“Time’s a Goon”: Time and Narrative in A Visit from the Goon Squad

Hebdige’s narrative of protest-followed-by-co-optation provides a useful gloss on some of the central elements of Goon Squad, with its overall emphasis on the effects of the passage of time. In popular usage, a “goon squad” is a group of hired thugs engaged to threaten and intimidate one’s enemies (most typically in an organized labor situation in which companies hired thugs to attack union organizers to prevent them from doing their work). Egan has said that the great gangster series The Sopranos (1999–2007) was one of the inspirations for the novel, though, so it seems reasonable in this context to think of a goon squad in terms of henchmen hired to intimidate the enemies of organized crime figures. In any case, the usage in the novel is entirely metaphorical: the “goon squad” referred to in the novel’s title is time itself, which, like a gang of hired thugs, tends to enforce its will on us all.

Some of this emphasis on the passage of time in Goon Squad is on the relatively mundane phenomenon of aging, with a particular focus on aging men—who typically battle against aging by attempting to enter relationships with younger and younger women. Indeed, Danica van de Velde notes that the nostalgia in Goon Squad is particularly gendered, with the male characters being driven by a “desire to return to a past that they can never recapture” (124). The most vivid example of this phenomenon is the highly successful record producer Lou Kline, who first appears as a middle-aged divorcé who uses his position in the music industry to seduce teenager Jocelyn Li and who last appears as an elderly man nearing death in his home hospital bed—still with much-younger women (including a now middle-aged Jocelyn) at his side.

This motif, incidentally, continues in The Candy House, in which art history professor Ted Hollander has divorced and then remarried a much younger woman (Portia, also an art historian). This novel also provides an extra commentary on gender bias when Ted’s ex-wife becomes romantically involved with Jack Stevens, a former high-school friend of her son Miles. Both Miles and his brother Ames are shocked by her involvement with a man the age of Miles, to which she responds: “‘Portia is almost thirty years younger than your father,’ their mother said, addressing Miles. ‘Your half sister, Beatrice, is the same age as your daughter. But none of that is a problem. Gee, I wonder what the difference could be?’” (40).

The fact that Kline works in the music industry is crucial to his role as a marker of aging in Goon Squad. Not only does he use that position to attract much younger women, but that role also means that his own professional success depends upon his management of artists who are also typically quite young and who hope to appeal to young audiences. And that success is considerable, resulting in the luxurious surroundings in which he lives. As we later learn in Candy House, “he’d made the careers of enough rock stars to be a star himself” (107). Of course, neither that stardom nor those younger women can prevent his eventual slide into old age and death. Meanwhile, Egan suggests that Kline’s desperate battle against time is congruent with the industry in which he works, an industry the notoriously youth-oriented nature of which is one of the key elements of Goon Squad’s overall concern with the impact of time.

The youth-oriented nature of American popular culture is evoked in A Visit from the Goon Squad in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is its portrayal of Bosco Baines¹ and Scotty Hausmann, aging rock guitarists who both feel that time has passed them by. Indeed, these two characters actually employ the central metaphor of time as a “goon squad.” Bosco, a former star who is contemplating an attempted comeback via a “Suicide Tour” that he himself feels is doomed to fail, describes his current fallen condition by telling the pop journalist Jules Jones that “time’s a goon” (127).² Later, aging record producer Bennie Salazar employs the metaphor (perhaps he got it from Bosco or perhaps it was the other way around) in attempting to convince Scotty to try to go on stage for a concert designed to restart his long-dormant musical career. “‘Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?’ Scotty shook his head. ‘The goon won’” (333).

The goon indeed seems to have won, as younger and younger audiences become the driving forces behind the music industry. This fact is directly represented in the text via the “handsets” that form the principal piece of science fictional hardware in the novel. Given that these handsets don’t seem much more advanced than the smartphones that were already common in 2010 (when Scotty’s concert takes place), their presence in Goon Squad does not represent all that much of a technological extrapolation. However, one crucial difference between these handsets and our own iPhones is that they also exist in a “kiddie” version, specifically designed to be accessible to the very young, such as toddlers or even infants, who can use them (by simply pointing at items on the screen) to exert significant influence on the music industry through the ordering of digital downloads. In one case, a three-month-old infant orders a download of a Nine Inch Nails song entitled “Ga-ga,” the title of which would have obvious appeal to an infant, even if Nine Inch Nails would not typically be thought of as a kiddie band. There is also a booming market in infantilized remixes of a variety of previous hits, also often by surprising artists: “Bands had no choice but to reinvent themselves for the preverbal; even Biggie had released yet another posthumous album whose title song was a remix of a Biggie standard, ‘Fuck You, Bitch,’ to sound like ‘You’re Big, Chief!’ with an accompanying picture of Biggie dandling a toddler in Native American headdress” (313). This motif clearly satirizes both the growing use in our own world of digital devices by increasingly young children and the disproportionate influence of young audiences on the music industry and on popular culture in general.

The emphasis on youthfulness and innovation in contemporary American popular culture, of course, is a mere extension (and intensification) of the all-that-is-solid-melts-into-air nature of capitalism itself, described long ago by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, even if the special emphasis on youth that marks contemporary culture is rooted particularly in the rise of youth culture in the 1950s, when late capitalism was still in its infancy (or at least early childhood). Aging rockers are, of course, perfect images of the way in which the march of time tends to pass us by, but A Visit from the Goon Squad engages in a critical dialogue with American popular culture in a number of ways, most obviously in the way that so many of the characters are directly engaged in working in the Culture Industry. Jules, for example, is a journalist who reports largely on pop culture figures, including movie starlet Kitty Jackson, another peripheral character. Meanwhile, Jules’ attempted rape of Kitty suggests the ways in which the popular press seems to think that it has a right to total access to the star it covers. But the principal engagement of Goon Squad with American popular culture occurs in the fact that the music industry lies at the very center of the novel. In many ways, the central character of the novel is Bennie, who resides at the hub of a nexus of connections that link many of the other characters.

The music business is certainly a crucial part of modern popular culture. It is important, however, that the focus in Goon Squad is not on mainstream pop music but on punk music, which originally evolved largely as a protest against the banality of mainstream pop music, seen as a result of the excessive emphasis on commercialization and marketability, rather than artistic quality or originality.³ Bennie first participates in the world of popular music as a teenager, when he (along with Scotty, his high-school friend) plays in a punk band called “The Flaming Dildos,” the very name of which reflects the attempt to shock bourgeois sensibilities that was so central to the punk aesthetic. Indeed, while Scotty seems to be a talented musician, the band, as a whole, seems more concerned with violating the rules of musical propriety than with producing actual music.

It is also important to note that the Dildos play in San Francisco, birthplace of the hippie counterculture that had flowered in the 1960s and then largely disintegrated by the mid-1970s. Indeed, the fall of hippie culture is directly noted in chapter three, which deals centrally with a key performance by the Flaming Dildos, its title (“Ask Me If I Care”) reflecting the supposed cynicism of the punk movement. Indeed, while the punks were most obviously rebelling against the banal conformism of establishment culture, they were also clearly mocking the idealism and utopianism that had once convinced the participants in the 1960s counterculture that they could build a genuinely better world. By 1979, when this chapter is set, the hippies are depicted as fallen and decrepit, their dreams broken. Thus, the chapter’s narrator, Rhea, a teenage friend of the band members, depicts San Francisco’s leftover hippies as decaying relics, though one might also wonder if her disdain for them arises from an unconscious sense of guilt that her own generation has lost the progressive zeal that once drove the 1960s counterculture to try to do big things: “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” (40–41).

Bennie eventually becomes a commercially successful music producer, largely through his discovery of the hugely successful rock group The Conduits (led by Bosco), who apparently have some roots in punk culture, but who have moved into much more commercially successful and socially acceptable forms. Their style is “somewhere between punk and ska at their peak in the late 1980s,” but it is clear that their punk elements are decidedly watered down, whatever might have been added (125).⁴ Thus, when, years later, Bennie and his wife Stephanie move to an upscale suburb (signaling their own appropriation by polite bourgeois culture), they attend a local party hosted by a pretentious hedge fund manager who represents everything the punks were originally rebelling against. They learn, though, that the Conduits are this man’s favorite rock group—demonstrating just how safe and acceptable they really were, despite the notoriously spastic on-stage performances of their lead guitarist, Bosco (113).

Goon Squad, however, is not an entirely negative story about the appropriation of once-subversive energies by the juggernaut of mainstream culture. There are, in fact, moments of resistance to this kind of appropriation. Bennie himself greatly damages his career via a spectacular moment of protest when, in frustration at the demands of the corporate controllers of his record company that he produce commercially viable shit rather than actually good music, he serves a gathering of these corporate types with a lunch of cow pies. “‘You’re asking me to feed the people shit?’ Bennie had allegedly roared at the appalled executives. ‘Try eating some yourselves and see how it tastes!’” (312). As a result of this display of contempt for corporate music, Bennie, pushing sixty in the last chapter of the book, has lost his once-prosperous record company and is now a minor independent record producer, still looking for the next big sound (but based on the music, rather than the market). In this chapter, Bennie attempts to make a splash by promoting an important performance by his old associate Scotty, despite the fact that their relationship has been on the skids for years. Scotty, in fact, is the novel’s leading example of resistance to appropriation by the corporate culture of late capitalism. Having refused to follow the punk movement into its commodification, Scotty has been out of the music business for decades, working as a school janitor and sometimes fishing in New York’s East River for extra food.

Scotty himself narrates chapter six, in which his alienation from Bennie is complete. Occurring back in the days when Bennie was riding high as the head of Sow’s Ear Records, this chapter is marked by Scotty’s show of contempt for what Bennie has become, as he visits Bennie’s well-appointed offices and deposits there a large fish he has caught. By the final chapter, set some time in the 2020s, he has reconciled with Bennie, who has been managing Scotty’s low-key comeback, which has largely consisted of on-line recordings for young children, now the dominant audience in the music business.

In this chapter, though, Bennie attempts to accelerate Scotty’s comeback with a high-profile live concert at the former site of the World Trade Center, the 9/11 destruction of which lurks in the background of all of the events of the novel subsequent to that destruction. Meanwhile, Bennie enlists Alex, an important character from chapter one who now re-emerges, to promote the concert by hiring “parrots,” individuals who are paid to talk up the concert on social media and encourage others to attend, feigning personal enthusiasm for Scotty’s work. Alex’s efforts are a big success, and a huge crowd turns out for the concert. Perhaps surprisingly, a reluctant Scotty, playing the unlikely instrument of a slide guitar, manages to come up with a rousing performance that is a huge hit with the crowd, seemingly opening great possibilities for his future. Beginning with the infantile hits he has already put out there—such as “I Am a Little Lamb,” “Goats Like Oats,” and “A Little Tree Is Just Like Me,” he then moves into more adult fare expressing his raw existential rage. For Alex, these later songs are “ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure” (336).

For his part, Alex isn’t sure if Scotty’s success comes from the quality of his music or from the fact that he is in the right place at the right time for such music to strike a chord with the hungry audience. But it seems clear that the concert has the potential to be a turning point in an American culture that was beginning desperately to yearn for something new and significant. Scotty’s music appears to appeal to all generations, from infants to sixty-year-olds like Bennie, though its appeal seems most significant for Generation Z “Zoomers” such as Bennie’s young employee Lulu, the daughter of Dolly Peale (a publicist who features prominently in chapter eight of the novel).⁵ Lulu, a “handset” worker who foreshadows the gig workers of today’s world, stands in the crowd with Joe, her black fiancé from Kenya, a PhD student involved in robotics research,⁶ the two of them seemingly emblematic of a potential better future in all sorts of ways. But they have also lived their lives in a time of hardship and cynicism, with little in the way of a coherent program to believe in. Now, however, the two of them look at Scotty with “the rhapsodic joy of a generation finally descrying someone worthy of its veneration” (336).

Scotty’s almost total escape from digital experience might be seen as fueling the ability of his music to connect with audiences at a very human level. However, Egan’s treatment of the digital, while largely satirical, is not entirely negative—if only because she knows quite well that Time the Goon marches on and will never let us return to a pre-digital age. The best one can do, per Goon Squad, is to preserve our humanity amidst the growing digitalization of our experience. As Fladager puts it,

Her work displays a belief in the pervasive effects of humanism and ambiguity within systems, especially digital- and marketing-based information systems, to create play and ambiguity, and in doing so presents us with an optimism that is not techno-utopian, but is related: the age-old belief in the human, whatever the circumstances. (326)

It isn’t clear what might come of the popular discovery of Scotty’s new music, as the novel’s final pages veer off in a seemingly new direction. Alex and Bennie are also impressed by Scotty’s performance, but perhaps less inspired than are Lulu and Joe. In fact, rather than look to the future, Alex (a generation older than Lulu) and Bennie (almost two generations older than Lulu), suddenly become nostalgic about Sasha, with whom Alex had a brief sexual encounter in chapter one and who was once a valued assistant to Bennie, as detailed especially in chapter two. Bennie and Alex then go together to Sasha’s former apartment—and of course do not find her there.⁷ At the same time, they do see another young woman, presumably starting out her own life in New York with a fresh supply of hopes and dreams, entering the apartment where Sasha once lived. Time the Goon might catch up with us all in the end, but there is always a fresh supply of young people ready to take it on, which is the only way to beat the goon at its own game—or at least of fighting it to a draw, thus giving the novel a more upbeat ending than might have been expected.⁸

The Thing that Changes Everything: Nostalgia in The Candy House

Goon Squad was published relatively early in the social media era and does not fully anticipate the extent to which social media would impact American public life. It does, however, reflect the growing impact of the internet and digital media on American life even as early as its 2010 publication. The Candy House then extends the colonization of personal life by social media much farther, envisioning a time when such media literally mine the contents of human brains. In recent decades, the pace of innovation has continued to be driven by popular culture but perhaps even more by changes in the technologies with which that culture is delivered than by changes in the culture itself. Jonathan Crary convincingly argues that human identities have come, in the twenty-first century, to be defined more and more in relation to our consumption of specific technological objects and devices that themselves are continually replaced by newer models and thus rendered obsolete. This rapid pace of innovation means that our identities must themselves be revised and updated at a faster and faster pace, while those identities are rendered more tenuous in the first place by the knowledge that the devices many so cherish are temporary and provisional:

Now the brevity of the interlude before a high-tech product literally becomes garbage requires two contradictory attitudes to coexist: on the one hand, the initial need and/or desire for the product, but, on the other, an affirmative identification with the process of inexorable cancellation and replacement. (45)

In short, eventually, the consumerist desire that drives subjects under late capitalism becomes a desire not for the commodity itself but for the newness of the commodity and for the sense of being up to date on all the innovations being produced by the consumerist system. This emphasis on technological innovation begins to emerge at the end of Goon Squad in its representation of the “handsets” that are beginning to dominate the marketing and consumption of popular music. The Candy House, however, places much more emphasis on technology, beginning with its acknowledgement that, back in 1999, Napster instituted a new era of streaming music that fundamentally changed the industry (and perhaps helped to drive Lou Kline to an early grave). As Kline’s daughter puts it, detailing his reaction to his discovery of Napster, “He’d been through a lot. He still had plenty of vitality, but not enough to reinvent his business. All he could see was an end” (124).

Of course, the principal technological innovation in The Candy House (and the one that pushes it beyond current-day reality and into the realm of science fiction) involves the extension of social media technology, first into more sophisticated algorithms to identify “affinities” among individuals (based on the anthropological research of Miranda Kline, ex-wife of Lou), and then further into a classic cyberpunk brain-upload technology that allows users to add the anonymized content of their memories to a collective cloud (in return for the ability, not only to review their own experiences, but also to review the experiences of others). These uploads are achieved via a simple and painless connection to a “Consciousness Cube” provided by the social media company Mandala (run by Bix Bouton), making Mandala a powerful force in American society. However, the novel clearly implies that the loss of privacy involved in this process means that this collective connection possibly interferes with authentic connections between individuals, rather than enhancing them.

In addition, the Mandala narrative is closely related to a dystopian vein that begins late in Goon Squad and continues throughout The Candy House in which digital data collection techniques are employed in a wide-ranging project of official surveillance spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security. Much of this surveillance, though, is self-inflicted as individuals willingly offer up their data to social media, including to the Mandala collective. Meanwhile, a key science fictional motif in the novel involves a program of resistance, both to Mandala’s information-gathering and to official surveillance. The Candy House also includes cyberpunk technologies that go well beyond mere surveillance, such as the mind control device known as a “weevil,” identified as “a burrowing electronic device that can interfere with thought” (93). These devices are employed both by the government for its own purposes and by forces of resistance, such as the privacy activists known as “eluders,” who sometimes secretly implant the devices in the brains of tech employees as part of their effort to resist the technologization of human beings. Thus, when O’Brien, a manager at a data gathering company called Harvest, is discovered to be an agent of the eluders, there are suspicions that they might have been controlling him via a weevil.⁹ On the other hand, a chapter that jumps forward in time to the year 2032, reveals the official instructions given to Lulu, who has now become a “citizen agent,” implanted with a variety of electronic devices that help her to gather information on specific individuals, especially “powerful men.” Meanwhile, in the Lulu plot line of The Candy House, she appears mostly after she has ceased to be an active agent but suspects that she might still be carrying a surreptitious weevil with the capability of modifying her conduct without her knowledge. This situation thus opens up considerable cyberpunk plot possibilities, though they are not well developed in this novel. Indeed, Lulu’s cyberpunk story is simply abandoned in midstream just as she attempts to enlist the aid of Ames Hollander (son of Ted Hollander and the cousin of Sasha from Goon Squad) to try to detect and remove her weevil, with no indication of the results.

Among other things, this digitization of human experience suggests the commodification and commercialization of experience, just as the chapter “I, Protagonist” comments on the commodification of narrative itself as a private company attempts a form of commercial narratology that separates narratives into distinct “algebraized” components of specific types, presumably ultimately for use in the automated digital generation of marketable narratives. The Candy House suggests that every new gain in technology is also accompanied by a loss of what came before, again leaving it to us to decide how to weigh the balance of gain vs. loss. As Lou’s daughter also notes, expressing her wariness of the new consciousness-uploading techniques, “A gain is a loss when it comes to technology—my father’s imploding business had taught me that much” (133). And this theme of loss leads directly to what is perhaps the central theme of The Candy House—the notion that the incessant emphasis on innovation and change inevitably leads to a nostalgia for what this process has swept into the dustbin of history.

In a similar way, the emphasis on youth in American culture tends to make older individuals look back with nostalgia on their younger days. As Silcox puts it in a review of The Candy House, “The near-future America Egan conjures is numbed and festering: a country full of opioid dreamers and pill mills. But the most irresistible and dangerous drug of them all—the ultimate brain-rotting candy—is nostalgia, even the sly, ironic kind that powers our dreary cycle of reboots and remakes.” Indeed, nostalgia is a constant presence in The Candy House. For example, users who upload their consciousnesses into the Mandala cloud largely do so in order to be able to review their own past memories—seen from their own perspectives and perhaps from the perspectives of others.

Just as Goon Squad is quite explicit that its titular goons are time itself, The Candy House also directly indicates the theme of nostalgia in its own title. Derived from the classic fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” the “Candy House” refers to the appetizing cottage in the woods used by a wicked witch to lure children to their doom. Egan’s novel contains several references to fairy tales (including “Hansel and Gretel”) and also sometimes suggests the “Candy House” as a metaphor for the allure of digital technologies or even of capitalism itself, somewhat along the lines of “the gleam” in Ayi Kwei Armah’s classic postcolonial novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). But Egan makes quite clear the principal significance of her title by specifically identifying it as a metaphor for nostalgia. In a chapter that consists entirely of a long email thread, one of the messages is from Bennie Salazar to Jocelyn Li and Alex Applebaum concerning their attempts to boost the careers of Bosco and Scotty, who are now even older than in Goon Squad. Bennie notes that folks over sixty (like all of these characters) have to struggle for “cultural relevance,” something they are now likely to find only through “tongue-in-cheek nostalgia,” which is “merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.” Then, though, Bennie oddly follows by suggesting that this nostalgia is their only hope to find “the thing that changes everything: isn’t that always the goal?” (Candy House 298–99).

The notion of nostalgia as a source of true, paradigm-shattering innovation is seriously problematic, of course, though it is true that nostalgia can potentially identify elements of the past that can be useful for imagining a better future. Still, Bennie apparently has it exactly backwards here: this novel suggests, not that nostalgia is a source of innovation, but that innovation is a source of nostalgia that impedes our ability effectively to deploy the innovation to make a better world. This entanglement of nostalgia and innovation is mirrored in the convoluted chronologies of both Goon Squad and The Candy House. The Candy House, even more than Goon Squad, is largely unconcerned with extended coherent plots and more concerned with character sketches, brief chunks of narrative, and broad depictions of various social tendencies. The Candy House is also overtly concerned with its own construction, which shows most clearly in the final chapter, when the narrator (an anonymous author figure) is telling the story of Ames, first considering ending the novel as Ames settles back into his childhood home after a career as a soldier and then government assassin, then considering jumping to the end of Ames’ life as he nears death in a nursing home. Instead of either of these, though, the narrator opts to end the novel with an anecdote from Ames’ earlier days as a hapless Little League baseball player back in 1991, convinced that he is capable of great feats despite his continual failures. Then, he inexplicably connects at a key moment and launches a grand slam home run, winning a key game and becoming, at least for a short time, the hero in a family in which he, as the middle brother, has typically been overshadowed by his brilliant older brother Miles and his eccentric younger brother Alfred. It’s a great moment in young Ames’ life and a perfect moment of Americana, though it also contains a warning. Baseball might now have serious rivals for the status of America’s national pastime, but it is also (by a wide margin) the American sport that is most infused with nostalgia. It is known, for example, as a key binding element for fathers and sons who otherwise have trouble communicating. Thus, after his stunning home run, Ames seems most pleased by the fact that the feat makes him for once the center of attention for a father who is otherwise typically occupied with his eldest son’s impressive achievements or his youngest son’s problematic behavior. However, if Ames’ greatest moment can come at age eleven, what does it say about the rest of his life? A moment of childhood triumph thus becomes still another reminder of the youth-oriented nature of American culture and of our tendency to heroize the young.

This scene is infused with nostalgia in other ways as well. For example, its longing for the innocence of Little League baseball is combined with nostalgia for a pre-iPhone time of supposedly authentic human connections. As Ames comes to the plate for his monumental at-bat, we are told that “no one in this crowd has ever seen a portable phone, which gives to this moment the quality of a pause. All these parents gathered in the fading light, and not a single face underlit by a bluish glow! They’re all here, in one place, their attention burning toward home plate” (326). In a review of The Candy House for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Grace Linden calls this passage “heavy-handed” and unnecessary, noting that “as someone who uses her phone mostly as a phone, it isn’t that I disagree with Egan but rather that such lines are unnecessary. Within the subtle and thoughtful panorama of The Candy House, these and similar observations tell too much. To the reader, all of this has already been proven painfully true.” Linden’s reading of this passage as overstating in obvious fashion things that are stated more subtly elsewhere in the novel is perfectly valid. However, other readings are valid as well. For example, both this passage and the whole baseball story might be intentionally overdone as a way of suggesting that our nostalgia for an idealized pre-iPhone time when everyone was genuinely present is itself overdone.

The treatment of nostalgia in The Candy House is similarly complex throughout, rooted very strongly in the notion that every technological step forward requires that some part of the past be lost. Meanwhile, this doubleness is complicated even more by the fact that technology itself—even with its inexorable drive for the new—can also feed (or feed off of) nostalgia—as in the case of the relived memories in Mandala’s Own Your Unconscious. The Candy House certainly views technology as a version of the dangerous lure in its title, but it does not ultimately take a definitive negative (or positive) stance in terms of the impact of technology on individual lives. The issue is too complex to be viewed in simple black and white terms. Both Goon Squad and The Candy House are devoted to an exploration of the complexities of contemporary life, but this exploration is more descriptive than prescriptive. That is, Egan does not seem to want to provide a vision of how things should be so much as a vision of how they are now and are likely to be in the near future.

Put differently, both Goon Squad and The Candy House are critical of contemporary capitalism and of the technological progress that it drives. Neither, however, suggests a viable alternative either to capitalism or to technologization, instead providing warnings about our inability to imagine such alternatives. In this sense, both novels are representative of Fredric Jameson’s oft-cited description of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, so aligned with capitalist ideology as to lack the ability to imagine anything else. Later, Jameson elaborates on this idea, noting that we cannot currently imagine utopian alternatives to the present because “our imaginations are hostages to our own mode of production (and perhaps to whatever remnants of past ones it has preserved).” Under these circumstances, the best we can hope for work of literature to achieve is “the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.” For Jameson, then, “the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively” (Archaeologies xiii).

From this point of view, the most valuable ideological critique that can be derived from most postmodern texts would involve a demonstration of the inability of those texts to envision utopian alternatives to capitalism—a task to which Jameson himself devoted much of his career. In most cases, these failures are not necessarily intentional, but Goon Squad and Candy House directly thematize our inability to imagine a genuinely different future through their emphasis on our nostalgic entrapment in the past. Here, one might also cite Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism,” which closely resembles (and draws upon) Jameson’s vision of postmodernism. For Fisher, most contemporary culture is marked by an inability to imagine any historical process or event that might take us into a genuinely different future beyond. Indeed, Carl White has made this very point about Goon Squad, arguing that, read through Fisher, the unstoppable “goon” of the title is not just time but “time as an agent of capitalist production” (1496).

In addition, Jameson has emphasized that much postmodern culture is heavily informed by a particular kind of nostalgia that is driven, not out of any real emotional longing for a lost past, but by an estrangement from the present, demonstrating the “enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience” (21). For Jameson, postmodern works such as neo-noir film revel in this retreat to the past, which only serves to emphasize the inability to imagine the future. The critique of nostalgia in Goon Squad and (especially) Candy House thus once again strains against the limitations in the imagination that Jameson sees as imposed on postmodern culture by the ideology of late capitalism, moving in the direction of the kind of genuine political critique that Jameson finds lacking in the high postmodern culture of the 1970s and 1980s.

In a 2016 interview with Baumbach, et al., that is chronologically spaced midway between the appearances of Goon Squad and Candy House, Jameson himself addresses the possibility of such a movement in a more general sense when he suggests a distinction between the aesthetic “postmodernism” of the 1970s and 1980s (a phenomenon that is probably now a thing of the past) and “postmodernity” as an historical period that is still going strong. He even goes so far as to note that, in terms of writing, one thing marking the end of “postmodernism” is that, now, “everybody’s political” (144). Then again, Jameson himself had imagined, back in his 1991 Postmodernism book, that a “political form of postmodernism” might eventually appear that would “have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale,” allowing individuals better to understand their place in the world system of late capitalism (Postmodernism 54). Goon Squad and Candy House together mark a movement toward this political form of postmodernism, even if they have not entirely overcome the original limitations of postmodernism.

A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Candy House, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Egan’s novels remain strongly postmodern in their highly fragmented form, as well as in the fragmented identities of their characters, which correspond well with Jameson’s emphasis on both formal and psychic fragmentation as key elements of postmodernism. One way of describing Egan’s movement away from the high postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s, though, is that her work seems to recover some of the strengths that Jameson consistently associates with modernism—in particular, the ability to imagine that the world can change in fundamental ways, even if it cannot project what those ways might ultimately be. There is a strong sense in both Goon Squad and Candy House that the world is changing, as can perhaps be seen in the shift in emphasis from punk rock to cyberpunk. Such a recovery of modernist energies, in fact, can be observed in numerous aspects of Egan’s work. As David Cowart points out, Egan was born the year before Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 was published. She is thus essentially a generation younger than the first wave of American postmodern novelists. However, Cowart concludes that A Visit from the Goon Squad still employs the same sort of textual strategies that have come to be associated with postmodernism. Thus, for Cowart, rather than repudiate the approach of her postmodern predecessors, Egan “takes her place in their ranks and augments their exhilarating formal and ideational deconstructions of such vestigial metanarratives (of language, of history, of the unconscious) as continued to shelter in the shadow of that great rock, modernism” (243). However, Cowart suggests that Egan does approach the modernists differently than do Pynchon and other earlier postmodernists, viewing the modernists not as immediate forebears to be challenged but as more distant forerunners, as “ancestral figures—as much to be venerated as rebelled against” (243).

Cowart identifies Proust (as has Egan herself) and T. S. Eliot as important modernist predecessors to Goon Squad, especially in their treatment of the theme of time, which is so crucial to her text. And it is certainly the case that new ways of thinking about and representing time were crucial to the work of many modernists, including these two. But Cowart also grants that Goon Squad differs sharply from works such as Proust’s novel sequence Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927) or Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), “miniaturing” the vast magnitude of the former and parodying key strategies of the latter, particularly revamping “the fragmentation, the density of allusion, the exploitation of myth” that are crucial to The Waste Land for her twenty-first century audience (245).

It is certainly the case that Goon Squad is one of the most formally interesting literary texts of the twenty-first century, featuring narrative intricacies that rival those of great modernist novels such as Remembrance of Things Past or even Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). However, it is definitely smaller in scale and more modest in intent than such lofty predecessors. Whereas the greatest modernist novels tend to be monumental in scope and ambition, Goon Squad and The Candy House (as their playful titles indicates) are more like literary puzzles or games. Unraveling their complex narrative structures offers readers an epistemological equivalent of piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, but (unlike the best modernist novels) this process does not offer the reader the possibility of discovering profound truths about the human condition by “solving” the narratives.

The individual chapters of A Visit from the Goon Squad are narrated from a number of different perspectives and in a number of styles and genres, including one chapter (Chapter 9, “Forty Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame and Nixon! Jules Jones Reports”) that is essentially presented as a magazine article and another (Chapter 12, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses”) that consists entirely of a PowerPoint presentation. Goon Squad also employs a liberal mix of third-person and first-person narration—and even includes one chapter (Chapter 10, “Out of Body”) that is narrated in the unusual second-person (with a momentary flicker into first person). The Candy House employs a similar mix of narrative techniques and perspectives, such as one chapter that consists of nothing but a long email thread (Chapter 12, “See Below”) and another (Chapter 10, “Lulu the Spy, 2032”) that consists only of some (rather strange) instructions to a digitally augmented spy. In this way, the novel not only explores a number of traditional modes of literary narration but also the newer ways in which information is widely conveyed in the society of today. In this sense, both novels resemble something like Ulysses, in which each of the eighteen chapters essentially explores a different way of telling a story. Egan’s novel also resembles Ulysses in that the individual chapters are interrelated in very intricate ways, with bits of information that seem insignificant when delivered in one chapter sometimes turning out to be highly important in the context of other chapters. Of course, the basic plot of Ulysses is relatively simple and linear, even though there are lots of digressions from the main story line. In Goon Squad (and in The Candy House), the narrative is much more convoluted and complex. Not only are the different chapters not related in chronological order, but each chapter is essentially a standalone story that is connected to other chapters by the presence of overlapping characters but is relatively independent in a narrative sense, leaving it to readers to piece the stories together.

Incidentally, if the link to Ulysses seems tenuous, it might be noted that Egan, in The Candy House, specifically invokes Ulysses by having Bix Bouton carry about a worn copy he had read in graduate school, “as proof of his literary seriousness” (313). In his case, “literary seriousness” equates almost to “humanity,” serving as a sort of proof that he still has a human heart and soul despite being the inventor of a social media technology that is potentially dehumanizing and soul destroying. However, the novel leaves it unclear whether this habit is merely as a sign of Bouton’s pretentiousness (and thus a potential knock against the prestige regularly accorded to Joyce’s novel) or is a sincere acknowledgement of Ulysses (and modernist literature in general) as a monument to human ingenuity and creativity. Indeed, one key element of the dialogical texture of both Goon Squad and The Candy House is their ability to present possible opposing interpretations without indicating a preference for one or the other.

The individual chapters of both novels are also dialogical in the sense that they enter into dialogue with one another rather than joining one another in a single coherent narrative. Indeed, the individual stories of Goon Squad are so loosely linked that there has been much discussion about whether the book should be regarded as a novel at all, or whether it should simply be regarded as a collection of short stories. And the same can be said for The Candy House. The work of Joyce again comes to mind, in the sense that his story collection Dubliners (1914) has sometimes been regarded as a novel because of the close thematic interrelationships among the stories, even if there is little direct narrative interconnection. Again, though, the Dubliners stories are presented in roughly chronological order, while the much more radically disordered chapters of Goon Squad and The Candy House reflect a more postmodern and fragmented sense of time.

The fragmented narrative structure of both Goon Squad and The Candy House can be taken as a reflection of this postmodern sense of time. Indeed, this temporal fragmentation is one of the clearest ways in which Egan’s books can be taken as representative works of postmodernism. Not only are the individual chapters of the books not arranged chronologically, but the order within chapters is sometimes disrupted as well, especially in the PowerPoint chapter, where the temporal flow within individual slides is sometimes quite difficult to unpack. In addition, there are other textual features that disrupt the normal flow of the narrative, as in the inclusion of paratextual features such as footnotes that supplement the narrative with extra information but that cannot be accessed without disrupting the normal temporal flow of the reading process.¹⁰

One could clearly include Goon Squad and The Candy House, with their radically fragmented nonlinear narrative structure, in the category of the fragmented postmodern texts described by Jameson. The same might also be said for the identities of its characters, who tend to go through various phases in their lives in the course of the text, phases in which they sometimes seem like radically different people in ways that go well beyond the simple changes that all of us can expect to go through in the course of our lives. In this sense, the novels again recall Jameson’s discussion of the schizophrenic nature of postmodern experience, which (among other things) renders individuals incapable of establishing and maintaining a stable and distinctive sense of their own identities.¹¹ At the same time, though, the changing identities of Egan’s characters contribute to the strong sense in her work that people can change—and that, perhaps, society can change, as well.

In Goon Squad, many characters are concerned with consciously creating new identities that they can present to the world. Meanwhile, The Candy House is centrally concerned with the authenticity of human identities. Via the high-tech social media that dominate the future world, individuals can purchase “proxy” identities to present on-line, allowing them to avoid having their real information shared with others (including the government or shadowy corporate forces). One method for producing proxies involves the simple purchase of “brand” identities based on famous individuals. Meanwhile, individuals often employ “hermit crab programs” to serve as decoys by maintaining the previously established patterns of their online activity “as a way of hiding the reality that the original occupant of that identity has vacated it” (79).

Most proxying of identities in this future world is handled by a single (non-profit) private company known as “Mondrian” that creates proxy identities in various ways, though their “most sophisticated proxies are live professionals—usually fiction writers … who impersonate multiple identities at once.” (79). Mondrian is particularly meant to serve “eluders”—those who wish to avoid having their identities monitored on-line and so create proxies to disguise their real activity. Mondrian, founded and operated by Chris Salazar (son of Bennie), is engaged in an ongoing struggle with the much larger (and richer) company Mandala and other forces that would seek to control the on-line world for corporate purposes, rather than individual enrichment. Meanwhile, all of this creation and promulgation of manufactured identities is part of a larger social climate in which authenticity seems largely to have been lost in favor of performance—a key characteristic of what Guy Debord termed the “society of the spectacle” to indicate a late capitalist world in which the commodification of everything leads to a devaluation of physical reality in favor of images. In terms of human identity, this phenomenon is addressed most clearly in the chapter focused on Alfred Hollander and his distaste for the “phony” performative identities he observes in all of those around him. By the time he is nine years old, Alfred concludes that most of the people he meets are playing “versions of themselves they’d cribbed from TV: Harried Mom. Sheepish Dad. Stern Teacher. Encouraging Coach. … Parents played parents; teachers played teachers; baseball coaches played baseball coaches” (25–26). Later, after graduating from college (in 2004), Alfred concludes that his college friends, who had professed to share his contempt for “bullshit,” were just as fake as anyone: “On completing law school, they pretended to be lawyers, or to work at marketing firms or engineering firms or Internet firms that were just getting back on their feet after the dotcom bust” (27).

Meanwhile, moving into a more heavily monitored future world, one of the discoveries made in The Candy House by those who monitor human behavior is that our identities were perhaps always less authentically original than the individualist ideology of the United States would have us believe. Lincoln Blake, the neurodivergent son of Sasha and Drew, concludes from his professional analysis of data involving human behavior that

There is nothing original about human behavior. Any idea I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in similar ways, think similar thoughts. What the eluders want to restore, I suspect, is the uniqueness they felt before counting like ours revealed that they were an awful lot like everyone else. (82)

Where Goon Squad and The Candy House differ from high postmodern texts (and resemble modernist texts) is that their puzzle-like narratives can, to some extent, be put back together with sufficient effort. Granted, some pieces of the puzzle might be missing, but there doesn’t seem to be any contradictory information (such as two different events, each of which occurs before the other) that makes it impossible to reconstruct a reasonably consistent timeline. In addition, the novels thematically remind us that time itself marches on in a relatively linear and continuous way, quite apart from the actions or fragmented perceptions of its characters. It is, indeed, largely in this sense that the “goon squad” of time ultimately triumphs over everyone. At the same time, one could also see the fragmented narrative structures of these novels as a strategy for resistance to the inexorable passage of time, just as specific content elements (such as the fascination of young Lincoln Blake with “pauses” in rock recordings) can be seen in a similar way.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported and funded by the research sector, Arab Open University - Kuwait Branch under decision number (26011).

This essay grew out of an early draft of an essay on A Visit from the Goon Squad that was written in collaboration with Professor M. Keith Booker.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.