The Fame Monster

Love in Infant Monkeys
by Lydia Millet
2009, Soft Skull Press


This past summer some of my colleagues suggested to me that we begin an informal book club. The responsibility to select a book fell to me and, panicked, I scrambled around my mental inventory of books I'd like to get around to reading. Perhaps arbitrarily, the title I pulled out was Love in Infant Monkeys, a collection of short stories I read about in the Boston Globe and was subsequently reminded of when it was nominated for last year's Pulitzer Prize.

We never wound up meeting, adding another notch to my aborted book club belt. However, when I arrived this week for professional development at school, I was quickly accosted by one of the would-be members, who simply frowned at me and stared for a very long time to communicate her dislike like of this book.

I assured her the feeling was shared.

Love in Infant Monkeys is a collection loosely united under the premise that each story involves an unlikely combination of a celebrity and an animal - an elephant and Thomas Edison, for example, or David Hasselhoff and a dog.

The collection begins jarringly with "Sexing the Pheasant", a scathing story narrated from Madonna's point of view as she is abandoned by a hunting party in England. Millet portrays Madge with no small amount of vitriol:

The fans worshipped you because they needed something - well, what were you supposed to do? Well, prostrate yourself before the Infinite. Clearly.

OK, granted, sometimes the mirror suggested it: Not your fault if your reflection reminded you of all that was sacred, all that was divine and holy...She was actually very humble. And of, course, it was not wrong to see God in yourself.

As Madonna waits for her husband and his chums to show up, she coaches herself on accurate British slang ("...even exceptional brilliance ('brill' - use in moderation)") and attempts to determine the gender of the pheasant she has just shot dead.

Millet's tone in this story sets an uncomfortable tone for the book as a whole. Madonna's frustration and discomfort at having murdered the bird at her feet is the extent of Millet's empathy for her imagined portrait of the superstar. Her attitude towards her subject is caustic and condescending and while several of the subsequent stories are considerably less brutal, her motives in addressing the culture of celebrity seem thereafter a bit suspect.

At first, the conceit of taking these partially factually-based combinations of man and animal is exciting, fresh, irreverent. But the further these stories plunge into variations on the same theme (man's callousness towards the plight of noble animals, man's awareness of his shortcomings and failure to ameliorate his plight) the more the gimmick that initially drew me to this collection felt like just that - a gimmick.

As the collection progresses, these revelations about humanity's self-obsession in contrast with nature's quiet, abused dignity start to seem a bit too simplistic. The idea that man is preoccupied and nature is at best ambivalent to man's ontological struggles and, at worst, harmed by them is not in and of itself a bad idea.

Millet's subjects prove to be too broad as targets. Madonna proves to be too easy to ridicule considering her fetishized status in the echelon of celebrity. Hasselhoff appears as nothing more than a punchline in an otherwise middling story about dog walking; the punchline is his mere existence and Millet uses the narrator, his dog, to punctuate the joke by easily and dishonestly depicting the dog's obliviousness to his owner's status.

Even less obvious targets, like Noam Chomsky (who appears in a story in which he quibbles with his wife at a public dump while trying to give away a hamster condo) or Nicola Tesla (who is shown obsessing with religious-like devotion over carrier pigeons), are treated with a considerable lack of empathy.

It is this absence of empathy for her human characters and the surplus of empathy for the animals that serve them that mars these stories. It is all well and good to establish a clear dichotomy between man's selfishness and the otherwise unobtrusive natural world (although, as mentioned above, this theme seems strikingly one-noted) but Millet erects her characters as straw men, conjecturing to libelous lengths about their apathy towards the world around them.

While I understand that this in and of itself appears to Millet's focus - that as a culture, we revere arbitrarily chosen personalities and cast aside those creatures with no discernible talent beyond being tasty - this does not negate the application of the straw man fallacy. And while Love with Infant Monkeys is not a philosophical thesis and should be subject to logical fallacies, an author must not use her characters as manipulatives in a moralistic puppet show.

I suppose, as was the case in my entry on Alyson Hagy's Ghosts of Wyoming, my hatred would not be so focused were it not for a sole story whose excellence lays bare the failure of the collection as a whole to live up to the potential hinted at by glints of undeniable talent.

In this case, the story in question is the penultimate piece in the collection, "The Lady and the Dragon". The plot of this particular piece concerns a komodo dragon who bit Sharon Stone's husband on the foot. An eccentric millionaire in Indonesia acquires the dragon and insists to his staff that they convince Sharon Stone to visit.

Soon enough, a woman arrives at the compound, but she is not in fact Stone but a Vegas-style celebrity impersonator. Paid for her time, she pretends to be charmed by the millionaire although is unable to disguise her horror at the dragon's predatory behavior (mirrored, obviously in her host himself). When she is proposed to, she desperately seeks the help of his staff, who successfully secure her voyage home.

This story is much more at peace with the kindness of its characters than the others are, perhaps because its titular character is not, in fact, a celebrity but a celebrity-by-proxy. Where one might have assumed that Millet would portray this woman in a negative light, as a leech on the culture of celebrity, she instead becomes similar in disposition and predicament to the animals who appear in earlier stories: injured by celebrity, duped into thinking there is solace in success.

The portrayal of celebrity in this story certainly fits into the larger themes of the book, but its characters are treated with the tenderness that was virtually absent in say, the Madonna story.

The cover of this book depicts a banana against a black background, bringing to mind Warhol's famous cover art for The Velvet Underground & Nico, with its iconic unpeeled (perhaps bruised?) banana. The jacket for this book seems to reference Warhol's attention to fame, to the glorification of celebrity and its peeled banana (while obviously appropriate in terms of monkeys) puns about on this notion of fame debunked as opposed to, in Warhol's work, fame mystified.

What strikes me, though, is that so much of Warhol's work was about the staid aspect of celebrity, the emptiness of iconography. In the very act of creating and glorifying celebrity, Warhol was making a gesture to the arbitrary nature of fame, to the intrinsic absence of intimacy implied in fame. It is this absence of intimacy, of knowability, of true knowledge of the soul of celebrities and non-celebrities alike that afflicts this mess of a work.

Turning Japanese

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

by David Mitchell

2010, Random House

There's a cute little independent bookstore in Andover where I like to roam seemingly endlessly examining the staff picks. Occasionally I chat about books with the employees (I recently had a brief conversation about David Foster Wallace), but reading the little summaries and glowing reviews that point me in the direction of a good book is a satisfying activity.

Whenever I am in an indie bookstore, I try to buy a book, any book, to make up for the numerous titles I record in my cellphone's notepad feature for further investigation. Some time ago one such title was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a book that came with an effusive recommendation from an employee. That was not the book I picked up that day, but when David Mitchell published his fifth and newest novel last month, the name was instantly familiar to me and so with what wound up being great pleasure, I dove into it.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an amazing book.

The plot centers around a red-headed Dutchman named de Zoet (or Dazuto, as the Japanese call him) who has been hired as a bookkeeper to straighten out the mismanaged and manipulated books of the Dutch East Indies Company. The company operates a trading port in Nagasaki referred to as Dejima, populated by a small handful of Dutchman, their slaves, and a bevvy of Japanese dignitaries, translators and students of foreign culture.

While the Japanese benefit a great deal from trading with foreigners, their attitude toward them remains stringently closed off. The Edo appoints translators to acquire the Dutch language and become accustomed to their cultures but dissemination of information about Japanese customs is strictly prohibited; the Japanese attempt to maintain as much mystery as possible. Foreigners are not permitted to learn the Japanese language, and all evidence of worship of foreign gods (Christianity, in main) are illegal.

Jacob de Zoet is intensely interested in Japanese culture and undertakes secretly acquiring their language as he balances his duty to the Dutch East Indies Company and love of his god. Eventually, the underhanded behaviors de Zoet was hired to clear up conspire to strand him in Japan for a very long time, during which he falls in love with a forbidden, scarred Japanese girl studying midwifing techniques.

The plot eventually becomes quite rollicking, if you can believe that. There are a substantial enough number of twists, turns and cliff-hangers to keep me reading quickly and insatiably.

Thematically, Mitchell seems preoccupied with the collision of cultures in Jacob de Zoet. Of particular interest is the problem of translation. Although the book is written in English, the characters are speaking English, Dutch or Japanese, depending on the character and often the characters clarify one another's expressions with more precise vocabulary. The effect is puzzling, as the reader is fluent in English. While this might read as a historical necessity in the context of the novel, it recurs often enough to elevate it to a leitmotif.

The Japanese ideal of preserving their culture from foreign infection plays heavily thematically, too. de Zoet is essentially homeless throughout the novel. His reminiscences of his home in the Netherlands are half-dreamed remembrances, and for all intents and purposes Japan is his home. Yet, the Japanese forbid him to partake in either his culture (he keeps an illicit book of psalms under a floorboard) or theirs (his interest in the scarred beauty is forbidden, the language kept secret).

de Zoet is orphaned in a way on an island that uses him but will give nothing of itself back, an intractable position as Mitchell demonstrates later when the English attempt to establish trade. The Japanese are shown to mismanage their dealings with the foreigners to disastrous consequences and the novel begins to evoke a peculiar atmosphere. Mitchell's book is steeped in the past; he virtually fetishizes the details of sailing, for example, and exalts in the happy collision of accurate medical data (child labor) and superstition (bloodletting).

Yet this nostalgic atmosphere is tinged with a struggle to grow out of itself, just as de Zoet chafes at the confines of the magisterial constraints imposed upon him. Mitchell depicts an era at the brink of change, with constituents pushing for and against that change equally, creating an intensely alluring tousle between antiquity and modernity, mystery and science, romance and pragmatism.

Mitchell's writing is simply lovely. It is direct but nuanced with character. Throughout the novel he is prone to a slightly koan-esque syntax; for example, "In the ginkgo's knotted heart, a brood of oily crows fling insults."

I hesitate to say more about the book, in part because of the difficulty of enunciating praise, as opposed to condemnation. At 500 pages, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is neither a quick nor easy read, but it is so incredibly compelling that it is well worth the investment of both time and energy.

Get Your Freak On

Editor's Note: Today (8/27/10) is the one-year anniversary of this emphatically humble blog. while it has been occasionally difficult to find the time to blog, I think I have managed to do so consistently and I'm quite proud of the output here. My only disappointment has been my frustrated attempts to share the experience of reading through this blog with my friends and family. This blog has been a really wonderful way for me to keep intellectually and creatively active and it occurred to me that perhaps this expressive act, which I've found incredibly rewarding this past year, is the very thing I've been trying to share.

As I was reflecting on this anniversary, the idea of inviting my friends to moonlight on my blog came to me. I think this will be an opportunity to share completely the experience of reading, writing and sharing that has been inspiring me this past year.

What follows is the first guest blog entry for Pygmies and Peanut Butter, and I'm very proud of the work here, although it's not mine. There is a least one more guest entry lined up for the near future, but I hope this isn't the extent of the involvement. If you've read something lately and you'd like to contribute, don't hesitate to let me know. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy perusing this guest entry:


Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

1989, Random House

The universe was asking me to read this book. Aside from Brendan having two copies of Geek Love (one for sharing and one for keeping), this book found numerous ways of making its way into my life. I finally gave in to the numerous hints and started in on the novel.

What's truly unusual about this book is that I'd finish each sitdown session so fulfilled with what I'd just read that I never had to force myself to put it down. Part of the reason for this is that the writing isn't cheap and easy; Katherine Dunn isn't looking to get you hooked. She doesn't use spectacle as a method of storytelling, although spectacle is exactly what the story is based upon.

Simply summarized, Geek Love is about a family of freaks. I assumed it was a story about dorky people who wear glasses and fall in love, a totally masturbatory plot for plenty of authors. The term "geek", I discovered, is apparently derived from an individual who bites the heads off of live chickens for an audience such as might be found at The Fabulon, the circus where the novel is set. The inheritor of this circus, Al Binewski, is enthralled with a volunteer lady geek named Crystal Lil and the two make babies. In order to produce true freaks for the shows, as opposed to the run-of-the-mill fat ladies and lizard men, the couple experiments with drugs during Lil's pregnancies. The resulting deformed children are the main characters.

I was quickly captivated by the main character Olympia, a humpback albino dwarf. Though Oly is truly freakish and would be the main show on a subway car, she is a letdown to her parents. Her older siblings include a brother and two sisters - well - two if you count heads and one if you count asses. Arty is the oldest. His hands and feet are webbed and connect directly to his torso. He is power-hungry and easy to hate. Though in a world where it's difficult if not impossible to bond with norms, it's easy for the siblings to grow affectionate of their leader. Elly and Iphy are Siamese twins with a natural dichotomy. The kid brother, Chick, has the complete physical appearance of a norm, but is far from it. Dunn takes her time to spill the beans on Chick, so I won't ruin it by saying what he is.

Really, this book can easily appeal to anyone who has ever felt like an outcast. I kept thinking to myself while reading this, "This book feels like a classic." I can almost picture it up there with The Great Gatsby or 1984 as one of those books that everyone has seen (if not read) on their high school summer reading list. I'm sure it would have a good chance to be if it weren't for the easily objectionable material.

But that objectionable material is what really pulls me in. As a proud former outcast, I saw my life parallel what these characters went through. The world can't or won't accept them, and they find their place as the princes and princesses of a circus, somehow made for each other yet constantly feuding and scheming against the others.

The book isn't really about the dynamic of this group, but more about how each of them changes or becomes affected by people and events. I'm possibly tapping into what really made me fall in love. Dunn really brings you through cycles of the changes that each character goes through. They are not a group, but individuals bound together by their freakhood, common parents, and lower torsos.

Early in the book the four young siblings find themselves in a cherry tree in some random small American town feasting on the fruit. Naturally a farmer comes by with a shotgun meaning to scare the kids. Organized by Arty, the kids climb out of the tree one-by-one, starting with Oly and followed by Arty and the twins. This parade successfully aims to scare the crap out of the farmer. This is the most organized the group find itself. It's all downhill from here.

Between puberty and power, love and parenthood, and other force of life and death, each sibling becomes their own individual. This individuality can't seem to coexist in what should theoretically be a band of brother and sisters united. Their comfort in being freaks leads them to develop as people and eventually leads to the destruction of both bonds and bodies.

When you get to the climax you should be prepared. Dunn doesn't hold back. I found myself in a Meineke waiting room getting my oil changed with tears running down my face. I wish it could have at least been at a hair salon or a GAP, just something less manly than a Meineke with those oily deep-voiced mechanics telling me something I don't understand about a car part I'm unfamiliar with. Then, to top it off, the book ends 30-something pages later with another incredibly sad, unfortunate, heart-breaking event. It's a 1-2-punch.

Interestingly enough, Dunn is now a sports writer for boxing. (Did you like the segue?) She has written columns and books on the topic, and is using it as a basis for a new novel. It will be her first since Geek Love. After almost thirty years she's switched tracks completely in terms of subject matter, but I'm dying to read it. At least this time if I break down crying in a Hummer dealership or something I can look up, flash the cover and say, "It's about sports."

Guest blog entry by extrachrisb.

Beauty as Banshee

Three Delays

by Charlie Smith

2010, Harper Perennial

In a recent issue of The Believer, included in the one-page book reviews was a review by novelist Rick Moody of a book I was unfamiliar with by an author I'd never heard of. I am possessed of some particular fascination with Rick Moody himself; this fascination probably stems from his rather divisive reputation as a practitioner of modern literature. (On a side note, I eagerly anticipate reading his new novel, The Four Fingers of Death.)

The review in question was of Charlie Smith's Three Delays and Moody's praise was so effusive that I was at once utterly convinced of the necessity of my reading this novel. Having completed it, I can safely say that Moody's hyperbolic praise is just that, but even so Three Delays is a stunning vision of the powers of lyrical and lofty prose. Despite a certain amount of aimlessness in plot and structure and a definite staidness of development of character, the distinguishing feature of Smith's novel is the simply sublime prose itself.

The plot of the book is basically a stormy love affair between Billy and Alice, ill-fated childhood sweethearts. Billy narrates the novel and describes a period of about ten years during which Billy and Alice fall continually in and out of love and Billy falls off and climbs back on the wagon of sobriety.

Billy and Alice met as a children at a mock wedding ceremony performed for the amusement of local townsfolk and fell in love. They spent adolescence together in presumable bliss, but where the novel picks up in early adulthood, Billy's drug habit and Alice's manic alternations between passion and malaise have marred their otherwise passionate love affair.

At the novel's beginning, Alice has left Billy and he in turn has found a shabby semblance of solace in abusing drugs. The earlier portions of the novel are chiefly characterized by Billy's aimless wandering and endless soul-searching, caused by/the result of the procuring of drugs. Most of the soul-searching adopts the kind of fiery, passionate wording of passionate diatribes; to wit:

She looked at me, embarrassed, shy of herself, explicitly focused. Everything inside her was expressed in her face. She was like an infant. It was the same as always. Hurt, fear, chagrin, some wild Arabian nights kind of thing, slyness, the slyness apprehended, misery, an ancient ungovernable sadness, hatred, disgust, a Daffy Duck idiot wiliness, bafflement, lust, blank feral staring, love - the were all there. She was better than jai-alai, better than the movies, better, almost, than drugs, and she always had been.

Alice's love for Billy is without question as strong as his. They fall into and out of each other's bodies as animals unable and unwilling to control themselves and with the same regard for psychological and physical safety. To describe their love affair as stormy would be a marked understatement. Both are described as assaulting each other physically repeatedly throughout the book, undergoing blows to most sensitive areas on the human body.

Moreover, the two do substantial psychological damage to one another. When Alice is married to one her two other husbands in the course of the novel's events, Billy gleefully engages in the role of stalker, at one point even kidnapping her and an adopted child.

Alice is by no means innocent in their destructive cycle of inflicting harm and making contrition. Her unpredictable temper seems to indicate ferity. As Billy describes it:

Roughly she grabbed me, sank her claws into my body, snatched me from air into the fiery substrate she breathed...turned wildly against me cursing, her body shaking, fire in her eyes, the old demonic business, the devil in human form, all that, so familiar to everyone out in West Miami, beauty as banshee, all that, no stopping her if you weren't armed.

As you can clearly read from these cited examples, the prose we're talking about here inspires awe. Smith's mixing of high and low forms of speech, archaic and vernacular forms, profanity and sacred language alike, is jaw-dropping and exciting.

But these examples also lead me to the inevitable problem with the novel itself, from a purely thematic standpoint, which is: to what extent is this an accurate portrayal of the ferocity of love?

Love is a tricky bastard. It leads one to self-doubt, self-esteem, self-flagellation. Love is often (but not always) passionate, desperate. Perhaps the most pressing question of life is why one hurts the people one loves most in life? Intimacy tends to inure one from sensitivity, and it is this sense of numbness to another's feelings formed simply through familiarity that is perhaps communicated in Alice and Billy's callousness to one another.

And yet, love doesn't inspire most people to strike their partner, or leave them. Alice and Billy's romance, while eminently dramatic does not strike me as realistic. Even in the scenes of domesticity towards the end of the book are marked by an almost cinematic expression of discontent: after returning from work, Alice remains in the car to knit, refusing to torture herself with sharing space with Billy, for example. A more realistic, albeit admittedly prosaic, depiction would be Alice going out for drinks with her girlfriends.

Smith works, justifiably, to make Billy and Alice's fiery affair significant, tortured, doomed, special. But ultimately his prose is so good that the narrative itself need not be heightened to the same histrionic expressions of drama.

Recently I was camping with a friend who finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road and we briefly discussed some of the more unique strengths of that novel. The first thing that came to my mind, despite its being three years since I'd read the book, was McCarthy's muscularity in his prose.

McCarthy's prose is muscular in its singular devotion to syntactical precision; the sentences are structured so that each one communicates its thought in the most direct and concise manner possible. When asked to elaborate on what I meant by syntax, I focused in on McCarthy's use, or lack thereof, of commas; McCarthy's sentences are so compact that they render unnecessary asides, superfluous modifiers and messy clauses virtually impossible.

As a demonstration, I flipped open to a half-dozen pages of his copy of The Road in search of commas and found fewer than five. I then picked up my then-unfinished (but overdue) copy of Three Delays, flipped to a random page and counted no less than thirty commas. On one page.

I am struck now at the thought of what is perhaps a false dichotomy. The point I was making, of course, is that McCarthy's restraint was the favored technique. To write beautifully, but carefully, is better to write beautifully, but sloppily. Or so I thought.

Smith's prose is so prone to stunning description, to leaps of baffling connections, to a completely unrestrained and effulgent view of life that the book as a whole is invigorating. Electrifying.

I cried twice in reading this book, once at a lengthy description of Alice's fatal miscarriage in the novel's last chapter, and once at the following passage, which in its tone of life-affirming desperation and utterly flamboyant prose perfectly encapsulates the gestalt of the experience of reading this baffling, provocative, sumptuous novel:

I looked straight up. The stars were a trail of dust across the sky, dust that might someday form itself into something, some way of expressing things. Or maybe only dust that had already been used up, dust from the pulverization of worlds no one remembered anything about. I wished I was more careful in my life, more respectful, got more the hang of things.

There are dozens of examples of passages in the book similarly characterized by a passionate, drunken embrace of the (as Billy put it) "fucked-upness" of life but something about the dual nature here between creation and destruction in a singular entity explains the novel's messy, inspiring attitude towards love better than I could ever put it.

The Days of Losing Touch

A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
2010, Alfred A. Knopf


Some years ago, I devoted a week to poring through the Eggers-edited Best American Nonrequired Reading of that particular calendar year. I attempt every year to spend some time with those volumes, largely in the hopes of seeking out an author whose novels might interest me. This particular year was fruitful, with several names lodging themselves in the back of my brain for future perusal.

One of these names is Jennifer Egan, whose story in that collection was titled "Selling the General," about a down-on-her-luck publicist hired to improve the PR image of a genocidal general. To this end, she employs fuzzy hats and has-been actress to dress up the general's public image.

Now, years later, I remembered this story when Egan's name appeared again: in a review for her new novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which reads on the jacket as an exploration of the members of a punk rock band as they age, but which is really quite more than that.

Ostensibly, the main characters of the book are Bennie and Sascha, both of whom work in the music industry. Our first introduction is to Sascha, whose kleptomaniacal exploits are recounted to us through her therapy sessions and an anecdote concerning an apparently blind date. She's caught in the hotel restaurant where they eat their meal stealing a wallet from a woman's purse and she goes to lengths to prevent public embarrassment. Afterwards, she takes the man back to her apartment, the distinguishing features of which include a bathtub in the kitchen and a large pile of purloined artifacts.

Egan explores the character's guilt at her thefts, the harmlessness of the act itself from which Sascha derives pleasure not from the malicious Schadenfreude-esque pleasure of wrecking havoc on people's lives but from the forced act of intimacy it implies, and from the thrill of skirting danger successfully. Lifting personal items is a private act shared with an unwilling and unknowing party - an act of intimacy less painful or difficult than more conventional routes of bonding.

Within this chapter it is revealed that Sascha works for a man named Bennie Salazar, former lead singer of a punk band from the late 70's and now a music mogul.

These two men clearly reveal Egan's sense of the narrative: the subsequent chapter revolves around Bennie Salazar and the book does not subsequently return to either Sascha or Bennie's thoughts from a close third person perspective. Instead, Egan reintroduces these characters as auxiliary characters in others' narratives; each chapter is narrated by a new character, one seemingly given birth to through some offhanded allusion in the preceding chapter, with Bennie and Sascha being the through-line in each narrative.

The final chapter of the book returns full circle to the young man who dated Sascha as she lifted the wallet from the restroom. He is now older and cynical in his approach to Manhattan and has all but forgotten Sascha, possessed by an elusive memory concerning a bathtub in a kitchen. The effect naturally is one of a circular narrative in which the emotional timbre of the end plays off of that of the beginning; the sense of loss and sadness and change is derived not from Sascha's narrative arc (this does exist, but peripherally as the novel progresses) but from depriving us of directly witnessing such a thing. Egan tantalizes us with an intimate experience with an important character, but refuses to sate us by returning to that character directly. The novel ends with Sascha no more than a memory, by which point she might seem that way to the reader.

These two characters, Bennie and Sascha, are the main characters of the book inasmuch as they are the lowest common denominator. Each chapter can be traced through some six degrees of separation-ist chain back to the novel's groundwires: Bennie and Sascha.

One might get the impression that the book is manically structured, compulsively moving from one character to the next with a restlessness that denies the reader the ability to learn enough about any character to truly begin to care. However, this narrative technique proves to be just the opposite.

Egan develops character elliptically, slowly. For example, one chapter is narrated from the perspective of Sascha's uncle who has escaped to Italy under the pretext of finding Sascha, who has run away from home. This chapter occurs mid-novel and is therefore out of chronological order, considering our first glimpse of Sascha is as a middle aged woman.

By this point we have a view of Sascha informed and complicated by some understanding of her back story granted through the experiences of auxiliary characters. The cumulative effect is one weighed by great sadness - we are permitted occasional intimacy with Sascha but this intimacy lasts no longer than thirty pages and the reader strains for more insight, which Egan doles out slowly and at a perpetual remove. Ultimately, A Visit from the Good Squad seems to emphasize the inability of people to ever really know each other, and moreover, the fleeting nature of intimacy. People come into your life, you are granted closeness with them that inevitably drifts away with time.

Egan compounds this with the gymnastic prose she employs in writing the book. Infrequently, Egan adopts a bird's-eye omnipotent perspective that teases the reader with information about the future, lending the novel a sense of fatedness:

The warrior smiles at Charlie. He's nineteen, only five years older than she is, and has lived away from his village since he was ten... Thity-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire. He'll have had four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side. Joe will go to college at Columbia and study engineering...

This is one example of several times Egan fast-forwards in her novel, and in fact the later chapters take place in eerie, perhaps poorly-envisioned version of the future (which reminds me of the ill-conceived future of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, where people were named Tomcruise and dinosaur-like aliens migrate to Earth).

This omnipotence is not the only example of Egan's gymnastics; she employs significantly more postmodern techniques. For example, one chapter of the book is composed of a Microsoft PowerPoint slide show.

The slide show is on its surface about the occurrence of pauses in rock songs throughout history, but it is eventually gleaned that this is Sascha's daughter and her strained relationship with her parents and her concern for her autistic brother.

The exercise, while it reeks of Safran Foeresque gimmickry, is powerful for a number of reasons. Egan demonstrates the extent of Sascha's unknowability in the distancing from actual prose. The slide show, unlike the book's earlier prose, must be interpreted rather than read. The emotions are subtextual and linger under the surface in the same way that Sascha's development as a character is gleaned as though from the corner of one's eye as the book progresses.

Despite the deliberate withholding of a satisfactory emotional denouement, Goon Squad reads as a very emotionally powerful experience; each chapter stands on its own feet as an entity and the cumulative emotional power of the book, while it reinforces the inability to preserve connection with another person, grows stronger the further one is distanced from Bennie and Sascha.

An appropriate place to end this entry is with a portion of the book that displays the twisted sadness of the whole enterprise:

You look over at Drew, squinting in the sun, and for a second the future tunnels out and away, some version of "you" at the end of it, looking back. And right then you feel it - what you've seen in people faces on the street - a swell of movement, like an undertow, rushing you toward something you can't see.

"Oh, we'll know each other forever," Bix says. "The days of losing touch are almost gone."

Within pages of this quotation, the main character of the chapter dies in a drowning accident, a revelation that is not divulged to the reader for dozens of pages. In this way Egan delivers an almost crippling emotional blow. The reader is again reminded that he is not granted full access to the lives of these characters. In discovering this character's demise, the reader is full of shock and sadness alike, with a heavy dose of nostalgia.

Egan's characters are full of both despair and hope and every bittersweet mixing of the two imaginable. A Visit from the Goon Squad reads ultimately as a tribute to the complexity of life, with its fleeting, impermanent connections, its hardships and the small victories with which we navigate it.