagined worlds that not only bleed into, but define, the social and personal interactions of their everyday lives. The result is a compelling, intimate, and experimental work that, much like a carnival’s room of funhouse mirrors, simultaneously entertains and mystifies the reader by both shape-shifting reality and reflecting a strange, distorted fantasy world in its place.

In each of her stories, July first exposes the fantasy worlds that the characters create. For instance, in “Mon Plaisir,” a female narrator introduces herself and her husband by depicting the imagined nature of their seemingly happy marriage.

"We are not people who buy instant cocoa powder, we do not make small talk, we do not buy Hallmark cards or believe in Hallmark rituals such as Valentine’s Day or weddings. In general, we try to stay away from things that are MEANINGLESS, and we favor things that are MEANINGFUL. Our top three favorite meaningful things are: Buddhism, eating right, and the internal landscape."

Likewise, in “The Shared Patio,” a woman imagines her and her neighbor’s shared patio as a place where she can find her identity and connect with others. In the “The Swim Team,” a woman, writing to her ex-boyfriend, details the swimming lessons she gives to elderly townspeople by dipping their faces in small, water-filled Tupperware laid out on the kitchen floor. In “Majesty,” a woman fantasizes about seducing Prince William at a pub near his school. And in “I Kiss a Door,” the narrator dreams of being the proverbially perfect Eleanor, of having Eleanor’s “perfect” father as her own.

However, July shows through these stories that, when fantasy and reality do finally meet, it often occurs in a sort of reverse-epiphanic moment, in which the main characters realize that being extraordinary is a myth like any other. Hopes and wild aspirations are replaced with a gravity, a humbleness, that makes July’s narratives more than simply zany and clever; her true depth as a writer emerges organically from her own outlandish plots in the same way as through her characters’: the more vivid the fictional world is, the harder it comes crashing down.

In “Mon Plaisir,” this shift takes place when the husband and wife are forced to create and maintain marriage as background actors in a movie. They realize, in this scene, that, like the movie couple they have created, their romance is just as fictional.

“Here we were again, eating together in silence.... Carl looked up, we stared across the table at each other. It was plain between us: we should not be together any longer. And cut.”

Additionally, in “Majesty,” when the narrator realizes she will never really meet Prince William, July gives us a haunting description of what, as in all the stories, has become of the narrator’s fantasy world.

“This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.”

In addition to being unable to escape their imagined worlds, the characters also fail to communicate with each other across the fictional or real borders they have created. The most haunting story of the collection, “The Person,” revolves around an unnamed person who believes there is “a place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life” -- a place the narrator finds out, eventually, is unattainable.

“This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her chance to be loved by everyone... the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person’s chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft.”

Yet, one of July’s more controversial stories, “The Sister,” while revealing how sexual desire is often defined more by time and place, age, and desperation, than by the fantasies that bring us to those points, simultaneously gives the reader a glimmer -- be it a distorted one -- of hope. In this story, the main character, an elderly man seeking an imaginary younger sexual partner, finds that the realness of his sexuality is more important than accessing it through this “imagined” girl. The poetry of the final scene, in which two older men embark on a sexual relationship, undermines the assumed cultural taboo of the moment and shows how people actually can find ways to connect across the arbitrary moral and ethical (see: fictional) borders we set for ourselves.

“We slept. It was the sleep of one hundred years. And when we woke, it was still night, and Victor reached across me and turned on the lamp. We were two old men. Everything seemed ordinary, even overly ordinary. There was a fly in the room and it buzzed in a way that told us nothing amazing had ever happened in this place.”

Through each of the stories in No one Belongs Here More than You, Miranda July exposes, most importantly, that one who lives in a world of imagination has a reason for escaping the real world. Her characters, in confronting their fears and fantasies -- whether willingly or unwillingly -- also find a purity, a painful joy, in the act of being human. Reality, July seems to be proclaiming again and again, is more evocative than any fantasy can hope to be. This, I believe, is what truly connects all the stories and characters: by facing reality, they face themselves.

How Reading Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help Is Like Swimming in a Public Pool

I read at swimming pools. And because I’m borderline schizophrenic, I sometimes have trouble differentiating between fictional narratives and reality. Or maybe that’s just one of the many neuroses that accompanies writerhood. Potentially both are true. I read Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help poolside, and I watched the characters walk off the page and into swimming trunks and Spongebob floaties.

There was the wife watching her husband oogle the girl in too-small bikini.

There was the mother clipping a leash to her 13-year-old child.

There was the grandmother coating her leathery skin in coconut oil.

Mostly women, mostly in relationships, and mostly enacting self-destructive behaviors, these pool dwellers made it easy for me to draw swooping parallels. They laughed. The loved. They made ridiculous mistakes. In short, they lived. Like these people, Lorrie Moore’s characters are heartbreakingly honest.

You could work with the woman catering an affair with a married man.

You could babysit the 12-year-old girl exploiting her parents’ divorce for 7up.

You could have lunch with the mother, wife, and cancer victim who commits suicide.

But Lorrie Moore does more than offer you a glimpse into their lives. It’s not only voyeurism that makes these stories so satisfying. It’s not just that you watch their struggles and learn from their mistakes. It’s that you become these characters.

Since the dawn of the creative writing workshop, much has been said about the second-person narrative. Mostly in the form of, don’t do it. It’s gimmicky. It’s confrontational. You can’t pull it off. On the flip side, if you do pull it off, it creates urgency and snap, like a green bean begging to be eaten. The reader and story fuse.

At the swimming pool, as in these stories, I was not just watching the people around me. I was keenly aware of myself as part of the scene. I played a role in the narrative, and was, in fact, that girl in too-small bikini (it's probably time I buy a new one). I swam with them, sometimes barely keeping my head above water. I played with their children. I sunburned.

Lorrie Moore doesn’t offer a ten-step guide to beating depression or reveal the secret to driving your dream car. Instead, she gives us experiences that closely mimic her own. The characters aren’t helping themselves. More often than not they end up fired or dead or in a mental institution. But ironically, I still felt helped.

Because Lorrie Moore is an artist.

She can describe a bleeding wound, and we at once feel pity for the victim and awe for the scribe. We’re marveled by her ability to spin scabs into golden stories, and because we’re human too, we feel as though we may be capable of some such level of greatness.

Despite the strong emotional connection, the collection does indeed have some flaws. The drug-induced haze at the end of “Go Like This” falls flat. The men in the collection are intrusively one-dimensional. The stabbing in “To Fill” doesn’t behoove the character.

Yet, in many ways, these flaws make the collection even more endearing. Reading authors like Chekhov and Steinbeck can wear you down. No matter how hard I try, I will never write their stories. Our experiences are too dissimilar. Lorrie Moore is an accessible writer and watching her experiment on the page excites my imagination, much like watching a swimmer try a new dive. You may end up with a few sore spots, or even a head wound, but that doesn’t keep you from jumping off the diving board.