"A Visit from the Goon Squad."

When I teach kids how to write a good personal, reflective essay I tell them that they have to understand the experience they are writing about in context, so that they know how to balance the retelling of it.  I mean that in order to create pace, to engage their reader, they can’t spend five hundred words describing the car journey to the airport and then the last four hundred words describing the rest of their holiday.  Actually, writing about holidays is banned in my classroom, unless a young person has something reflective to say about their fortnight in Lanzarote.  Some do, don’t get me wrong: I read a wonderful essay written by a sixteen year old girl about her memory of going to Venice with her family. It was the last holiday they had before her parents split up.  She balanced her descriptions beautifully.  The pathos was in her memory of the beauty of Venice set against how unhappy she felt that this was the last time her family were happy.  

If only we could see all experiences with the benefit of a holistic understanding, with the benefit of a universal perspective. 

I’ve just read Jennifer Egan’s, “A Visit From the Goon Squad” and have loved it.  It made me cry in unexpected places, for unexpected reasons.  One of the characters explains that Time is a “goon;” this “goon” can be avoided by no one.  It is something we take for granted until we're running out of it, or until we realise that we didn't notice so much of it pass.   It’s a strange book because it doesn’t have a single narrative thread, although each chapter is connected to the next by a single, sometimes marginal, character.  For example, one chapter is about Sasha, a kleptomaniac who is seeking help for her condition, and the following chapter is about Bennie, a music producer whose assistant is Sasha.   Later, Sasha’s daughter narrates a chapter, about her autistic brother, through the medium of a Power Point presentation. He is obsessed by the pauses in rock songs, which seems to be a metaphor for the way he and his father cannot understand each other; they cannot communicate.  Although they are connected, they are disconnected.  No amount of technology can change it.  Only they can come together to find a way to understand each other.

Beyond family, each, sometimes very disparate, life impacts upon another: each person memorable and important in their own right.  Every character leaves a kind of residue wherever they go, on whomever they meet and this somehow changes them, negatively in some cases, positively in others.  Without us knowing it, we are part of other people's stories, other people's narratives and that role can be minor, or can be starring. We don't always have the ability to perceive it. 

What Egan has her narrators do is see their lives with the benefit of perspective.  Even moments of happiness and freedom can be imbued with a sense of loss.  Lou’s daughter remembers being in Africa with her father, her brother and her father’s girlfriend.  She remembers watching her brother dance without self-consciousness; she remembers how happy he was at that moment, but in the context of his life and her life, it’s a moment infused with pain and dreadful loss.  Her brother killed himself years later, leaving a tear in their fabric.

This is what I take from this novel because it's what impacted upon me, but someone else would highlight other aspects for reflection.  Their retelling of the same story would be different, just as each perception of every moment is different.

It made me think about how we can try to take a broader perspective.  When something awful happens in my life, I can be burdened dreadfully by it.  Like many, I can feel that I cannot unload the misery because I can’t imagine that it will have an end.  Perhaps, what I should do instead, is try to be reflective: imagine this pain in the broader context of life.   Will this horrible experience be the catalyst for change?  Will it spur me in a direction I could not have taken otherwise?  Can I muster optimism merely from imagining that each dark moment will have its antithesis?  Can I remove 'myself' from my own narrative and see it more objectively?

Last week, a close friend of mine was sitting in her living-room, having just changed her two-and-a-half year old daughter into her pyjamas.  The doorbell rang.  It was her neighbour.  She told them that she had discovered that their other neighbour’s house was on fire.  She, her husband, her daughter left their home, thinking that they’d be back inside within minutes, but soon, they realised that the fire had spread across their roof and was engulfing their home and everything they owned.  She, heavily pregnant, I may add, watched as, very quickly, their home turned to nothing.  Next to nothing was salvageable.  They had the clothes they stood up in and, luckily, she had her handbag and car keys. 

I saw her yesterday, and although still in shock and tearful, she remained incredibly pragmatic.  What else could she be?  No amount of anger could undo what had happened.  (It was arson-they suspect the neighbour torched his house because it was due to be repossessed)  But, she laughed, saying that it was a good opportunity for a new start, closer to her parents' home and, as they’re expecting baby number two, that was a positive outcome. Wow.  Even in her darkest moment, she has found a way to find perspective.  Her husband may have lost his thousand- strong CD collection, amassed over a lifetime, but they are only things and can be replaced.  

I gave her “Goon Squad” as the first book to put on her new shelf in her new home, but I have a feeling that she is the type of person who has already learned its lesson.