Time, Thrashing to Its Own Rock Beat (Published 2010) (2024)

A music mogul named Lou is one of the many characters who drift through Jennifer Egan’s spiky, shape-shifting new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Whether this tough, uncategorizable work of fiction is a novel, a collection of carefully arranged interlocking stories or simply a display of Ms. Egan’s extreme virtuosity, the same characters pop up in different parts of it. Lou is a case in point. He appears early and then burns through a few of Ms. Egan’s adjacent (though not consecutive) chapters, ending up very much the worse for wear.

Lou is the fulcrum of “Ask Me if I Care,” a section of the book narrated by a high school girl named Rhea. “Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God,” she says, setting this particular section’s time, tone and intergenerational hostility. “The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We’re sick of them.”

But the slick, successful 40-something Lou, “a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally”, is no burnout. He’s living the high life, snorting cocaine and using his show-business clout to seduce teenage girls. When Rhea glimpses pictures of Lou’s children in his apartment amid the electric guitars and gold records, she has the guts to get angry at him. Lou taunts her by announcing that he’ll never get old; Rhea tells him he’s old already.

In “Safari,” the story that immediately follows, Lou is six years younger. His age can be pinpointed by a reference to the age of his daughter, Charlie, who is 14 in “Safari” but was 20 in “Ask Me if I Care.” Lou is accompanied on a trip to Africa by a couple of his children and also by his young girlfriend, a graduate student named Mindy. And Mindy is enough of a provocation to rattle other members of the “Safari” group, particularly Rolph, Lou’s teenage son.

Lou makes his exit in “You (Plural).” Here he is an old man dying in a hospital bed, and Rhea and a girlfriend from “Ask Me if I Care” come to say goodbye. They were high school students when he met them; now Rhea is 43, married and a mother of three. The encounter is sad but not poignant. All the people in these three Lou-related stories have been mugged by the goon squad of Ms. Egan’s title.

Ms. Egan uses goon as a synonym for time, as in: “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Taking some of her inspiration from Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” as well as some from “The Sopranos,” she creates a set of characters with assorted links to the music business and lets time have its way with them. Virtually no one in this elaborately convoluted book winds up the better for wear. But Ms. Egan can be such a piercingly astute storyteller that the exhilaration of reading her outweighs the bleak destinies she describes.

It’s an understatement to say that every character in this book has a dark side. Sasha, the young woman with whom “A Visit From the Goon Squad” begins, has a compulsion to steal, and the array of objects she has filched looks “like the work of a miniaturist beaver.” In a book eager to incorporate the technology of its times into what its characters think and do, 35-year-old Sasha spends “Found Objects” on an awkward date with a man she met online. She winds up with his wallet.

Sasha has worked for 12 years for the Sow’s Ear record label as the assistant to Bennie, another recurring character. And Bennie is seen from his youth (eager to get into the record business, and wowed by Lou) to his prime, and then on a downhill slide. This book’s single most startling section describes Bennie’s encounter with Scotty, a damaged kid and former band mate of Bennie’s who has turned into a dangerously embittered failure. When Scotty wangles an audience with the all-powerful Bennie in Bennie’s New York office, he arrives armed with a fish that he caught in the East River.

Sasha figures tangentially in this story, “X’s and O’s.” She’s the gatekeeper at Bennie’s office, and she must spend some awkward moments with Scotty and his dead fish before Bennie saves her. As Scotty, narrating this chapter, reports, Sasha is visibly relieved when Scotty is whisked away and is not her problem anymore. “I gave her a wink whose exact translation was: Don’t be so sure, darling,” Scotty says.

The showiest part of this acrobatic book is the part that doesn’t look like fiction writing at all: Ms. Egan spends 70-odd pages on PowerPoint charts meant to reflect the rogue thoughts of two adolescents, who turn out to be Sasha’s children. The passage of that much time moves “A Visit From the Goon Squad” somewhere into the future, but Ms. Egan clearly enjoys tackling such challenges. And if the PowerPoint ploy seems risky, it winds up being no less welcome than any of her other methods. She also makes chillingly weird use of text-message-ese: “if thr r childrn, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?” It takes temerity to even ask, let alone text, that question.

The children of the future give the book a flash of science fiction. Ms. Egan’s vision is mostly dystopian, but what makes it most memorable is the eccentricity. She imagines that the aftermath of 15 years of war have led to a baby boom. And technology has eagerly leapt to accommodate a new demographic group: gadget-loving children. Pity the poor rock stars who find themselves at the mercy of toddlers who have purchasing power. Ms. Egan slyly turns one “Goon Squad” recurring character into one of those stars.