Hey, how are you? Come on in, there's some people I want you to meet. So this is Sasha - she's, eh, I dunno, thirtysomething? She works for a record company, primarily for this guy over here, Bennie Salazar. We'll get to him in a minute. Anyway, Sasha has a nice little flat in New York, a job she likes, as long as she can gracefully swerve Bennie occasionally making a pass at her. Strictly entre nous she's got a few, if you will, issues of her own, though; main one is she's kind of a kleptomaniac. Wallets, purses, little trinkets, you name it. She's in therapy, though - I mean, like all of us, right? - trying to work it all through. Anyway, back to Bennie - big record company exec and talent finder; trouble with that is you're only as good as your recent talent finds, though, right? And Bennie is a bit worried he might have lost his golden touch after a couple of finds turn out to be screechily unlistenable. Or maybe he's just getting old?
So here's Bennie's music industry mentor from when he was much younger, Lou. They got to know each other when Lou was screwing one of Bennie's friends, Jocelyn. Later we'll meet a couple of Lou's kids, Charlie and Rolph, on a safari trip with Lou's girlfriend, Mindy. Mindy in turn is eyeing up the tour guide, Albert.
OK, so ... this is Scotty, another of Bennie's friends from when he was younger. Scotty's a musician but he's gone off the rails a bit lately and he's kind of a hobo these days, hoicking mutant fish out of the East River to eat.
So you can tell we're moving backward and forward in time, here, right? I mean the episodes involving young Bennie and Lou are obviously in the past, and you sort of assume by default that the early parts involving Sasha and Bennie are in the loose "present", but, well, just keep your wits about you. Anyway, here's Bennie's second wife, Stephanie, living with him in suburbia and trying to fit in with the tennis club set. And here's Stephanie's brother Jules, a writer, but fresh out of prison after some bizarre incident involving a young actress. And here's Stephanie's boss at her PR firm, Dolly aka La Doll, who turns up shortly after running some sort of publicity scheme for a Middle Eastern dictator to humanise his image a bit (after some unfortunate publicity about murder and torture and genocide and tiresome stuff like that). The actress Dolly chooses to employ to fake a celebrity romance with this guy turns out to be none other than Kitty Jackson, the actress Jules assaulted.
Back in time a bit now to meet Drew and Rob, boyfriend and unrequited admirer respectively of Sasha. They hang out a bit, then decide, for ill-defined reasons (but following a night of drink and drug ingestion), to go for a swim in the East River, whereupon Rob gets into difficulties and drowns.
Then we meet Ted, Sasha's uncle, sent by the family to Naples to look for Sasha, this being her last known location before she broke off all contact with her family two years before. Ted takes a leisurely approach to searching, though, preferring to warm up with some sightseeing first, and when he does run into Sasha it's largely by chance. She's keeping up with the petty thievery but with a bit of the old prostitution on the side just to supplement her income. She is not best pleased to see him at first but in his clumsy but persistent way he eventually persuades her to jack it in and come home.
And now we see that our judgment of where to draw the chalk mark denoting "now" was a bit off as we zoom a couple of decades into the future where Sasha and Drew are married (having reconnected on the internet) and have two children. We also meet Alex, a former one-night hookup of Sasha's, also now married with a small child, who's been tasked by Bennie with performing some magical social media influencing to drum up interest in an outdoor concert in New York featuring none other than Scotty, still a bit mental but just about keeping it together enough to make a triumphal musical return.
Some notes on structure first: as the paragraphs above suggest this is a novel told in short and discrete chunks, featuring a wide cast of characters and not in any sort of chronological order. Indeed were it not for the loose narrative thread and the shared cast you might say it's more of a short story collection. Personally I'm not that interested in categorisation arguments of that sort, and it's more of a novel than, say, Invisible Cities. As it happens the only other thing of Egan's that I'd read before was Emerald City, which definitely is a collection of short stories.
Secondly, the Stuff That Is Like Other Stuff list: much of what's here is reminiscent of modern American authors like Douglas Coupland and Rick Moody, the minutely detailed account Jules gives of the events leading up to his assault of Kitty Jackson is slightly reminiscent of Nicholson Baker and the heavy use of footnotes which simultaneously explain and undercut the main narrative is a bit Dave Eggers and a bit David Foster Wallace. Another thing that's a bit Dave Eggers is the last chapter, since it's quite reminiscent of The Circle in its depiction of a society five minutes in the future and just a little bit further down the social media rabbit hole than our own.
To be honest that last chapter works less well than some of the early ones, and there are a few episodes which don't work quite as well as the others, notably the bizarre episode with Dolly and the dictator she's taken on PR duties for. Perhaps this is because we've got attached to Sasha, who is the main character - to the extent that there is one - and are waiting to find out which part of her life we're going to shoot off to next. What the whole thing is about is more of a challenge: friendship, aging, how people simultaneously change and don't change as they get older, assuming they survive long enough to get the opportunity. It's very good, anyway, which is after all the most important thing. Various august bodies thought the same thing, as A Visit From The Goon Squad was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 (there's a list of previous featurees here) and the National Book Critics Circle Award the previous year (previous featurees are Ragtime, A Thousand Acres, Gilead, Wolf Hall and Lila). I therefore deduce that Gilead and A Thousand Acres are the only previous featurees to have won both.
