Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” made headlines (and a certain bookstore owner with a first printing just a little wealthier) when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Best American Novel a couple months ago. The big question for the reader is whether or not the book is destined to be an American classic, like recent winner “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, or a dreary snoozefest like Jonathan Franzen’s Pulitzer-losing (runner-up is too kind) “The Corrections.” I hate to damn “Goon Squad” with faint praise, but this reviewer found it to be an enjoyable and quick read.

“Goon Squad” tries very hard to be postmodern, and includes the usual bag of po-mo tricks that make you certain you’re not reading “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Softball postmodernism a la “Pulp Fiction” is the oft-trodden ground that “Goon Squad” occupies. Twisting timeline? Check. Interlocking characters seen from different perspectives? Check. No clear beginning-middle-end plotline? Check. And actually, I enjoyed these elements quite a bit, as hoary and timeworn as they may be in 2011. The story follows the lives of different people who make (rather, made) a living from the music industry. Like the Buzzbin staff!

There is an aging music mogul from the ’80s “glory days,” spending more time on barely legal multi-chick BJs than finding genre-breaking new artists. He has a protégé who actually broke into the music industry via his Bay Area punk band’s success. That guy has an assistant. She has an ex — who was in a band. Et cetera. ITunes, Napster or music downloading isn’t specifically given a lot of space, but it looms in the background like a creeping Lovecraftian beast, as the lives of all of these people crash and burn when the money starts running out in the late ’90s. The titular Goon Squad is time, destroying the young as they get older (spoiler alert, sort of), and the book ends with the music industry devolving into artists who can survive only by performing for children, managed by image consultants who do nothing but generate the fakest social media buzz.

The book wants to be about the Internet’s destruction of our cultural middle class, but instead spends a lot of time on the rich people in the music industry, who really nobody cares about. When was the last time you Googled “Clive Davis”? The great American novel about the fall of the music industry probably won’t be written by somebody who is comfortable wearing pearls (like Egan), but someone who actually worked in the front lines — some forgotten Quonset Hut employee, a Kinko’s clerk photocopying her fanzine before work, a bouncer at CBGB’s. Though this book really does have some terrific moments, it stays thoroughly grounded in upper-upper-middle-class boring whiteness (painfully like Franzen).

Some points in the book ring extremely untrue, such as punk-rock teenage girls turning into groupies for old record execs. Didn’t happen: I knew loads of actual punk-rock girls from 1987. They were tough and smart, and no old rich guy’s easy lay. Also, becoming a major label record executive out of the punk scene was completely taboo. All the ’80s punk people I know followed a career path of either tattoo artist or complete normalcy (cop, electrician, teacher).

The opening character’s kleptomania is extremely well-written and really gets the book off to a great start. Unfortunately, there is a coda to the book, written in chart form and taking place 30 years in the future, that really is quite painful. Please, Jennifer, leave the future to the professionals (Robert Charles Wilson’s “Julian Comstock” would be one great place to start) — but the pieces about rich girls’ thievery and Wisconsin boys’ coming-out tragedies were wonderful.

Come dip your toe in the postmodernist water at Backlist Books in Massillon: “The Goon Squad” is available in paperback now for $15, and easily worth that much. I promise the reader will not be bored, and only the most jaded English major or punk scenester (like me) will find much to complain about. 

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