![]() When all is said and done-and there's a lot-it reaches a nearly pitch-perfect understanding of American culture and conflicts that brought us not only to the present but to ways of life, music, community and communication that Egan imaginatively foresees lying in wait. ![]() The life cycle of a band that starts out as Flaming Dildo in late-70s San Francisco gives the novel shape only in as much as its members, hangers-on, commercial enablers and products of assorted broken unions morph back and forth and far, far ahead in time, leading the reader on an achy, breaky course of fitting the pieces together. ![]() 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' seems put together eerily like a record album-even nostalgically, one might say, except that Bennie Salazar, the music producer whom the novel bears with through several decadent decades, insists that "Nostalgia was the end-everyone knew that." Chapter for chapter the novel has the initial feel of a series of short stories-or songs on a CD-only gradually and implicitly interlocking to express a particular sensibility and outlook. ![]() ![]() No disrespect is meant here, merely the acknowledgment that, in her last, successful novel, The Keep, she meshed Gothic mystery with techno-psychodrama, or, before that, in Look at Me, stabbed celebrity journalism nicely in the back. ![]()
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